The Protagonist EX-1 Early Access Preview Build Discussion

 

Greetings friends, I was given early access to The Protagonist EX-1 recently but was unable to record it with native Windows 10 recording features; so in lieu of that I decided to simply write up my thoughts on the present state of the game instead. This game is still in early access so if anything seems unfinished in the forthcoming screenshots then keep that in mind, but it seemed relatively functional on the whole. The general concept of the game is that it's a tactical RPG with fighting game elements, I didn't actually notice a half-cover/full cover system so it doesn't necessarily fall into the "X-COM like" department despite what you may think.

Right off the bat the game inundates you with many tutorials (note the #/8)

Some of which are quite verbose; now I do think the fighting system is probably quite complex and would take a while to optimize but maybe present that information gradually instead of dumping it all instantaneously. This is possibly still just an early access issue and on principle I like the ambition and scope of the game's combat which in sharp contrast to most "X-COM clones" (which as mentioned this game is not) is very diverse right off the bat and presumably will become much moreso deeper in the game.

To give a summation of what the general concept is beyond tactical RPG I guess I'd say Mass Effect art design with Jade Empire Combat in a turn based setting; but also with guns/crafting and the Shadowrun Returns style of map movement out of combat. That sounded interesting enough to me personally and I much prefer ambitious indie games to by the book ones, there also don't seem to be roguelite elements (yet) which is always a plus for uniqueness.

In combat your melee strikes build up a super gauge which you can eventually unleash and it carries over between individual combats (it seems like your health is restored though, helpful); so just like Final Fantasy X or whatever you can build up your "limit breaks" and destroy whichever boss; though I'd assume the game tends to just have massive encounters with lots of enemies rather than singular big enemies.

There's also shooting and a crafting system which was somewhat inscrutable at first:

The shooting seems less irritating to execute than most recent tactical RPGs so that's nice, should be fun to mix and match melee with ranged. Here's a shot of the inventory screen:

Which is another information overload scenario, I could guess what half of this stuff does I suppose but its just so much.

Overall I had fun with what I played, I don't think there's a ton of the overall % of the game in the present build but it makes me relatively optimistic for future endeavours. I hope you enjoyed reading this, I figured it wouldn't be a bad idea to exercise my writing brain cells for a bit.