0.5/5 ★ – joiningwithaname's review of Blue Protocol: Star Resonance.

Despite I kinda quit this kind of places, I’m back to review a game that I played from its own launcher and essentially nothing about the launcher will be mentioned for this reason, despite it had untranslated Chinese buttons and the bar with the download and installation progress didn’t tell you anything, especially when I guess it checks the download and install it, it just turn into an anonymous bar that progress and goes back, with no explanation, followed by a button in Chinese, but at least the sub-menu under the various icons are translated in English. This game is avaible on other popular launchers such as Steam and EpicGames. Let’s leave all of that behind and don’t consider it as a part of the following review. This is… Not a game… It’s a shop with an open world, but yet not so open world because in fact it have a lot of elements working as barrier in order to prevent you from going “outside the map” and essentially the “open” world feels more like a corridor, with very little places to explore and when you finally manage to find such places, there is essentially nothing. This game has its version of chests, but looking for them leads you to several totally empty places, with no players, no npcs, no enemies, no activities, nothing. If this game was released when it was supposed to, it would make more sense, but now years have passed, meanwhile other games under development when developers delayed it got released, they met success, but in these years the game hasn’t improved. What were used for these years? It could have been released at the time of Genshin Impact, but we are here, years after, with a product that already felt old years ago and now it feels even older. Graphic wise, it follows a really old concept consisting in pursuing a detailed, hyperrealisting background, with detailed rocks, grass, nature, but just ends up feeling off… Over this kind of background, which isn’t already that good, they put 3D models that try to imitate, with horrible results, a drawing. The character models are bad. They kept that outdated concept of adding black borders, that sometimes lead to nothing, cut the on the sections of the body in weird points, on models that looks flat, don’t have very clear shades or shadows, they look at best colored in sections, but it doesn’t feel natural and it doesn’t really look like anime style either, outside the fact that they are trying to imitate it with the type of models. Men look weird, they have strange black lines in their face, which I’m not sure if they are supposed to indicate wrinkles or limiting the area to indicate the presence of a curve, a shadow or something else. You see some characters with a very anime-type of body, while other characters look just like people with a filter to turn them into a stylized drawing, leaving them with almost the same proportion they had before. For a comparison, where Blue Protocol opted for “simplified” models over a detailed background, other games choose to build a world in a way that merge the style of the characters, with the context of the background and this is very clear in games such as Zenless Zone Zero, but also in other much older games it was implemented better, you may not like their style but the characters fit the background. MapleStory 2 characters made sense with its background because all the environment, all the world was built with clear in mind one style. You didn’t have hyperrealistic grass or fishes with at their side a flat-looking piece of paper with boobs. Genshin Impact have around the same age and years of development of Blue Protocol, but at release it had its own version of anime style with slightly pastel color, a world that was not too realistic, but also not too close to benign a flat drawing, it had very nice looking models, which vastly take advantage of colors to balance shadow, how they look in the world, hide undesired elements and so on. Grand Fantasia, which isn’t that mind blowing game, is somehow better, despite I can agree that it looks terribly old, because to a certain degree the characters fit into world; it has a world that wasn’t fully realistic, at opposite from buildings to trees, everything was a bit simplified maintaining just a few nice decorative details. Grand Fantasia didn’t even bother rendering realistic grass everywhere, it had a few longer grasses and most of the ground just took advantage of textures. It was clear that neither the characters, nor the world, were the real world in Grand Fantasia, nor did they want to, it was their style, not perfect, but coherent within the game elements. Black Desert, but also Blade and Soul have more coherency, but their graphics are also better and they are old. All elements in the background of these two games, all world building point slightly to a realistic, but yet a bit simplified, style compared to previously mentioned games and for that reason I need to mention them to explain where Blue Protocol failed in the field of aesthetic. Both have in common with Blue Protocol how they manage nature and elements outside the characters, but first their buildings, the nature are really great in comparison and second they have a key feature that all previously mentioned games had: their environment fit the character. I’m not going to touch much more BlueProtocol way of handling different elements, since also the buildings looks in another style, the enemies sometimes looks much different and out of place, it feature medieval buildings mixed with futuristic structures, even some decorative elements are weird and you have decorative flowers and plants that looks glitching plastic, with unnatural angles, floating pieces and so on. It’s too long to mention everything, I’m even sure to have met Wuthering Waves enemies, like a fat enemy that you can meet in the early game in both games. Animals and mobs are just too generic and yet weird looking… Speaking of Wuthering Waves, Blue Protocol have in fact the echo system, with a summoned enemy that help you in battle, at least in theory, it looked ugly, so I just avoided crafting it, since the game have limited resources and I had no active quest that told me to finalize it, despite I was left with an exclamation point over the suggested echo. Blue Protocol also adopts the same concept of killing multiple enemies for a little achievement-like reward, exactly like Wuthering Waves and it even asks for the same amount of kills… I didn’t bother reading quests, since almost all were skippable except the ones that introduce you to activities related to the shop, in either a direct way or indirect way, however at some point I was in a sort of dodging tutorial, which didn’t really teach me anything and apparently it’s unimportant and the dialogue is skippable, and it turned out that it had the dodge exactly like Blade and Soul… The skill system looks also like a worse, not free to player friendly, version of Blade and Soul skill tree, but to be transparent many old games do have a similar concept, but usually they insist a lot about explaining it to you, they don’t just throw it to your face like how Blue Protocol did. You are left with essentially no idea of how build your character, how to take advantage of skills or which one you should improve, you’ll eventually figure out that the game thinks that getting a new armor is unimportant, so this is why you never got notified when you got a new armor outside the one that the game force you to wear when you spawn on that world… Infinite shop-related things are important and deserve a mark to urge you to look at them, but getting a better armor piece doesn’t deserve it. The gameplay is not fun, which is probably why they have the autoplay function, killing enemies is pointless considering that they essentially don’t give exp, it is so little exp compared to the requirement to level up, that you can kill enemies for days and still don’t level up. Everything, especially the story, which is substantially the only way to level up and progress, it’s time gated. This is not a good game for the majority of the population. Did you skip a day? It’s lost forever. You have to play every day because it’s a time gated story and progression, there is no such thing as “I’ll catch up on weekend”. You can’t. Blue Protocol need to be played every day otherwise you’ll fall behind and you’ll never catch up with the others, and this is especially true not only because the story is time gated, but mainly because doing the time-gated story is the only real source of exp, you cannot just skip a day and play two days of the story on the second day, you cannot just skip a day and compensate killing more mobs on weekend, it just doesn’t work like that. It’s a job, it’s not a game. A daily job, with nothing meaningful to do after doing your daily portion of the story. I still wonder why this world has enemies when they are useless for exp and generally they don’t target you unless you are in specific areas dedicated to events or combat bosses. Some mobs run away, which is annoying, while others essentially stand still doing little to nothing… Common enemies are so much scattered over the map that you just don’t want to look for them; you just pick one of a few spots where a few of them are in a group, attack them by accidentally hitting multiple of them with one skill and that’s it… Anyway they can’t kill you, and even if they did, there is no penalty for what I know. Some players experienced random deaths for unknown reason, just entering an area, I too did die once at the start, when I clicked on a marked side quest or event and I got teleported and kept moving in a new area, but I think I died because there seems to be a boss appearing nearby, so maybe I couldn’t go there at early levels, just maybe… Also the game have no fall damage, so you can literally jump from everywhere, despite climbing is not really a thing, the jump itself is very limited and instead for mobility this game introduce you to a sort of wind current, which is identical, especially the area of the tutorial for it, to the same kind of wind current implemented on Blade and Soul… I swear it even got a cave entrance really close to what you see on Blade and Soul on early tutorials, with even the position of npc looking similar, it just looks the same area where you