Blue Protocol: Star Resonance - Extremely First Impressions

Blue Protocol was never a game I was following - or really paying any attention to at all. I've only ever mentioned it two or three times here on the blog and not at all for a couple of years. 

The most interested in it I ever sounded was at the back end of 2022, when it had been picked up by Amazon Games as the global publisher. At the time, I said I hadn't been planning on playing it, even though I knew there was a lot of hype around the title, but since I had an Amazon Games account already set up, it seemed it might be worth taking a look when it arrived.

It never did arrive, of course. Not through Amazon, anyway. That all fell through for reasons I'm not sure I knew even while it was happening and certainly don't remember now. The game was released in Japan but didn't last long there, closing at the beginning of this year.

And that seemed to be the end of it. Until fairly recently, at least, when I started hearing rumblings about something called Blue Protocol: Star Resonance.  That seemed to be a mobile game at first but then it became apparent there was a PC version or a port or something. Reports on its progress drifted in, here and there, and in that way the name and my recognition of it were kept alive.

I didn't keep a mental note of when it was going to launch. I still had no special plans to play it but I did think maybe I'd take a look when it arrived, if it was on Steam or something and I didn't have to make a new account. Same logic as when Amazon was going to be doing the paperwork, basically.

Then earlier today I saw this news item at MassivelyOP, just as I was wondering what I could find to write about today and I thought there's an idea...

I do enjoy doing First Impressions pieces. They're easy to write and they seem to go down quite well. Usually, I like at least to get through the tutorial before I do one but as I may have mentioned, opportunities to sit down and play three-hour gaming sessions and then spend three more hours turning them into detailed posts are pretty thin on the ground around here just now. 

For example, today I had to drive to the next city over to do some stuff for my aged mother and tomorrow we have a bunch of workmen turning up at the crack of dawn to tear out the old heating system and start putting in a new one, so the first chance I'm likely to get to give the game a decent shake will be Saturday.

But I can download it and make a character. That won't take three hours, will it? OK, I know there have been plenty of times in the past when doing something similar took at least that long but we're past that now, aren't we? 

Nice tee-up for an anecdote about how it took three hours just to download the game and make a character there...

Except the download took about fifteen or twenty minutes and the game installed perfectly and I was able to log straight in and get stuck into making a character right away. Which was fun.

BP:SR is referred to in everything I've read about it as an "anime MMORPG", which could mean a lot of things. In this context, I often feel "Anime" means a look more than anything. I'm not even sure what anime gameplay would be. There as many genres of anime as there are novels or Western games, aren't there? It could be scifi or fantasy or high school drama or historical or... well, anything. 

So that's not much to go on. Visually, though, anime does have a certain look and feel, regardless of the subject matter, and judging purely on Character Creation, which is almost all I've seen of the game so far, this definitely looks like an anime MMORPG.

I really enjoyed making my character even though most of the text was untranslated from the original... Mandarin? 

Sidebar: I'm going to look this up in a moment but I realize all of a sudden that I don't know if this is a Chinese or a Japanese game. I do know the only servers are in China because everyone outside South-East Asia has been complaining about it bitterly and review-bombing the game on Steam for it. On the other hand, every time I saw anything about the original Blue Protocol it always seemed to involve Japan somewhow, right up to the game launching, then closing, there and nowhere else.

On investigation, it seems Blue Protocol itself was Japanese but Blue Protocol: Star Resonance is "developed by Shanghai Bokura Network Technology and published by A Plus Japan". So I guess it's Chinese and Japanese. That's cleared that up, then.

Whatever the language, in Character Creation all the pertinent parts have been translated and the icons
are more than adequate to explain the rest. Well, most of them. I was somewhat at a loss to figure out the meaning of the five symbols that show your character in a variety of poses when you click them but then again that part didn't seem to require any input from the player so it didn't really matter whether I understood them or not.

Character Creation starts with a choice of Body Type and Gender, although the word Gender isn't used and come to think of it I didn't click on the downard-pointing triangle. I just assumed it meant "male". Clearly I need to work on my assumptions some more.

The Body Type is labeled as such but it looks more like an age choice to me, with the options appearing to be Child, Adolescent and Adult. Or I guess they could be Petite, Slim and Well-Built. Depends how you look at it. I went for the middle option, whatever it's supposed to be.

