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cosmicspearI desperately wish Blue Reflection was a game I could recommend without reservations. It's got plenty of heart and makes a good effort to be unique, and those are qualities I very much enjoy seeing. Unfortunately, a combination of design flaws, unexplored potential, and some extremely unfortunate writing choices mean any recommendation inevitably comes with a pretty damn big asterisk.
So, this is a magical girl RPG from Gust, which given their usual output isn't exactly a stretch. The idea for it came from Mel Kishida, the character designer for the Arland-era Atelier games, who shortly after the game came out did an interview where he talked about wanting to experience life as a high school girl in a way that I distincctly recall producing a non-zero amount of controversy (the big thing I remember is actually related to my biggest criticism of the game, so we'll get to that later).
As the story starts we're introduced to our protagonist, a girl named Hinako Shirai who was a ballet prodigy right up intil she got a knee injury that permanently destroyed her ability to dance. They really drive home the point that ballet was her entire life and losing it has left her completely broken, which leaves the early parts of the game feeling extremely bleak in a way that you don't really see in a lot of games. Like, normally when video games go for bleak they do it in the Dark Souls "everything is fucked" style but this is more bleak in the sense of "I have lost everything and can only go through the motions of life" and let me tell you, that hits completely different.
Anyway, magical girl stuff starts happening very quickly: Hinako runs into a middle school classmate who admired her and starts behaving very strangely, she gets pulled into another dimension, voices in her head tell her how to use a magic ring she is now inexplicably wearing to transform, and she fights a demon before absorbing a physical manifestation of the aforementioned classmate's emotions into herself. Then she heads to class and runs into the two girls whose voices she heard.
So, what's going on here?
Well, the alternate dimension Hinako ended up in is called the Common, and it's made up of people's emotions. Individual emotions manifest in it as crystals called Fragments. Normally they disappear when the emotion subsides but sometimes they go rampant, causing the person experiencing the emotion sort of get stuck on it and making the Fragment associated with it stick around. Over time or due to demon attacks, Fragments that have gone rampant can be destroyed, which is harmful if it happens enough. Hinako has become a Reflector, which is what the game calls the magical girls who can enter the Common and stabilize Fragments so that doesn't happen. This is beneficial for the Reflectors too, because they need the energy emotions give off (called Ether) to do their thing and Fragments are the best source of it.
Also, the two girls who spoke to Hinako and are her classmates are named Yuzu and Lime Shijou, and they're also Reflectors.
Oh, but Reflectors aren't just there to stabilize Fragments. Their real purpose is to fight the Sephirot, monsters who try to destroy the Common via the 22 singularity points around the world (of which we only see the one, of course). If a Sephira breaches one of these points, everyone there dies. If all of them are lost, Bad Things happen. When fighting the Sephirot, Hinako and her friends also get help from everyone whose Fragments they've obtained, who are able to help when most people can't even move during a Sephira attack because they receive rings like the ones the Reflectors wear.
So, what's in it for the Reflectors? As Yuzu and Lime put it, they get one wish if they beat all the Sephirot. Naturally, Hinako plans to use hers to fix her knee so she can dance again.
And so the formula is set: Hinako goes about her life, meeting her fellow students and stabilizing their Fragments when they inevitably go rampant, and every so often a Sephira attacks and she and her friends have to fight it off. Between that, you get free time segments.
So that's the setup. Now for how the game plays.
Most of how Blue Reflection plays is familiar territory, really. During battles you've got a bar on top of the screen that shows action order, with your team on the left and the enemies on the right. Character icons move towards the center of the bar, and whenever one reaches it the associated character gets to do stuff. So far, so standard. When your turn happens you get attack and support skills on their own menus, along with an Ether Charge option that regenerates MP and raises your Ether meter. The Ether meter is used for a handful of skills, but it mostly fuels the Overdrive option, which lets you do multiple skills in one turn with each getting more powerful and less expensive than the last. This is also how you use the ultimate attacks you get in the late game, which happen automatically at the end of a level 3 Overdrive.
So far you're probably thinking that this sounds like a really run-of-the-mill battle system, and you'd be right, but there is one more trick to it: you get abilities you can use between turns. There's four of these: a heal for both HP and MP, a guard that works better if you use it at just the right time (though I couldn't make it work), a variant of the aforementioned heal that affects supporters instead (we'll get to supporters in a bit), and an option labelled "Timeline" that speeds up your turns and slows down enemy turns. All of these drain Ether faster than one character charging will restore it, with the last one naturally costing the most since fucking with the action economy is Just That Good.