learn about wind currents. Also I try to not look at the landscape because it’s ugly and empty, and anyway noticing enemies gives me nothing, since they essentially don’t give exp. I love killing mobs in games, but here I can’t, it’s a pointless waste of time. Why is this an open world, if you can’t get rewarded for killing monsters outside the main quest? I wish to say this game is laggy, but it’s not that bad compared to a lot of other games, it do have a really high ping and a lot of players were complaining about it and apparently people from latam areas have above 800ms, while I was barely above 100ms despite I’m in another continent and according to players (not the developers or the company, I don’t know if it’s true or official) the servers are located in NA or at least somewhere in America, if it’s not North America. About the chat: it censors everything. It censor common words, it censor many innocent foreign words, it fail to censor many insults, but not all, it censor your opinion, it try to censor you if you try to express any bad opinion, or if you try to casually talk about other games, the game mechanics and if you try to tell players that it’s better to quit it or that you don’t find it fun in every form or shape; but it doesn’t censor bot and spam. If you are looking for something, most of the time you can’t ask about it, because a lot of words are censored, it’s annoying. The chat seems to not work really well, sometimes it gets the enter input, other times it doesn’t, a lot of times it seems you successfully left it, but as soon as you press any key, it opens back the chat, despite it seeming not active anymore. Going back to the quest, it’s still not clear to me, personally, why sometimes I click to tracking a quest and I got teleported, but other times I click it and it doesn’t teleport me, but also sometimes I click it and I start moving despite the quest is hundreds of meters away and the game could have teleported me nearby instead… I just have no clue and I can continue mentioning these kinds of episodes forever, sometimes I just wanted to start tracking it to do it after ending other activities or quests, but instead I got automatically teleported without any prior warning. Fishing exists, I’m not into it, I in fact hate side activities, I like good looking stuff, but I don’t like doing something unrelated to combat in a game that is supposed to focus on combat. If I wanted a fishing simulator, a farm, a life simulator I would have played such games and not an MMO. And here we go to crafting activities… The decorative items that you can craft are kinda limited, don’t expect a huge variety because there is not. A consistent portion of craftable decorations are essentially plants in a pot, and that’s it. They don’t look good, they look like fake plastic plants, really bad looking, not natural, not detailed either, just some leaves over some lines, sometimes flowers that seem detached from the main body of the plants, with unnatural angles as well. It’s nothing good, nor special. About crafting, it’s mandatory to mention currencies. This features a lot of currencies and currency-like things such as dropped materials, materials locked behind certain quests, events, and other systems, time-gated materials that you can’t get over a certain limit without paying and many others… Farming them is a nightmare, everything is scattered, sometimes you need a thing to redeem another thing, to get another thing, to unlock or craft another thing in order to get something else, but luckily, under the sub-sub-menu to track where to gather the selected thing, you always find the shop as an option, you can essentially buy everything or become insane trying to find the right place for all needed ingredients and currencies… This is not only true for decorative items, but for anything craftable. This part forces me to introduce you to the monetization system, which I really don’t want to touch. There are many currencies that just serve to hide the fact that you need to pay. Several events, shops and event-related shops have their own currency, but in the end you can just buy it with real money and the rewards for playing the game are little to nothing. Not only this game gives different names to things that are essentially the same thing, making all really confusing because you have to pick the right currency for the right group of rewards and items, but this game feature multiple passes at the same time, as well a monthly card, and have paid items locked behind rng, it features gacha inside items that you already pay and other games let you select what you want. Here you have to gamble for mounts, cosmetics, even some battle-related things are locked behind the gacha system, in addition to the fact that the drop from enemies was already random and you didn’t get notified when you get a new armor piece. As I mentioned there are several currencies, with several stores, each one with its own limited sales that pressure you to buy. Making mistakes it’s easy, because there are so many currencies that you may pick the wrong one, thinking that a certain item was in that shop, but it wasn't and you can’t just convert that