Game Review - Blue Protocol Star Resonance

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Game Review: Blue Protocol: Star Resonance by Shanghai Bokura Network Technology Co. Ltd., published by A Plus

Score: FAIL

"Begin your MMORPG adventure in an anime-styled fantasy world!."
Blue Protocol looks great and is in every way a contender against even FFXIV -- beautiful world, lots of verticality for exploration, a mix of story, combat, and life skills.

However, it immediately scores a FAIL for not respecting your time regardless of what else is in the game.

In the screenshot above, you can see a piece of gear with a Perfection rating capped at 80/100.
  • This means you cannot upgrade it past 80/100 so any piece of gear with less than 100 (and sometimes they can randomly generate with even less than 50/100) is ultimately junk.
This wouldn't be so bad if you can get a lot of gear to fight the randomness, but you cannot:
  • Rare drop from tough encounters like field bosses, and NOT automatically for your currently chosen class (unlike SWTOR for example)
  • Tedious crafting involving multiple Life Skills all of which advance slowly and you collect materials slowly
    • Intended to stimulate the player market.
    • Adds a huge layer of grind and cost to random gear creation.
    • The key materials you need require "Focused" action to acquire or process and you only have a certain amount of Focus per day shared among all Life Skills, and these materials are shared among various uses such as gearing, furniture, and Guild Cargo turn-ins.
  • Buying with special currency.
    • Which I did so for the gear above, and it let me chose the appropriate gear for my class including recommended stats.
    • But obviously wasted a LOT of currency because the Perfection rating is capped.
Even if you get a good piece, once you cap the upgrades with Rare materials, you still have to spend rare materials to get a good random stat.

It's more than a time sink here it's a currency sink. Of course many games have a lot of RNG in gearing, but Blue Protocol is easily near the top of the list for tediousness.
(At least the industry seems to have gotten rid of costly gear failure or regression during upgrades, like in Neverwinter Online or TERA).

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