Battles against Sephirot have a handful of extra things to consider. First are those supporters I mentioned before, who are all the friends whose Fragments you've stabilized. They build up MP over time and use it to follow up your actions with their own skills (which are worth using even if you don't need them because they give you some free Ether). Second, all Sephira fights have adds that will use their turns to regenerate if they're destroyed but will otherwise just attack. Destroying them also debuffs the Sephira, and they come back with less HP. Third, every Sephira battle has multiple phases and to be absolutely sure that you see each phase's special animation and hear its neat battle theme variant, the Sephira starts each phase with the maximum possible HP for that phase no matter how much damage the attack that pushed it over the edge did.
(The real annoying thing about this is that the phase transition erases your timecard-based attacks and stops your Ether Charges, BTW.)
The most actually unusual thing about the game mechanics is how you get stronger, though. See, you don't level up from fighting. At all. Instead, as you go through the game you get growth points, each of which is worth one level. You get four options to invest your points in and when they hit certain milestones you learn new skills (though you also get skills just from leveling up). There's also the matter of those Fragments you spend the game collecting, which you attach to your skills to power them up. Each skill has 1-3 Fragment slots, with the better ones naturally having fewer. There's a lot of different abilities you can get from Fragments—some make your skills do more damage or heal more, some let your support skills buff allies (hint: put these on your AoE heals), some just increase character stats without affecting the skill itself and thus should be kept on skills you won't use much, and so forth.
Ultimately the battle system isn't especially inspired, but it gets the job done if you're okay with Gust combat. The really interesting part, and the part that I feel will make or break the game for most people, is the free time mechanics.
So, free time gives drops you into Hinako's school to build relationships with the other characters, do sidequests, and generally just hang out. You're given a list of missions that have specific point values and told you need a certain number of points to advance, but the game doesn't really want you to rush through it. You certainly can, but what the game really wants you to do is take your time and just live out Hinako's life. They even give you an entire in-universe social media section, with chatrooms and stuff to read and a music player and even a simple minigame associated with it, that has no mechanical rewards and just exists for fun.
For those of you looking for more tangible rewards, though, hanging out with Hinako's friends is always an option. See, all of the twelve supporters have their own secondary events that have continuing stories and additional Fragments you can get out of them. The stories are gated partly by plot progression but mostly by affection, which is raised both by choosing the right dialogue options and hanging out with them after school. The latter is actually fairly interesting, because everyone has a list of places Hinako will take them and unique (and sometimes fairly interesting) dialogue for all of them. This is how you get the vast, vast majority of the Fragments in the game, which also tend to have more interesting effects than the mandatory ones. You also get growth points from hanging out with friends, tracked via an item you receive that you get points for having enough of. This is important because it translates to a total of 20 (count 'em!) levels if you max it out, which will happen way before you're done getting Fragments.
Also: whenever you invite a friend somewhere, after a few of their Fragment events, and any other time you decide to do so, you go home. Here you're given the opportunity to prepare for the next day (which gets you minor stat boosts if you make the right choices) or take a bath (handled in a surprisingly non-fanservicey way considering everything) before another day starts. There's no time limit to worry about—the Sephirot will wait exactly as long as it takes for you to choose to advance the plot.
Missions, meanwhile, are generally extremely samey and not especially interesting. Most of them involve finding a generic student who's gone rampant, heading into the Common, and either killing a specific enemy type or grabbing a bunch of random pickups. There's also missions that involve making specific items with the crafting system and bringing them to someone, and some oddball ones where you have to do specific things in battle or visit specific parts of the school. Your reward is typically items that provide permanent stat upgrades or new item recipes.
Oh yeah, this game has item creation too. Very uninspired and one-dimensional "spending things on things"-type item creation, but it is there. The same menu is also used to enhance Fragments, making their effects better. But there's really not much to the system.
One last thing about free time: rainy days. Rain happens on random days and when it does going outside will get Hinako's clothes drenched to the point where you can see through her shirt. There's an impressive amount of effort put into this feature that people are going to see as bizarre at best and downright creepy at worst, with multiple different levels of soaked-ness that are visually distinct enough to notice and consideration for characters who wear vests. Once the novelty wears off, though, rainy days end up being just plain annoying, because the characters who would normally be outside quite understandably aren't (even minor NPCs are mostly removed from the map), and they don't have alternate indoor locations.