currency to the right one. It’s a really shady practice and it has no reason to exist. You may remind me that the game gives indeed a small amount of a premium currency and that you can daily accumulate it by playing, but this whole argument falls and fails exactly because the shop is divided into multiple shops, each one with its own currency as I mentioned before. Not all the currencies work where you need them, even less the ones you get in a limited amount for free, and there are really a lot of currencies of several types for several shops and activities. The monetization system merges all the worst practices of the gaming industries from multiple game genres, from MMO to gachas. Name something awful consisting of a sort of paywall and this game got it. If something can get monetized, this game does it. If you want to change your name, you can do it by paying, if you want to change the color of the literal ten clothes that you can see, but not get, in the early game, you can do it by paying. If you want more clothes, you can just pay for them, and most of them need to be buyed from the shop, and the shop only, mostly from limited sales. Of course you can as well change your hair, and get a few new hairstyles, just pay for it. I really don’t want to continue talking about monetization, it’s just a mess. Sadly it seems that certain professions or life skills are needed in order to improve certain classes, which is awful because it means you are forced to do pointless side activities or pay, all of that to fight things that are either time-gated, party-gated or just useless and weak. Why should I improve, if things die with no effort, the gameplay is uninspired, buggy and boring, it is so boring that it even has an autoplay function? It’s pointless. Of course sometimes the game helps you with bots, when there aren’t enough players around to do bosses for example, which tells a lot. Leveling more than one class, at least in the early days of this game, it’s not a realistic option for players that don't want to spend real money, and it’s slow as well. Speaking about classes (almost all of them involve using a sword, but for some reasons they are listed as different classes instead of just being one knight with various option on the skill tree), here we find again the mysterious multitude of items, that you have to guess how to get without spending real money, hoping to don’t get lost, but of course we meet as well again our friend time-gate, because you get the very first materials needed to unlock the first skills for progressing, and the progression on this game come from a story locked behind a time-gate and there is no such option like farming exp by killing mobs. Talking about skills, they even look uninspired, several of them are just generic bright circles on the ground, several of them even share the color with different classes, with minor differences on them, several skills are just colored physical damage and again the game doesn’t really explain you what the skills does, you have to manually look for them and everything is kinda hidden under many sub-menu. I don’t get why there is only one mage, technically two if you count the hybrid summoner-healer, and the only mage has to be specifically an ice mage… But other elements seem to exist, so why can't the mage just be any kind of mage? Why can't we just be a fire mage, a water magician, a simple summoner or a dark mage? Technically the healer-summoner is a sort of mage, but why can't the class that is mage as class do that, and can't as well directly use other elements? Still proper tutorials are missing, and even the most basic ones are essentially skippable, there is the possibility to jump, but it is in fact useless in combat, since you are forced to dodge, regardless of from where the attack comes, jumping results in you getting hit. You just do the story until a timer block you, the game doesn’t really offer a tutorial or a guide of any kind about what kind of playstile you can achieve unlocking certain passives or skills, instead of others, it doesn’t even tell what the skills, that just spawn on your skillbar from the start, does. It’s a game that doesn't want to be played or explored, just press the autotravel and autocombat things. Professions, or life skills, are related to your combat skills, but it’s not really explained. You may want to cook, but maybe cooking is useless to your progression and anyway you can just pay and avoid all of that. Sometimes you just picked the wrong class according to your own tastes and hobbies. Anyway all of this is getting too long and I have nothing positive to say about this outdated “game”. You may notice some recurring words, such as sub-menu and sub-sub-menu, or paywall, or timegated, because they are very present in this game and they seem to be a core part of this game. I didn’t touch in details all the menus, but just imagine to click on anything: this open a list or a button that redirect to a list, but in that list there is another list and if you click one of the elements on that list, it open another list and so on for a really long path and it’s like this for almost everything. When you make your