Blue Protocol Preview: Living Out my Anime Action Dreams
It may not come as a surprise to those who know me, but I love me a good anime aesthetic, and Blue Protocol, the upcoming MMO from Bandai-Namco, is anime through and through. But more than just the art style, I like games that lean into their JRPG bonafides and push them to the forefront. Which is why I found myself enjoying Blue Protocol so much during my brief time with it back during Summer of Gaming Play Days last month. The hyper-anime styled MMORPG from Bandai Namco leans way into its anime aesthetic to the point it promises you a chance to "become the hero of your very own anime adventure" on the game's official Steam page.
The question is, will Blue Protocol actually allow me, a middle-aged dude who used to spend $30 on anime VHS cassettes in the 1990s, to live out my anime adventure dreams? I'm leaning pretty heavily towards the "yes" column here, because while my time with Blue Protocol was limited to a 45-ish minute demo in a booth in downtown Los Angeles, everything about it appealed to me and my latent anime dreams.
My demo began with a very cool battle scene followed immediately by an anime opening cinematic, one that would have felt right at home in any serialized anime show on Crunchyroll right now. Wide shots of good versus evil, racing towards battle, gorgeous backdrops of the fantastical world, a few shots of characters from the game, the stuff you know and love in an anime series, but in game-form. It set a great tone, with the right mix of high-energy battles, cinematic backdrops, and fast movement. I gotta say, from the get-go, I felt like the game was already living up to its promise to make me the anime hero of my dreams.
From there, I moved to the character creation screen, where I had a chance to
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