From an audiovisual standpoint, Blue Reflection gets the job done. The graphics are never going to be hailed as any sort of technical masterpiece but the art direction is spot on—the feel of Hinako's school as an old, somewhat run-down building is perfect, while the fantastical environments and demons seen in the Common are similarly impressive. The main graphical problem, such as it is, is that character faces don't quite emote right—particularly when someone's supposed to be smiling and has exactly the same face as always.
The soundtrack, meanwhile, is an absolute masterpiece that I have no problems whatsoever with. It makes extremely heavy use of piano, which gives it a very distinctive feel compared to pretty much every other JRPG sountrack I've heard. Where it really gets good, however, is in the Sephira battles. As briefly mentioned above each Sephira has a different version of their theme for each phase, all of which are bangers. They also break away from the game's main musical style and go for a more electronic feel, a very deliberate choice that helps make the Sephirot feel otherworldly.
Blue Reflection's difficulty ranges from low to nonexistent. I only ever found myself in serious danger twice, and only had anyone die once, over the course of my playthrough. This is pretty much entirely because the game gives you a lot of very good tools—by around the halfway point I found that Yuzu had reached the point where she could end a lot of regular random battles in a single hit, and shortly after that Hinako learned an attack that consistently hits 9999 damage with Overdrive boosts regardless of her stats. It was only at the very end of the game that I started running into enemies that could survive that kind of attack, and even then it was only the strongest members of the highest-HP enemy types that could pull it off.
And even they struggled to get turns in, because that AoE Yuzu has? Also has a delay effect.
What I'm saying is that you shouldn't go into Blue Reflection expecting a challenge.
Now, I've put it off long enough so it's time to talk plot. And it's absolutely a mixed bag for a number of reasons.
Let's start off with the bad. First up, this game has a lot of interesting plot ideas that never get used significantly. The idea of the other singularity points mattering at all is brought up exactly once, when Yuzu and Lime mention how one of them got destroyed, then it gets ignored after that. At a few points they bring up Lime trying to manipulate things to get more Fragments at the expense of everything else, but this too is dropped with no resolution. And only five Sephirot actually appear when basic knowledge of what they're doing with them suggests there should be eleven, nothing is made of what might've happened to the other six.
Another major complaint I have about the plotting, and one that's a lot more serious, is the game's treatment of its lesbian characters. See, Blue Reflection is very much a game aimed at the yuribro audience, the kinds of male yuri fans who do shit like demanding a character's little brother be retconned out of existence because he might be close in age to the girls and who actively prefer their f/f couples ambiguous enough to insert themselves into them (That big takeaway from the Kishida interview I mentioned way at the start of this? He mentioned making sure none of the girls had canon relationships in a way that implied it was so male fans could do just that.) This particular demographic tends to be associated with some, uh, less-than-pleasant ideas about girls who are definitely into other girls, and sure enough this game goes well beyond the usual not having male characters outside of the girls' age range (in this case there's exactly two male characters with speaking roles, one of whom is never seen onscreen and the other of whom is the final boss) and not comfirming things one way or the other and does something particularly heinous with the characters who are confirmed to be lesbian.
So, one of the friends Hinako makes is named Shihori, and she very very unambiguously loves Hinako. How is she going to be portrayed, you ask? Well, her character story is about her trying to convince Hinako to swap underwear with her. Let me repeat that. Her entire character story, the sidequest you do specifically to learn more about her, is about how she wants to wear Hinako's panties. Oh, and it culminates in a sequence where she steals them while they're at the pool and, after Hinako drags her back to the changing room, starts groping her with no attempt to get even the most dubious of consent and with obvious intent to go further. And then she goes rampant from sheer horny.
There's exactly one other character explicitly confirmed as lesbian in the game, and she's a never-shown member of the track team who hides a camera in their locker room.
Meanwhile when the possibility that an unseen male character might be a sexual predator is raised it's explicitly said to be a misunderstanding.
I'm not saying this pattern was intentional, but I am saying there's a pretty fucking clear lack of care taken to avoid what are ultimately some absolutely dreadful implications. It's not like it's even something you have to go out of your way to find, either—two of these incidents are mandatory and the third is in the character stories you're going to be doing anyway. And if a cishet guy like me can spot it a mile away, anyone can.
There. Absolute worst thing about the game discussed. Now for other stuff.
Not that we're out of the woods when it comes to complaints yet, mind you. I also have to talk about the localization. It's, uh, in need of at least two or three more editing passes, that's the diplomatic way to put it. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if the editor barely got enough time to ensure consistency, much less clean the script up. Typos aren't common so much as ubiquitous, and there are plenty of cases where Lime's name is still written as "Raimu". Two different types of "penalty in exchange for more power" Fragments have their descriptions bungled to the point where they say you get the penalty instead of more power. The game spells the name of the Sephira Tiphereth three different ways between its first encounter version, its second encounter version, and the unlockable art gallery. And then there's the rap battle that happens in one character story, which is rendered completely fucking incomprehensible.
