During Summer Games Fest last month, we got to go hands on with Blue Protocol, the upcoming anime MMO from Bandai Namco and Amazon Games. We got to spend about 45 minutes with the game with the ability to explore two different areas as well as teaming up and attempting one of the game’s dungeons.
The first thing we got to do was to create a character. The character creator was the typical character creator you would find in most RPGs featuring a character creator. You had the typical aspects of a creator from hair and eye color to body size to facial features with plenty of options to choose from in most categories. This game has an anime aesthetic, so it’s not the most in depth creator as it needs to still fit into the world of the game. Thus, don’t go in thinking you can make too crazy looking of a character.
Following this, we got to choose one of five classes. The options were a Blade Warden which focuses on melee sword combat, the Twin Striker which is another melee class that dual wields axes and focuses on combos, the last melee class with the Foe Breaker which was the heavy weapon tank of the classes. There were also two ranged classes which were the Spell Weaver which obviously focused on magic attacks. Then, the class I chose in The Keen Strider which uses a bow as well as being the healer class.
Of the two exploreable areas I chose Reitz Tradesway. This area featured a small town with NPCs to interact with as well as a wide area including a river valley to explore and participate in combat. Combat itself can be as intricate as you want it. Basic combat was just shooting enemies with arrows or attacking with spells or melee weapons depending on your classes as well as being able to dodge roll from enemy attacks. However, each class has other unique abilities for you to use. Like the Keen Strider has an AoE healing ability which really helps when you team up with others. All in all, with all the abilities, combat can feel a bit overwhelming as you try to juggle all your abilities at once.
Finally, we got to explore a dungeon as a full party of six characters. The dungeon wasn’t too complex. It was a linear path through the dungeon with exploration interrupted by combat encounters. Combat here consisted of wiping out a mob of enemies. Where the dungeon got difficult and really enjoyable was once we made it to the boss. The boss felt like a real difficulty ramp up in a fun way. We had to coordinate as a group to take on the boss in a smart way. It ended up with most of our team low on health with time running out, but we were able to take out the boss at the very end with a sense of accomplishment.
You can check out our full gameplay preview for Blue Protocol below: