If you thought the Summer Game Fest coverage was over, you’d be dead wrong. For the last month plus, we have had to keep secret a preview we did for a game that we previewed at Summer Game Fest. Now over a month later, we can finally share with you our preview of Amazon Games and Bandai Namco Online’s upcoming game, Blue Protocol.

Last month, Augusto shared with you some of the details of the closed Japanese beta. At the time, I wanted to add my own input but couldn’t due to previewing the game at Summer Game Fest. So what was so different between the two demos? Honesty, I can’t say since I didn’t look at the Japanese footage. What I can do is share my experience from the US Demo and maybe that will pique your interest.

I will start off by saying, I am not the biggest MMORPG player, in fact, I tend to avoid them due to the amount of time and effort it takes to level a character and grind their gear. If it’s the only game I’d play in a year or could afford, it makes sense; otherwise, it just seems like a giant waste of time.

For those reasons and a few other reasons is why I put down Diablo 4, Destiny 2, and Wild Hearts. Even with Blue Protocol looking interesting, Augusto or another MMORPG fan would be better suited; this isn’t to say that I might not review it, but we’ll have to see.

The Demo

So what did I see in the Summer Game Fest Blue Protocol Demo? The demo started us out by introducing our group to the basic level of combat. Starting out as a fragment of light, we are tasked with fighting these cybernetic wolves and what we perceived to be ogres. After clearing a hoard, our character attacks a random by standard but the fight calms down when a voice starts talking to the prism man.

Despite inflicting what should be a life-ending blow, light flows to the sky. The game then starts to show us an opening video showcasing the world and combat; in a way, these characters feel like they were taken out of the Sword Art Online universe. After three minutes, we finally got to customize our character.

Customization

With character customization, as you edited your character, the edits would be shown a character model on the right-hand side. We could edit the body’s height, frame, gender, and facial features. With hair, we could select a variety of styles, angles, brightness, colors, and multitone.

For the demo, there were only fourteen hair types. For skin and face, there were only three facial structures to choose from but seven skin tones with players able to adjust the skin pigment. With eyes, we could adjust the shape, style, and depth of the eyes, eyelashes, and pupils; once those were selected, we could change the eye and eyebrow colors.

Finally, the last three edits affected the character’s voice, nose, and makeup. For a demo, the amount of customization the game has to offer was fairly decent.

The customization wasn’t to the level of Street Fighter, but it was still highly detailed and easy to see. After spending almost 10 minutes on character customization, we finally loaded into the game’s base world and had the chance to see our character fully rendered into the cutscene.

After the cutscene was over, we got to try our hand at combat once again. After arriving at the town, we finally had a chance to see how the world was built. Personally, I love the art style that the game uses, and makes the world seem more detailed and less empty.

Preparing for the group raid, the developers switched us to another character. For the raid, I decided to pick an ice mage to help slow enemies and support my team. In the demo, we only had six people in our raid party. The most comical moment was when a teammate accidentally walked off the edge resulted in us losing a review, then another accidentally followed suit.

Combat within the dungeon definitely felt more difficult than standard combat. Enemies seemed to have a lot more health in a raid, in fact, the boss enemy seemed like a demi-god.

This could be due to our characters being high enough level or having a resistance to certain types of attacks. It felt extremely satisfying when we took down the boss.

If you want to see my Blue Protocol gameplay demo, you can watch the video down below:

Although the gameplay was fairly smooth, Blue Protocol will most likely require coordination that a lot of people don’t have the time or energy to meet. People who already play MMOs and JRPGs should enjoy the game if they are looking for something else to play. It’s worth noting the western release will be censored in comparison to its original Japanese release.

Meanwhile, if you are just a generic fan of RPGs, probably stick with Starfield when it comes out in September. Blue Protocol is in no way a bad game, it just was a bit of a headache to work with others that I couldn’t communicate with and get slightly irritated when they did their own crazy thing.

Blue Protocol is now available in Japan for Windows PC. The western release for PC (via Steam), Xbox Series X|S, and PS5 was delayed to 2024. A closed beta test will be held later in 2023, and sign-ups are available.