So there's definitely plenty to hate about the game's story and writing. What's there to like, then?
Well, the characters who aren't shitty stereotypes are pretty entertaining, for one, and the character stories other than Shihori's are generally solid enough. The real winner in terms of character interactions is the chat segments, though—they're fun, good at getting the cast's personalities across, and honestly the best-localized part of the game.
And the core theme of the story, that of learning to move on when things go wrong, is extremely well-supported. As the game goes on we see Hinako gradually go from being more concerned with getting to dance again to developing a new life that isn't necessarily tied up in ballet. Then there's the story of former track team partners Rika and Kaori—while Rika's certainly disappointed that Kaori quit, she ultimately accepts her decision and they're able to remain friends. The character story for boadcast club member Ako also touches on this, when her streaming venture goes wrong and ends up hurting her friends but she finds a way to patch things up with them and move forward.
And then there's how this theme plays into the finale. Obviously my discussion of this is gonna have major spoilers so consider yourself warned about that.
The game's final act opens with the revelation that no, Yuzu and Lime were lying about there being a wish at the end of all this and Hinako won't actually be able to have her leg healed. As you can probably guess she doesn't take this very well but with some encouragement she's able to get past it and accept the idea of permanently giving up on ballet, since the new friends she's made have given her a new purpose.
That's when she finds out that Yuzu and Lime died a year ago, can only appear thanks to the power of the Common, and will disappear forever when everything's over. And the world will be rewound to before the conflict started, so everyone will forget them.
That is what breaks Hinako, and when the last remaining Sephira attacks she can't bring herself to kill it, lest she give up the friends who are now more important to her than anything.
Except she can't not kill it, because every time it attacks the lives of those friends are at stake, and she can't just ignore it because if it gets through then everyone dies. And I don't just mean everyone at the school, either. It turns out that Reflectors and the Common were created by another Sephira as weapons in an endlessly repeating conflict over who gets to reshape the world in their image, so if Hinako loses you can imagine said final Sephira won't have anything good in story for humanity.
It's absolutely a shitty situation for Hinako to be stuck in, and the segment right before the end starts with her unsure of whether she's willing to fight.
Then you get to go around and talk to all of Hinako's friends, and you find that they're just as torn up about it as she is. They're all trying to cope in their own way, but they feel the same pain that Hinako does and all of them do what they can to try and encourage her. This whole sequence is Blue Reflection's storytelling at its best and I'll admit to tearing up multiple times during it.
And in the end, Hinako chooses to fight. It's tragic, but in the end she knows she can move on.
Of course the game has to have a unique final boss, and since you fight all the Sephirot at least once before killing them this doesn't count. So it's not over yet. Daath, the Sephira behind the Common and Reflectors, shows up, declares that his experiment in making life easier for humans to give them stronger bonds has failed because of how long it took to kill the other Sephirot, and starts making everyone vanish in preparation for merging them into a single consciousness.
Naturally, Hinako immediately decides this is bullshit and that if that's how it's going to be she'll just fight Daath too. And when he warns her that killing him will just make things suck when another Sephira shows up, she reminds him that she doesn't need to do that—she can always repel him instead. And so Daath accepts her challenge, agreeing to stop his plan if she wins. There's a sequel out as I write this, so I don't think I need to elaborate on who comes out on top.
I have mixed feelings about this final boss because on the one hand it's a cool moment and the fight itself is fun enough, but on the other it feels extremely close to the setup for Ar tonelico 2's final battle and there is no way anyone's gonna upstage that. Also, it doesn't really match the theme of the game and feels like it's just there to have a cool RPG final boss.
Anyway, Hinako stops Daath's plan, and it turns out that there really is no way to save Yuzu and Lime. But it also turns out that there really was a wish at the end after all, which Hinako uses to keep her memories. Because by that point, the good times she's had are a hell of a lot more important to her than ballet ever was.
So, that's Blue Reflection. Mechanically nothing special, with a few unique takes on the formula that don't really change how it functions as an RPG. Sidequests range from interesting character development to mindless tedium with a side order of one of the worst things you could possibly do with an LGBTQ character. The story falters a fair bit and doesn't explore a lot of its potential but does manage to stick the landing pretty well when it comes to treating its core theme with respect. The visuals are beautifully designed but poorly implemented, while the soundtrack is nothing but hits. Overall there's good there, but I don't think it's worth sitting through the bad. Of course, I already did so that's more an observation for other people.
