Blue Protocol: Star Resonance - Stunning Looks, But Is It Fun?

The long-awaited anime MMORPG Blue Protocol: Star Resonance launched on Thursday, and people around the globe have been hopping in to check it out. The first 24 hours after the game’s launch weren’t exactly great, as far as players reviews went. After all, it spent that time with the “mostly negative” label on its Steam page. Of course, that’s probably not enough to keep people from checking it out on their own. After all, it is free-to-play. It’s also our best bet for an anime MMORPG fix.

Yes, Blade & Soul Heroes and Crystal of Atlan launched not all that long ago, but for long-time MMORPG players, they may not give the experience players are hoping for – such as full character creation. For me, at least, that’s a bit of an important one. So the ability to create my own character in Blue Protocol: Star Resonance is a plus. The character creation is satisfying too. It may not be the most robust I’ve ever seen. But it’s robust enough, and I was able to create a character that I liked.

If nothing else it gave us fairly customizable hair with the ability to combine different sections and colors to create a style you really like. The eyes are equally detailed, allowing players to pick out not just eye size and shape but pupils and up to four different eye colors that can be layered. Face shape isn’t quite that detailed, there are three basic shapes. Eyebrows and mouth shape are about the same. So, not the most robust, but robust enough.

Once you’re past character creation and in the world, you’re basically doing all the tutorial-esque stuff, with the help of your new friend who more or less takes you around introducing you to the city while trying to find ways to generate some cash – since your new friend is broke and sees you as her cash cow. It’s not the most heroic start, but it doesn’t take long for the game to establish your character as someone special.

One thing that did bother me about playing through the game’s story was the cutscenes where your character and another stand next to each other to talk. This is something that comes off as not just mobile, but kind of old mobile. The characters in question are placed on opposite sides of the screen while a blurred out shot of the actual scene is behind them. On top of that, the two characters move stiffly. The whole effect is distracting.

As for the gameplay itself, I would say it’s fine. I’ve noted many complaining it’s too mobile-centric. But you have a hotbar with your abilities and summons on it. And contrary to what some comments have said, you can adjust the keybind settings to make it more comfortable to play. As someone who prefers using ESDF over WASD, I had to do this as well as make a few other adjustments to make the experience better.

Getting into the game isn’t too difficult, the storyline directs you. That said, there are quests that players need to do to unlock specific abilities and features and the game doesn’t exactly guide you well in that regard. Rather, some quests just appear in your log. But unless you look at the log, it’s easy to miss them because there no obvious indicator that they’re there otherwise.

On the topic of another major complaint, yes, there is autopathing and the ability to autobattle. However, both of these things are something you can keep turned off. You can even turn of the little gold GPS marker if you really want to. The only complaint I have about any of this is that I wish there was a way to only have the GPS trail turned on in the city and keep it off in the outer world – similar to what we see in Genshin Impact. Getting around in town is often a huge pain and considering all the locations in then game’s starting city, having help navigating is important. The rest of the world, however, I’d rather just follow a waymarker on my mini-map and get lost on my way there because I ran into other interesting things along the way.

As for dungeons and boss fights, I did one of the daily boss fights and ran a dungeon with a friend last night. We elected to just go in as the two of us rather than find more people, which allowed us to use the NPCs for the rest of our party of five. It was easy enough to do and the NPCs behaved well enough that the fights weren’t too problematic. From what we could tell the system scales the battle difficulty for solo and duo players.

There are eight classes for players to choose from. So there should be something everyone likes. I chose the melee class: Stormblade, as I tend to be less of a caster player. It’s worth noting that character abilities are unlocked over time, so how the character feels upfront won’t necessarily be how it feels later on. Players will obtain more mobility over time. That said, doing yesterday’s dungeon felt a bit clunky as a melee player. Moving out of telepathed attacks wasn’t smooth at all. Hopefully obtaining the other movement abilities will fix that.

One other things I got a bit of a look at is the game’s guild system, a few friends invited me since I’m playing and they need ten people in the guild to obtain their guild property. Those ten people need to agree to contribute to “crowdfunding” via one of the guild menus. That doesn’t mean what I mean when I saw the word. I was imagining a tax system of some sort. They’re not entirely uncommon in MMO guild systems, after all. But, apparently it doesn’t require that much investment from the guild members.

As for complaints about excessive currency and all the store purchases, yes, this is where the mobile-ness of the game shines through. After about two days in the game, I still haven’t taken the time to figure out all the workings of the game’s various currencies. And I haven’t tried spending money in the store. I’m not sure I’ll play the game long enough to warrant that. It will depend on if the story actually captures me at some point.

The other primary complaint about the game, regarding its single global server, I can't say much about. I had no real problems with my connection, but then, I'm not as far away from the main data center as many people are. I do believe this is one of the most serious issues and one of the first things that should be addressed.

That said, I do think this is a game players could have fun in. It’s not something you’ll be playing non-stop. The game itself doesn’t allow that. But from my own play experience, I wasn’t in the game long enough either day to have to worry about that. I had to log out at some point and hop into Genshin Impact so I could grind out more rolls for Flins.