character you meet for the first time the multiple sub-menu and they never leave, they just increase and get worse, sometimes the list are on the left, others are on the right or on top, other times they get creative and become squares or icon-like under a menu, and eventually they’ll lead to another list that may or may not keep the same style and structure. Sometimes clicking an element on a list leads to a different page with its menu, but other times it opens such sub-menu on the same page at its side… Also many items (let’s generically call everything just items, regardless if they are clothes, decoration, armors or materials of any kind) does not have a preview directly on the menu where they are mentioned, some have still an icon, but a lot of them need to be clicked and then open the preview, however several of them doesn’t have a preview at all despite they are also or only item purchasable with the premium currency (or should I say currencies at this point?). The game features many elements that never get explained, and I’m not only talking about the combat or about why you need certain things to improve other things. Battles Imagines, which are essentially echoes from Wuthering Waves, just exist because yes and as I mentioned at the start you get a sort of quest or tutorial that essentially tell you to speak to and npc, here you find them, but the mission ends without having to craft it, if you don’t craft it you keep having an exclamative mark, but it seems like the quest it’s ended and there is not a part two or something like that… They kinda exist, crafting them seems to be unimportant and optional, since the game just lets you ignore the crafting part and the same is true for essentially any npc to which you are introduced to… Many times you unlock features and npc where essentially you can skip everything by swiping your card, but you never really know why it’s important to do or get it, what’s the lore behind it, why certain things exist, how they work. On top of that you get, sometimes, rewarded with packages with an option to cancel instead of selecting one of them, but the game never tell you that by cancelling you just send the package, with the other packages inside it, on your inventory, so you kinda don’t know where it goes or if it’s lost forever… All of that makes Blue Protocol even more confusing, chaotic, messy… Special mention: if you want to be bald, be aware that it’s locked behind a paywall. If you have any question about the lore or the environment, or how the magic works I can’t answer and the game couldn’t either. When you start you can hear a repetitive music, and these few high pitched notes continue in a circle, forever, almost everywhere. The game is not fully translated, several dialogues are not dubbed in English, the sub as well are kinda unclear sometimes, just sometimes. Of course the mouth of the characters don’t move in sync with their voice. I wish I could tell you something about last skills, but they are locked behind a time wall, because you can’t level up without doing the story and the story can’t be completed when you want, but you have to complete it in multiple days, without the possibility to continue it thanks to said timer. And you also need the right materials anyway. Certain characters have annoying voices, I don’t personally like them and the main green haired npc has a Paimon-like voice… This game sometimes feels like being on a wet Twitter fever dream, or maybe BlueSky, but people aren't obese, they all have super annoying traits and weirdly colored fluorescent rainbow hair, but they don’t tell you their pronouns every five seconds. Sometimes I wonder if that’s some sort of joke, or if some woke people kidnapped anime girls, mixing them with the old comic style, but also a bit of western hyperrealistic games about heroes or war, all this topped off with the addition of colorful clown-like wigs. Girls got these sort of strange mono-boobs, which are boobs but they kinda look like one continuous boob, the chest, especially on more prominent girls, looks off. I wish it wasn’t real. This already bad and outdated game is worse than years ago, somehow several cosmetic features got removed and you have less options to change your body, but the number of paid things increased, the number of currencies increased and generally speaking it didn’t add anything new or enjoyable. The whole main quest is just talking to the same npc and going from point A to point B and then repeat, with occasional new npc that you are never going to meet again in most cases. I have to mention that, despite bosses, raids and some sort of dungeons do exists, they are really never touched by the main story and with this I mean simply that the story don’t ask you to clear them, they just are on the map, sometimes you get annoyed by others players without a party when a world boss is spawning and that’s it. However you can get kidnapped and locked into a sort of dream inside the story, where you have to walk, and walk, slowly walk again until you just exit because yes. Sadly guilds are useless for now, since everything is new, so they have no skills, no buffs, joining a guild doesn’t even give