So, this is a magical girl RPG from Gust, which given their usual output isn't exactly a stretch. The idea for it came from Mel Kishida, the character designer for the Arland-era Atelier games, who shortly after the game came out did an interview where he talked about wanting to experience life as a high school girl in a way that I distincctly recall producing a non-zero amount of controversy (the big thing I remember is actually related to my biggest criticism of the game, so we'll get to that later).
As the story starts we're introduced to our protagonist, a girl named Hinako Shirai who was a ballet prodigy right up intil she got a knee injury that permanently destroyed her ability to dance. They really drive home the point that ballet was her entire life and losing it has left her completely broken, which leaves the early parts of the game feeling extremely bleak in a way that you don't really see in a lot of games. Like, normally when video games go for bleak they do it in the Dark Souls "everything is fucked" style but this is more bleak in the sense of "I have lost everything and can only go through the motions of life" and let me tell you, that hits completely different.
Anyway, magical girl stuff starts happening very quickly: Hinako runs into a middle school classmate who admired her and starts behaving very strangely, she gets pulled into another dimension, voices in her head tell her how to use a magic ring she is now inexplicably wearing to transform, and she fights a demon before absorbing a physical manifestation of the aforementioned classmate's emotions into herself. Then she heads to class and runs into the two girls whose voices she heard.
So, what's going on here?
Well, the alternate dimension Hinako ended up in is called the Common, and it's made up of people's emotions. Individual emotions manifest in it as crystals called Fragments. Normally they disappear when the emotion subsides but sometimes they go rampant, causing the person experiencing the emotion sort of get stuck on it and making the Fragment associated with it stick around. Over time or due to demon attacks, Fragments that have gone rampant can be destroyed, which is harmful if it happens enough. Hinako has become a Reflector, which is what the game calls the magical girls who can enter the Common and stabilize Fragments so that doesn't happen. This is beneficial for the Reflectors too, because they need the energy emotions give off (called Ether) to do their thing and Fragments are the best source of it.
Also, the two girls who spoke to Hinako and are her classmates are named Yuzu and Lime Shijou, and they're also Reflectors.
Oh, but Reflectors aren't just there to stabilize Fragments. Their real purpose is to fight the Sephirot, monsters who try to destroy the Common via the 22 singularity points around the world (of which we only see the one, of course). If a Sephira breaches one of these points, everyone there dies. If all of them are lost, Bad Things happen. When fighting the Sephirot, Hinako and her friends also get help from everyone whose Fragments they've obtained, who are able to help when most people can't even move during a Sephira attack because they receive rings like the ones the Reflectors wear.
So, what's in it for the Reflectors? As Yuzu and Lime put it, they get one wish if they beat all the Sephirot. Naturally, Hinako plans to use hers to fix her knee so she can dance again.
And so the formula is set: Hinako goes about her life, meeting her fellow students and stabilizing their Fragments when they inevitably go rampant, and every so often a Sephira attacks and she and her friends have to fight it off. Between that, you get free time segments.
So that's the setup. Now for how the game plays.
Most of how Blue Reflection plays is familiar territory, really. During battles you've got a bar on top of the screen that shows action order, with your team on the left and the enemies on the right. Character icons move towards the center of the bar, and whenever one reaches it the associated character gets to do stuff. So far, so standard. When your turn happens you get attack and support skills on their own menus, along with an Ether Charge option that regenerates MP and raises your Ether meter. The Ether meter is used for a handful of skills, but it mostly fuels the Overdrive option, which lets you do multiple skills in one turn with each getting more powerful and less expensive than the last. This is also how you use the ultimate attacks you get in the late game, which happen automatically at the end of a level 3 Overdrive.
So far you're probably thinking that this sounds like a really run-of-the-mill battle system, and you'd be right, but there is one more trick to it: you get abilities you can use between turns. There's four of these: a heal for both HP and MP, a guard that works better if you use it at just the right time (though I couldn't make it work), a variant of the aforementioned heal that affects supporters instead (we'll get to supporters in a bit), and an option labelled "Timeline" that speeds up your turns and slows down enemy turns. All of these drain Ether faster than one character charging will restore it, with the last one naturally costing the most since fucking with the action economy is Just That Good.
