Blue Protocol just unceremoniously launched, however, there’s a catch: it’s only available for people in Japan. Anyone playing outside of the country is on a tight test window of “play as much as you can before you get banned”.
Western players have been relying on VPNs, translation overlays, and English patches, but one thing is certain: nobody is escaping the ban wave. The game’s software runs a program that detects your IP, and it can detect if yours is fake or not, so it’s best to get your time in before being hit with the hammer.
That said, getting to play the game roughly a year early is huge, so despite not knowing a single word of Japanese, aside from the ones frequently used in anime, I decided to venture forth into Blue Protocol.
Presentation-wise, Blue Protocol is dialogue-heavy, starting out with in-engine anime cutscenes and eventually switching to a visual novel format with limited dubbing for less important dialogue. I can’t exactly judge the story because, well, I don’t know Japanese, and I played it safe with the translation stuff.
We start out as a glitched silhouette of a person in a brief tutorial against a bunch of enemies. As we lash out against a fellow adventurer, we get stabbed in the chest, and then we are taken to the character creation screen.
Character creation has some slight depth to it; it’s no Street Fighter 6 freak creation tool, but it lets you make your ideal anime husbando or waifu just fine. I even got to make our site’s mascot, Mika, despite my limited knowledge of what I was clicking on.
After creating our character, we wake up and meet we meet our sidekick, a money-hungry demi-human girl who tricks us into becoming her servant. Feste is a really charismatic character, and doesn’t feel like Genshin Impact‘s Paimon, who constantly annoys the player.
The voice acting for Blue Protocol is also a highlight, as it feels like an anime episode with gameplay in between. It’s gorgeous and pretty charming to watch, despite the fact that I couldn’t understand much.
Gameplay-wise, Blue Protocol follows the recent MMO trend of hack-and-slash combat. Standing still and casting skills won’t do, as the player has to be mobile and dodge around enemy attacks. The enemies can actually hit pretty hard too, so the player will have to engage with the mechanics to survive.
The feedback when hitting the enemies is pretty decent, and it definitely helps sell the idea that we are playing a hack and slash. We don’t seem to have a lot of control over enemy positioning like we would in regular character action games, but it’s not bad.
There are five classes available: Blade Warden, Twin Striker, Keen Strider, Spell Weaver, and Foe Breaker. I decided to go with the Twin Striker, and it was pretty fun. The class specializes in using dual axes to constantly perform spinning attacks against enemies.
The skill cooldowns are pretty short, so you’ll be constantly trying to keep them all in use while also dodging enemy attacks. The gameplay is fast and fluid, and there’s a lot of potential for the late-game fights if Bandai decides to make some harder content.
The game’s open world isn’t exactly super open, as there are definitely some walls that block the player from progressing, but the game currently feels really alive, as players from all around the world are testing out the MMO, despite Bandai Namco’s insistence on a Japan-only launch.
The game’s performance is alright, although I did get a few frame drops here and there. I don’t know if these frame drops are happening because of my ping, as some games throttle your frames when you are hit with a lag spike (yes, that’s actually a thing), but it never really felt like a laggy experience, despite the fact that I am connecting from Brazil to Japan.
Blue Protocol has a battle pass as well as a cash shop. Unfortunately, I can’t judge whether or not they would make the game qualify as pay-to-win because of the language barrier. It’s sad to see but expected in a free-to-play game.
It’s disappointing that Blue Protocol will be handled by Amazon Games in the West, especially since they are known for mismanaging their games, as was the case with New World and Lost Ark.
I’m excessively familiar with MMOs getting mismanaged by regional publishers, as I watched Level Up! Games run titles like Grand Chase and Ragnarok Online into the ground. A few games managed to escape this, but most were killed due to incompetence and greed.
We will most likely get an even more predatory version of Blue Protocol in the West, with delayed content and some censorship as a nice bonus. I hope this isn’t the case, but Amazon Games doesn’t have a good track record, and I have no good faith to spare for them.
With that said, hopefully, Bandai Namco will allow Western players to access the Japanese servers at some point, so they don’t have to go through a regional publisher they dislike.
Blue Protocol is set to release in the West at some point in 2024, for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Microsoft Windows (through Steam). We’ll have a final review of the game once it actually comes out in English.
Updated and Added SGF video (7/25)