you an achievement, so it’s pointless to stay on any of them. Unfortunately, I haven't found a way to block guild invites, which are constantly being spammed. You can “dance” in random places, but when you try it the background music doesn’t change and the character just moves ignoring the music… I’m not sure if that was working as intended or if it's a bug. In the game you find many long, empty corridors, long empty bridges and endless empty docks. It doesn’t feel like a world where someone lives, it’s kinda boring and most of the roads lead to nothing, or they feature little to nothing at their ends. Sometimes it’s just nothing, some roads kinda end in the grass, near world bosses or near events and that’s it… Since world bosses and raid-like bosses are locked behind a timer, most of the game consists of waiting… And you already wait thanks to the time-gated story… Because of several timers, you again can’t progress, you can’t get a better armor, you can’t improve your skills behind a certain point, you can’t as well get better stats, but the last one is not a problem, since anyway you don’t know which stats you need and you don’t know which armors are good, you don’t even know when you get a new armor because the game just don’t tell you about it. Bosses spawn, but you don’t know in which channel they have already been killed… Good luck finding it out. If you have a life and you miss the timer for the boss that you need, you have to wait another hour and hope that you’ll find other players, because right now everyone is underlevelled and despite enemies AI is kinda bad, you aren’t going to kill these bosses alone anytime soon. If you choose to fight bosses, be aware that you need keys to open their chests and free keys are again time-gated, you can’t get more until next day. Check everything before farming, because you may end up wasting your limited chances to get the drops on the wrong enemy. Life skills exp is limited and time gated as well… Players waited for years for this “game” to log in and wait more to play the game, but playing is more like a walking simulator with pointless dialogues in between and optional fight activities that you can just skip with the autocombat… You have this big conglomerate of shops with inside a little portion of a “game” and an empty world… In the end Blue Protocol: Star Resonance is a shop that magically spawns in a menu from an “open” world walking simulator. It’s just not good… Even some Battle Wills, which are needed for your cheap copy of echoes, are either time-gated or locked behind a paywall thanks to the fact that you need to pull for them. At the current progression rate, certain Battle Wills require months to get acquired for “free” by playing. Some of them can be acquired by killing bosses and opening their chests, but this enlightens another problem: both the keys to open the chests and the world bosses are time-gated. And the best part is that the game never tells you about that! You barely get introduced to the fact that the Battles Imagines barely exist, you have no idea of how long, boring and repetitive is going to be farming for just one of them, which have to be the right one for you, otherwise you are just wasting time, but you can still pay and pull anyway. Blue Protocol: Star Resonance is a "game" that tragically sacrifices its MMORPG potential for an aggressively monetized, mobile-first business model. The experience quickly devolves into an unrewarding chore. The core gameplay loop is ruined by a painfully slow, time-gated story and a combat system that feels clunky, oversimplified, and completely without challenge or meaningful progression. The game features a biblical and confusing monetization. Players are buried under several similar premium currencies, season/battle passes, and multiple gacha systems built with dark patterns to push excessive spending; all of this mixes with several special sales, discounts and so on. This game doesn't even tell you that you can convert certain currencies into other currencies, you need to find it out yourself either by running out of the main currency while trying to pull or by navigating multiples sub-menu with the list of places and activities where you can get a certain thing, but sometimes this information it's not even on them. On PC, the experience is further degraded by a clunky, oversized UI suffering from severe menu bloat, a jarring auto-play function, and poor global technical support that results in extremely high ping for players. Overall, it feels like a low-effort mobile cash-grab wearing a desktop disguise, failing to deliver on the promise of a true anime MMORPG. It’s all about money and this game doesn’t even try to be a game, it’s a shop, the game is the shop. It’s a shop with cosmetic items of a questionable quality and between a purchase and another purchase you may walk around, eventually talk to an npc a few times a day, and then wait for the end of the next timer. Also the concept behind the armors and the cosmetics feels “inspired” to Monster Hunter: World… I loved the random Russian bots spawning out of nowhere tho! And the Latin American players complaining about ping were very friendly…