Battles against Sephirot have a handful of extra things to consider. First are those supporters I mentioned before, who are all the friends whose Fragments you've stabilized. They build up MP over time and use it to follow up your actions with their own skills (which are worth using even if you don't need them because they give you some free Ether). Second, all Sephira fights have adds that will use their turns to regenerate if they're destroyed but will otherwise just attack. Destroying them also debuffs the Sephira, and they come back with less HP. Third, every Sephira battle has multiple phases and to be absolutely sure that you see each phase's special animation and hear its neat battle theme variant, the Sephira starts each phase with the maximum possible HP for that phase no matter how much damage the attack that pushed it over the edge did.
(The real annoying thing about this is that the phase transition erases your timecard-based attacks and stops your Ether Charges, BTW.)
The most actually unusual thing about the game mechanics is how you get stronger, though. See, you don't level up from fighting. At all. Instead, as you go through the game you get growth points, each of which is worth one level. You get four options to invest your points in and when they hit certain milestones you learn new skills (though you also get skills just from leveling up). There's also the matter of those Fragments you spend the game collecting, which you attach to your skills to power them up. Each skill has 1-3 Fragment slots, with the better ones naturally having fewer. There's a lot of different abilities you can get from Fragments—some make your skills do more damage or heal more, some let your support skills buff allies (hint: put these on your AoE heals), some just increase character stats without affecting the skill itself and thus should be kept on skills you won't use much, and so forth.
Ultimately the battle system isn't especially inspired, but it gets the job done if you're okay with Gust combat. The really interesting part, and the part that I feel will make or break the game for most people, is the free time mechanics.
So, free time gives drops you into Hinako's school to build relationships with the other characters, do sidequests, and generally just hang out. You're given a list of missions that have specific point values and told you need a certain number of points to advance, but the game doesn't really want you to rush through it. You certainly can, but what the game really wants you to do is take your time and just live out Hinako's life. They even give you an entire in-universe social media section, with chatrooms and stuff to read and a music player and even a simple minigame associated with it, that has no mechanical rewards and just exists for fun.
For those of you looking for more tangible rewards, though, hanging out with Hinako's friends is always an option. See, all of the twelve supporters have their own secondary events that have continuing stories and additional Fragments you can get out of them. The stories are gated partly by plot progression but mostly by affection, which is raised both by choosing the right dialogue options and hanging out with them after school. The latter is actually fairly interesting, because everyone has a list of places Hinako will take them and unique (and sometimes fairly interesting) dialogue for all of them. This is how you get the vast, vast majority of the Fragments in the game, which also tend to have more interesting effects than the mandatory ones. You also get growth points from hanging out with friends, tracked via an item you receive that you get points for having enough of. This is important because it translates to a total of 20 (count 'em!) levels if you max it out, which will happen way before you're done getting Fragments.
Also: whenever you invite a friend somewhere, after a few of their Fragment events, and any other time you decide to do so, you go home. Here you're given the opportunity to prepare for the next day (which gets you minor stat boosts if you make the right choices) or take a bath (handled in a surprisingly non-fanservicey way considering everything) before another day starts. There's no time limit to worry about—the Sephirot will wait exactly as long as it takes for you to choose to advance the plot.
Missions, meanwhile, are generally extremely samey and not especially interesting. Most of them involve finding a generic student who's gone rampant, heading into the Common, and either killing a specific enemy type or grabbing a bunch of random pickups. There's also missions that involve making specific items with the crafting system and bringing them to someone, and some oddball ones where you have to do specific things in battle or visit specific parts of the school. Your reward is typically items that provide permanent stat upgrades or new item recipes.
Oh yeah, this game has item creation too. Very uninspired and one-dimensional "spending things on things"-type item creation, but it is there. The same menu is also used to enhance Fragments, making their effects better. But there's really not much to the system.
One last thing about free time: rainy days. Rain happens on random days and when it does going outside will get Hinako's clothes drenched to the point where you can see through her shirt. There's an impressive amount of effort put into this feature that people are going to see as bizarre at best and downright creepy at worst, with multiple different levels of soaked-ness that are visually distinct enough to notice and consideration for characters who wear vests. Once the novelty wears off, though, rainy days end up being just plain annoying, because the characters who would normally be outside quite understandably aren't (even minor NPCs are mostly removed from the map), and they don't have alternate indoor locations.
From an audiovisual standpoint, Blue Reflection gets the job done. The graphics are never going to be hailed as any sort of technical masterpiece but the art direction is spot on—the feel of Hinako's school as an old, somewhat run-down building is perfect, while the fantastical environments and demons seen in the Common are similarly impressive. The main graphical problem, such as it is, is that character faces don't quite emote right—particularly when someone's supposed to be smiling and has exactly the same face as always.
