Blue Reflection Quartet Review – Review
For how iconic magical girls have been in anime over the years, from Cutie Honey to Sailor Moon to Pretty Cure to Puella Magi Madoka Magica, they have been woefully underrepresented in video games, especially in the JRPG genre. As someone who fell in love with Sailor Moon as a child and then discovered as many magical girl properties as I could get my hands on, this has been a massive oversight for the genre. For a long time the only options were Japan exclusive RPG adaptations of Sailor Moon and Magical Knight Rayearth, but in 2017 the developer Gust released the first Blue Reflection game, which takes magical girls to games. Nine years later, Gust has released Blue Reflection Quartet, a collection of four Blue Reflection titles, including some newly available in English.
The first game in this collection is the original Blue Reflection, which more than anything felt like a proof of concept to me while playing. In it you play as Hinako, a girl who formerly danced ballet at a high level but due to an injury needed to stop. She then meets two girls at her school, Yuzu and Lime, who introduce her to being a magical girl. Magical girls, known as reflectors in the game, fight in the Common, a shared world of the human subconscious. This leads to a gameplay loop that I often thought of as, in lack of a better term, Persona-lite. The story usually starts with Hinako at school and taking on quests which are usually related to a classmate’s troubles or issues. Hinako, Yuzu, and Lime go into the Common, fight in turn based combat and find items, and then go back to the real world to fix these problems, which then gets you a fragment, an item that can customize attacks.
The fragment system is one of the things that I found to be most fun to play around with in Blue Reflection, as it’s tied with increasing bonds with characters but allows for some fun customization. For example, I added a generate MP fragment to the standard attack of the character I used MP from the most, so when I ran out and needed to use the most basic attack it would get more MP. I also used a passive health drain fragment on my most used area of effect attack.This was a nice system. I also like how character focused this all is, getting to know characters was tied to upgrading your combat. I think ultimately it felt a lot more repetitive than I would have liked. I enjoyed my time with it, but a lot of the character stories felt light. The missions were also pretty repetitive, and usually ended up being going to an area of the Common, fight a few things, and then that’s the end of it. The Common is usually pretty uninspired, though the general atmosphere and music is very good. I think more than anything I just wished for it getting a few better missions, some better design in the combat arenas, and more stakes to the personal drama (the overarching stakes are very high, but then you are helping a character get the confidence to say something to her crush). It feels like a game that, perhaps in other hands, could be one of my favorites but ultimately ends up not quite getting there.
The next “game” in this collection is the adaptation of the anime Blue Reflection Ray, and I think my scare quotes around game show just what I think of it. It’s really disappointing that one of the new elements for this collection is this inconsequential. This is telling the story of the anime through flashbacks and anime screenshots. That’s it. There is no combat, there is no real gameplay between running in game from flashback to flashback. If you loved the anime and want to see some 3D models of the characters, this might be nice? But otherwise this feels like the worst possible way to experience this story, and feels like it was cobbled together to just say they included an adaptation of the anime in this collection. At a certain point I skipped all the scenes just so I could see if there was any game here or even a battle at the end I could interact with. Nope.
The third game in the collection is Blue Reflection Sun, an adaptation of a mobile game in the series that was only available in Japan. In it you play as the only male protagonist in the series who moves to a new school to lead a team of Eroded, magical girls who developed magical abilities by mutation due to the ash that fell that is threatening the world. This is told via cutscenes and some battles, without much in between other than being able to run around the school as the main protagonist. It’s more than Blue Reflection Ray, but also feels like a cobbled together inclusion. This feels more necessary since Sun was never released in English and has since been shut down in Japan, but it also feels like a missed opportunity. There are no real choices to RPG mechanics beyond which characters you are fighting with, no strategy beyond the moment to moment instances in the battles, which use the Blue Reflection Second Light system. The story and characters are interesting, and I enjoyed the character designs of the Eroded, but this feels a bit slapdash and like they knew they wanted to include the story of Sun in this product with the minimal amount of work.
The last game in this collection is Blue Reflection Second Light, and man they really did leave the best for last because this feels like an evolution from the first Blue Reflection game and one that I really have enjoyed. You play as Ao, a girl who goes to school and finds herself suddenly in another world where the school is surrounded by water. There are other girls there who have lost their memories, and now Ao is looking to find her way home. This feels like an upgrade in almost every way. The setting is interesting, with Ao looking for a way home being a great hook. There is also a lot more tied to exploring, because the areas where you fight and gather items are directly tied to a specific character on your team’s memories. There is also a lot more customization, including crafting of items, upgrading facilities around the school, etc. Increasing bonds and doing quests for characters is still one way to upgrade your characters for combat, but the focus is now on the characters on your team so there is more of an emotional hook. The combat system is also interesting – instead of having MP your characters are constantly gathering ether during a fight, which you then can choose to use as you please. Want to hoard a ton of it so you can attack multiple times in a row? Sure, but then you’re still getting attacked on and again. Blue Reflection Second Light is a genuinely really great game, and felt like something I felt almost shocked to experience. It makes me want another in this series, to see if Gust can continue to upgrade on these main console titles.
At their core, Blue Reflection and Blue Reflection Second Light are two solid JRPGs. I preferred Second Light but really, both are interesting enough games that I’d recommend them to JRPG fans who have already played similar titles. The first one is flawed but interesting while the second sands out a lot of these issues, but I don’t think ever achieves the heights of what JRPGs or even Gust can do. However, the shame here is with Ray and Sun being included in the states they are in. I get wanting to include these, so that this is a more complete collection, but it soured my experience with this collection. Ultimately I’m glad I got to experience the two console games but wish that the other two pieces to this Quartet were given more attention.
