Blue Protocol: Star Resonance - Death And Fractures

The elderly PC I'm limping along with until Black Friday arrives and I buy myself a new one is surprisingly happy to play most games I've tried, including a few I didn't expect it to be able to run. Most surprising of all is Blue Protocol: Star Resonance, a game that only came to the West a few weeks ago and which I thought would be well ouside my old PC's comfort range.

Instead, it runs beautifully. Smooth as ice cream and as cool. The fans don't even start up. Which is a good thing because BP:SR is my go-to game just now.

Not that that's saying much. My gaming time is still way down, although I expect that to change as soon as I get a new computer. But when I do decide to play something, Blue Protocol is what I choose.

There are a few reasons. One is indeed that it runs well but that's kind of a passive buff. It wouldn't be enough on its own. 

Another passive is that the world is very nice to look at. Better than I realised at first, when I thought the visuals looked a bit under-cooked compared to similar titles like Genshin Impact or Wuthering Waves. I still think there's less detail but the slightly washed-out, pastel color palette has grown on me and now I think it looks subtle and sophisticated rather than bland.

A third, more active reason I'm enjoying BP:SR is the gameplay. It's engaging but very low-key, a combination that suits me perfectly at the moment. 

I've noticed in recent times, when I'm doing First Impressions posts or generally recounting my experiences with newer games, that I quite often make mention of there not being all that much combat in them. I'm not sitting here with a stop-watch and an abacus, counting and timing the fights I have in every session, but my strong feeling is that since I started the game I've hardly had to do any fighting at all.

That leads me on to the main reason I'm playing and enjoying Blue Protocol, which is the story. It isn't original or even particularly compelling but it makes sense and it's linear, meaning I can follow it both literally and metaphorically. And while it may not be a great story, it's entertaining enough for me to want to know what happens next.

The narrative also takes some unexpected turns once in a while. Disturbingly enough in one case that there probably ought to be a trigger warning.

This next part is going to get pretty spoilery so it might be time to quit reading if you plan on playing and care about plot twists and the like. Also, I wouldn't even look at the screenshots in the rest of the post if I was you. Just in case.

Okay, now those folks have left us, let's get to it.

Fairly early on in the plot, as the player character, you run into a brash and mouthy kid called Narulo, who claims to be a hero. He challenges you to a competition and gets roundly beaten because you are a hero and he's just a kid but he still claims you ought to be his sidekick rather than the other way around.

This goes on for a while, with the kid popping up numerous times to make brash or outrageous claims, but as the story moves along he starts to realize how outclassed he is and what a mistake he made by thinking he could match up to you in the first place. The two of you then start to develop a very comfortable kind of big sister/little brother relationship, aided and abetted by some of the other NPCs, and the whole thing gets to feel very cosy.

Then some bad stuff happens and, as they say, shit gets real. A war starts and the part of town where the kid lives gets reduced to rubble. He steps up and becomes the hero he pretended to be, helping the refugees to safety, which is what he's doing when you arrive.

You makes several attempts to persuade him to get somewhere safe himself, while you go off to deal with the crisis, what with you being a true and actual hero and all, and he tells you he will. But then, of course, he doesn't. He finishef getting everyone out of the danger area, then doubles back and tags along behind you, keeping out of sight until eventually you discover him, hiding in a barrel.

By this time it's too late for him to get out of the combat area. You're too deep in and it would be more dangerous for him to go back on his own than to stay, so you very reluctantly agree to let him stick around, so long as he stays close, does what he's told and keeps out of trouble.

And he kind of does. At least, he's well back when the big fight with the boss starts. Just not far back enough. 

I wasn't even sure what happened, to be honest. It was very fast. I think he heroically but idiotically rushed in to save me from being struck  by lightning from behind, only to be burned to a crisp himself but some of the dialog later suggested he was just too close and got hit by sheer bad luck. 

Either way, he's dead. Which was a shock. I certainly wasn't expecting it.  And it had some impact. The narrative tends to be thin, as in there isn't a great wealth of detail and discussion the way there is in Wuthering Waves, but what there is absolutely hits all the nodal points it needs to establish an emotional reaction. The writers do the work and the effect they're going for lands.

It's not unusual in a game like this. Setting up a sympathetic character to reap the emotional payoff when you kill them is Storytelling 101 for RPGs. 

What doesn't tend to happen is having to deal with the fallout. It felt a lot less like a cliche when I met a middle-aged couple later a short while later, in the course of what seemed like an entirely unrelated sequence, and found out in the course of a conversation about something else that they were the kid's parents. 

And that they didn't know he was dead. And that I had to decide whether or not to tell them. It didn't help that the parents had just been talking about how their son was late and how worried they were about him. 

It occurred to me about then that the slightly etiolated nature of the prose was a good thing. It offered some protection against getting too emotionally evolved. Otherwise that part really might not have been much fun at all.

All of which is just an example of why I'm finding the story worth paying some attention. When something like that crops up it does make you wonder what might be coming next. 

Although what actually did come next, or pretty soon after, was a comedy moment that made me laugh out loud. It also worked well as a counterpoint to the tragedy the PC and her friends had just witnessed, which was clearly the writers' intention. 

What happens is that there's another big fight, during which another of your new friends gets crushed by the boss, rushing in to save you. He ends up flat on his back on the grass. He's lying there, saying his last emotional goodbyes and making something of a meal of it, when another of your pals points out  he's just broken a bone or two and  he's going to be fine as soon as the healers get their hands on him. Bathos as catharsis. Clever writing.

I bet it works even better in the original Japanese. The translations in BP:SR are decent but not entirely idiomatic. I've seen much, much worse, though. Whoever's behind these is doing more than enough to bring the emotional weight across. Still, I bet it's better in the ur-text.

So much for the quality of the story, which I would describe as being consistently at least as good as it needs to be and frequently quite a lot better. How's it for quantity, though?

Pretty good. There's a lot more story than I was expecting. I seem to remember reading it was short but it's not feeling that way. Steam says I have more than eleven hours played and I can't actually remember doing anything other than following the MSQ.  

I really haven't done any exploring other than what I've had to do to get from one story location to the next. I haven't done any crafting. I learned how to fish but I doubt I've spent more than ten minutes doing it. 

I haven't even spent any significant time on upgrading my gear or spending my talent points. As I said earlier, combat has featured so rarely up to now that I've not felt the need to improve anything. The few fights there have been seem either to be with trash mobs that pose no challenge or with bosses where the result is scripted anyway. Why bother upgrading when you don't need to?

There's a boatload of other things I could be doing, as in all these sorts of games, but so far I've found more than enough to keep me occupied just following the plot. I'm happy to carry on like that for now, although at some point I'm sure the game will have other ideas.

When I last logged out I left Floradelle standing outside a pair of huge gates, disguised as a member of an isolated, secretive tribe, waiting  to go through them into a Forbidden Zone. Maybe that'll be a dungeon with a lot of fighting and I'll finally have to sort out her gear and spend her talent points.

I'm betting it won't, though. I bet it'll be a lot more chatting and maybe some sneaking and eavesdropping, with a little light puzzle-solving on the side. 

And that will suit me just fine.