The soundtrack, meanwhile, is an absolute masterpiece that I have no problems whatsoever with. It makes extremely heavy use of piano, which gives it a very distinctive feel compared to pretty much every other JRPG sountrack I've heard. Where it really gets good, however, is in the Sephira battles. As briefly mentioned above each Sephira has a different version of their theme for each phase, all of which are bangers. They also break away from the game's main musical style and go for a more electronic feel, a very deliberate choice that helps make the Sephirot feel otherworldly.
Blue Reflection's difficulty ranges from low to nonexistent. I only ever found myself in serious danger twice, and only had anyone die once, over the course of my playthrough. This is pretty much entirely because the game gives you a lot of very good tools—by around the halfway point I found that Yuzu had reached the point where she could end a lot of regular random battles in a single hit, and shortly after that Hinako learned an attack that consistently hits 9999 damage with Overdrive boosts regardless of her stats. It was only at the very end of the game that I started running into enemies that could survive that kind of attack, and even then it was only the strongest members of the highest-HP enemy types that could pull it off.
And even they struggled to get turns in, because that AoE Yuzu has? Also has a delay effect.
What I'm saying is that you shouldn't go into Blue Reflection expecting a challenge.
Now, I've put it off long enough so it's time to talk plot. And it's absolutely a mixed bag for a number of reasons.
Let's start off with the bad. First up, this game has a lot of interesting plot ideas that never get used significantly. The idea of the other singularity points mattering at all is brought up exactly once, when Yuzu and Lime mention how one of them got destroyed, then it gets ignored after that. At a few points they bring up Lime trying to manipulate things to get more Fragments at the expense of everything else, but this too is dropped with no resolution. And only five Sephirot actually appear when basic knowledge of what they're doing with them suggests there should be eleven, nothing is made of what might've happened to the other six.
Another major complaint I have about the plotting, and one that's a lot more serious, is the game's treatment of its lesbian characters. See, Blue Reflection is very much a game aimed at the yuribro audience, the kinds of male yuri fans who do shit like demanding a character's little brother be retconned out of existence because he might be close in age to the girls and who actively prefer their f/f couples ambiguous enough to insert themselves into them (That big takeaway from the Kishida interview I mentioned way at the start of this? He mentioned making sure none of the girls had canon relationships in a way that implied it was so male fans could do just that.) This particular demographic tends to be associated with some, uh, less-than-pleasant ideas about girls who are definitely into other girls, and sure enough this game goes well beyond the usual not having male characters outside of the girls' age range (in this case there's exactly two male characters with speaking roles, one of whom is never seen onscreen and the other of whom is the final boss) and not comfirming things one way or the other and does something particularly heinous with the characters who are confirmed to be lesbian.
So, one of the friends Hinako makes is named Shihori, and she very very unambiguously loves Hinako. How is she going to be portrayed, you ask? Well, her character story is about her trying to convince Hinako to swap underwear with her. Let me repeat that. Her entire character story, the sidequest you do specifically to learn more about her, is about how she wants to wear Hinako's panties. Oh, and it culminates in a sequence where she steals them while they're at the pool and, after Hinako drags her back to the changing room, starts groping her with no attempt to get even the most dubious of consent and with obvious intent to go further. And then she goes rampant from sheer horny.
There's exactly one other character explicitly confirmed as lesbian in the game, and she's a never-shown member of the track team who hides a camera in their locker room.
Meanwhile when the possibility that an unseen male character might be a sexual predator is raised it's explicitly said to be a misunderstanding.
I'm not saying this pattern was intentional, but I am saying there's a pretty fucking clear lack of care taken to avoid what are ultimately some absolutely dreadful implications. It's not like it's even something you have to go out of your way to find, either—two of these incidents are mandatory and the third is in the character stories you're going to be doing anyway. And if a cishet guy like me can spot it a mile away, anyone can.
There. Absolute worst thing about the game discussed. Now for other stuff.
Not that we're out of the woods when it comes to complaints yet, mind you. I also have to talk about the localization. It's, uh, in need of at least two or three more editing passes, that's the diplomatic way to put it. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if the editor barely got enough time to ensure consistency, much less clean the script up. Typos aren't common so much as ubiquitous, and there are plenty of cases where Lime's name is still written as "Raimu". Two different types of "penalty in exchange for more power" Fragments have their descriptions bungled to the point where they say you get the penalty instead of more power. The game spells the name of the Sephira Tiphereth three different ways between its first encounter version, its second encounter version, and the unlockable art gallery. And then there's the rap battle that happens in one character story, which is rendered completely fucking incomprehensible.