 

From there you get a fairly wide range of Presets and quite a few chances to fine-tune your facial appearance. There are no sliders, other than for color. It's all identikit mixing and matching, which I think I probably prefer to sliders. 

Sliders are far more versatile and you can get much more nuanced results but you can also get sucked into some completely pointless, time-wasting rabbit holes as you try to get exactly the chin density or temple curvature you want, all the time forgetting that no matter how good it looks in Character Creation, you'll never see any of it ever again, once you log into the actual game. It's something of a relief just to pick from a menu and even then I found myself trying to make tiny adjustments that are never going to have any impact on my experience when I start playing the game proper.

I was in character creation for close on half an hour, something I can be reasonably sure of by my Steam played time of 35 minutes. The only other thing I did was watch the very short opening cut scene, then read a short note and put on my starting gear in the room where my character woke up after drowning or whatever it was that happened to her. 

Honestly, I don't know what happened. I wasn't paying attention because Mrs Bhagpuss came in in the middle of the cut scene and asked me a question and I turned round to answer her and neither saw nor heard what happened next, after my character dived down deep into the ocean. When I looked back at the screen, she was in a room somewhere. 

All of that, including what I did when I got to the room, can't have taken much over five minutes, so the rest has to have been making the character. It didn't feel anything like that long, though, which is a strong point in favor of both the tools and the character design.

Oh, and I opened the claim window and got some freebies for pre-registering, which I never did, so I assume everyone gets them. One was a dog you can ride on. looking forward to trying that out. 

Going back to the look of the thing, the character models certainly do scream "anime". There's no doubt about that. I didn't take any of them, but there are plenty of options to have the huge anime-style eyes and the many hair-styles all have that flick-away look that's so familiar. You even get to choose what your teeth look like, which I think may be a first for me.

Hair and eyes are always the two I spend most time on. There are a whole load of pupil choices, which for once actually look reasonable. That took me a while. 

Getting the hair right took longer. You can just take a preset hairstyle but again you can mix and match from "Front", "Back" and "Crown" to get something a little less generic. I was curious about the Crown option. It turns out to be one or two strands of flyaway hair that stick up or out and wave about in the breeze. I toyed with the idea but I suspect it would become quite annoying after the novelty wore off so I settled for the neat and tidy look. 

I have to keep calling her "my character" because one oddity of the process was that at no point did I get a chance to give her a name. I have come across that in other games. It usually means there's some point early on, where naming your character becomes a storyline choice, like when some official asks you to identify yourself or you have to sign some sort of document. We'll see if that happens next time I play.

Which is also when I'll find out if the game has any stickiness I guess. I'm hoping it may be at least as sticky as Crystal of Atlan, which I am theoretically, although not actually, still playing. I did get to about Level 50 or so in that one, which isn't nothing.

The last thing I did before the game dumped me into the opening cut scene was pick a class. There were quite a few to choose from. Maybe ten? I picked the ranged fighter that uses a bow and has a pet that fights for her because I always pick that one. And almost always regret it. The fighter with the giant sword is always more fun. I'll never learn.

All the classes get a difficulty rating. Mine was two stars out of five, so towards the easy end but not the easiest. That was the aforementioned fighter with the big sword. I'm hopeful that the much-maligned auto-combat option will remove any need for skill on my part anyway.  

So far, BP:SR is being torn apart on Steam, with a "Mosly Negative" rating from almost two and a half thousand reviews. I had a quick skim and most of the disses I read seemed to be complaining about things I'm quite keen on, like that auto combat and also auto pathing, or that I don't care about at all, like it being a mobile port, or that I'm expecting not to affect me much, like there being no EU or US servers. 

As for the "boring dialog" and dull quests, I'll make my own mind up on those. It is noticeable that there are a lot of quite sensible, positive reviews, while the negative ones mostly seem to be from people wishing they were playing a different game altogether. I wonder why people bother to download titles they must know they aren't going to enjoy. Seems like a waste of time to me

And speaking of time, that's all I have for this evening, so my first impressions are going to have to end there. For now. There will be more. I guarantee it.