So there's definitely plenty to hate about the game's story and writing. What's there to like, then?
Well, the characters who aren't shitty stereotypes are pretty entertaining, for one, and the character stories other than Shihori's are generally solid enough. The real winner in terms of character interactions is the chat segments, though—they're fun, good at getting the cast's personalities across, and honestly the best-localized part of the game.
And the core theme of the story, that of learning to move on when things go wrong, is extremely well-supported. As the game goes on we see Hinako gradually go from being more concerned with getting to dance again to developing a new life that isn't necessarily tied up in ballet. Then there's the story of former track team partners Rika and Kaori—while Rika's certainly disappointed that Kaori quit, she ultimately accepts her decision and they're able to remain friends. The character story for boadcast club member Ako also touches on this, when her streaming venture goes wrong and ends up hurting her friends but she finds a way to patch things up with them and move forward.
And then there's how this theme plays into the finale. Obviously my discussion of this is gonna have major spoilers so consider yourself warned about that.
The game's final act opens with the revelation that no, Yuzu and Lime were lying about there being a wish at the end of all this and Hinako won't actually be able to have her leg healed. As you can probably guess she doesn't take this very well but with some encouragement she's able to get past it and accept the idea of permanently giving up on ballet, since the new friends she's made have given her a new purpose.
That's when she finds out that Yuzu and Lime died a year ago, can only appear thanks to the power of the Common, and will disappear forever when everything's over. And the world will be rewound to before the conflict started, so everyone will forget them.
That is what breaks Hinako, and when the last remaining Sephira attacks she can't bring herself to kill it, lest she give up the friends who are now more important to her than anything.
Except she can't not kill it, because every time it attacks the lives of those friends are at stake, and she can't just ignore it because if it gets through then everyone dies. And I don't just mean everyone at the school, either. It turns out that Reflectors and the Common were created by another Sephira as weapons in an endlessly repeating conflict over who gets to reshape the world in their image, so if Hinako loses you can imagine said final Sephira won't have anything good in story for humanity.
It's absolutely a shitty situation for Hinako to be stuck in, and the segment right before the end starts with her unsure of whether she's willing to fight.
Then you get to go around and talk to all of Hinako's friends, and you find that they're just as torn up about it as she is. They're all trying to cope in their own way, but they feel the same pain that Hinako does and all of them do what they can to try and encourage her. This whole sequence is Blue Reflection's storytelling at its best and I'll admit to tearing up multiple times during it.
And in the end, Hinako chooses to fight. It's tragic, but in the end she knows she can move on.
Of course the game has to have a unique final boss, and since you fight all the Sephirot at least once before killing them this doesn't count. So it's not over yet. Daath, the Sephira behind the Common and Reflectors, shows up, declares that his experiment in making life easier for humans to give them stronger bonds has failed because of how long it took to kill the other Sephirot, and starts making everyone vanish in preparation for merging them into a single consciousness.
Naturally, Hinako immediately decides this is bullshit and that if that's how it's going to be she'll just fight Daath too. And when he warns her that killing him will just make things suck when another Sephira shows up, she reminds him that she doesn't need to do that—she can always repel him instead. And so Daath accepts her challenge, agreeing to stop his plan if she wins. There's a sequel out as I write this, so I don't think I need to elaborate on who comes out on top.
I have mixed feelings about this final boss because on the one hand it's a cool moment and the fight itself is fun enough, but on the other it feels extremely close to the setup for Ar tonelico 2's final battle and there is no way anyone's gonna upstage that. Also, it doesn't really match the theme of the game and feels like it's just there to have a cool RPG final boss.
Anyway, Hinako stops Daath's plan, and it turns out that there really is no way to save Yuzu and Lime. But it also turns out that there really was a wish at the end after all, which Hinako uses to keep her memories. Because by that point, the good times she's had are a hell of a lot more important to her than ballet ever was.
So, that's Blue Reflection. Mechanically nothing special, with a few unique takes on the formula that don't really change how it functions as an RPG. Sidequests range from interesting character development to mindless tedium with a side order of one of the worst things you could possibly do with an LGBTQ character. The story falters a fair bit and doesn't explore a lot of its potential but does manage to stick the landing pretty well when it comes to treating its core theme with respect. The visuals are beautifully designed but poorly implemented, while the soundtrack is nothing but hits. Overall there's good there, but I don't think it's worth sitting through the bad. Of course, I already did so that's more an observation for other people.
