Blue Reflection, a new RPG title from Gust Studios, puts the player in the shoes of Hinako Shirai, a seemingly normal high school girl who gains the mysterious power of a Reflector, a champion able to manipulate the dimension known as The Common. Follow her story as she creates new bonds and gain new strength as she fights through dangers of The Common.
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really could have used a little more love - probably the worst pass at script editing i have ever seen from a game released professionally within my lifetime - but the music is great and the emotional beats resonate well enough despite their simplicity. give us more magical girl games
The soundtrack is by far the best aspect of the game. It's one of the greatest things I've ever heard.
The story hit in places I never expected and the writing was pretty genuine for the most part.
Unfortunately, the gameplay feels like an unfinished tech demo, so if depth is what you're looking for, it's not here.
If you can get past that, there is a wholesome yet emotional story you'd expect from any other Mahou Shoujo media, backed by a stellar OST.
The story hit in places I never expected and the writing was pretty genuine for the most part.
Unfortunately, the gameplay feels like an unfinished tech demo, so if depth is what you're looking for, it's not here.
If you can get past that, there is a wholesome yet emotional story you'd expect from any other Mahou Shoujo media, backed by a stellar OST.
It's normal for girls
I’m one of those Caligula Effect 2 people. Sick game. We love a low budget RPG with best in genre writing and a battle system based on juggling dudes and trans characters who actually read like human people. Couldn’t tell you shit about Caligula Effect 1. I know it’s widely reviled, and that even though I have a lot of friends who have played it only one of them actually likes it and she does a really bad job of selling it any time it comes up so I probably am not gonna look into it further. Blue Reflection is kind of a similar thing, where it was kind of on my radar as a long time fan of its developer, but I only knew it as the unlocalized vita game for perverts that I always confused with the gacha game on phones for perverts, Blue Archive. But then suddenly BR2 came out and all my friends played it and they were like yo this shit rocks this shit is incredible. And I was like damn ok dope what about that first one I see its PS4 rerelease got localized and everyone is like don’t worry that one sucks ass. Just play 2.
However in the intervening years I’ve fully become a “do media in release order” bitch so BR 1 it is and I really went in expecting the worst and given that mindset I was so pleasantly surprised. It’s not that this isn’t a game for perverts because certainly it is, deeply. But the creep shit in this game is simultaneously so present and also so incidental, so just kind of irrelevant to anything happening except that it’s there too, it very quickly kind of washed over me. Never not chafing but almost always accompanied by a game that, when I let it in, revealed itself to be more thoughtful, more economical, and more tightly constructed than it seemed at first glance.
Blue Reflection follows Hinako Shirai, a teenaged ballet dancer at the top of her game who has suffered a catastrophic injury that has left her able to walk but fully unable to exercise at all beyond a light jog, let alone continue her ballet career, which she had until now dedicated her life entirely to. She was good at it. She had a future. It was her passion. Gone. And she’s fifteen. So Hinako is experiencing the midlife ennui of a person mourning their life at an unfortunately early age, she’s entering her fancy school late in the semester due to her intensive physical therapy, in the regular program, not the scholarship program for gifted students that she was accepted into because her gift has been taken from her, and she’s depressed, and she’s ashamed, and she’s kept her circumstances as secret as she can.
This is the person that mysterious magical girls Yuzu and Lime intentionally target to enlist in their secret war against the Sephirot, ancient beings in competition to remake the world to their desired image, while the magical girl Reflectors fight to preserve humanity from within the Common, a realm of collective unconscious that manifests itself based on the heightened emotions of the people unlucky enough to find themselves in the vicinity of the Sephirot, like the people as Hinako’s school. Once she’s been roped into the scheme with the promise that if they win she’ll get one wish granted (she will wish for the returned use of her leg, obviously) and accepted her mantle as the point man Reflector of their little team, the shape of the game emerges, where each chapter is centered around one of the girls’ classmates going through some emotional crisis and the girls entering her brainspace to stabilize her feelings via the combo powers of beating up monsters and also Hinako learning to empathize with people. The literal power of friendship. Occasionally a fifteen story tall tank made of meat or something will roll in and try to level the school but this only happens like nine times.
All of this could come off as very rote, and because it’s a Vita game clearly designed with a handheld stop and go philosophy in mind, stories are relatively thin and their volume is high instead. Most chapters will have a girl be introduced in one scene, there will be a second scene where her problem is explained and she freaks out, there’s a very brief dungeon crawl in her brain, and then the resolution is an equally short cutscene. Then, between chapters there are periods of side questing and Persona-esque social linking for as long as you want before you opt into the next story events. Only maybe four of the twelve supporting characters factor into the story in a big way after their introductory chapter, so how well you get to know these characters is entirely up to you, and I wouldn’t say all of them are even worth getting to know. Maybe half? But with fifteen main characters I’d say half is a pretty good hit rate for interesting guys.
The glue here is Hinako herself. One of my favorite recent video game protagonists, she’s the only person who doesn’t realize that she’s in a story about the power of friendship. Or rather, she isn’t convinced that that’s a thing that is worth making all that big of a fuss over. Hinako is depressed, and short tempered, and inarticulate. She can barely find it in herself to be civil with almost anyone on a good day if whatever they’re saying doesn’t hold her interest, but she has good reason to be pissed off. People are needling her constantly: volunteering her for extracurricular activities without her consent, needling her about her absences, joking with her about her leg, pestering her Not To Give Up The Dream Of Ballet, bullying and then bribing her to be a superhero against her will when she’d really rather just be left alone. NOBODY will leave her alone, and nobody really tries to understand why she’s not happy to be treated like she should be happy or plucky.
Of course the story won’t let her be this way for long, not entirely, and her job does require her to understand and empathize with other people in order to help them heal emotionally, something that is challenging for her, because she’s not healed emotionally herself. But eventually she comes around enough to want to be for other people what she isn’t getting. “I want to understand her better” is a line that starts popping up over and over in the back half of the game, even when she backslides, even when she lashes out, even when she’s challenged by people who hate her and when she’s most vulnerable and when she feels betrayed by people she thought she trusted.
It’s okay that the immediate stories of the supporting cast are so thin because all of them feed back to Hinako’s interiority, and this story is so intensely focused on her growth from someone who is isolated and apathetic to someone who Gets It and wants to be the person who helps other people Get It, even when everything else is in pieces.
Because Blue Reflection understands how being a teenager can be such a deeply isolating experience, that this is a feeling so many of us carry around when we’re that age, and that it can manifest in a lot of ways and in so many circumstances. Every girl in the game is going through their own shit but almost all of them are really just experiencing a loneliness or a fear of loneliness that they don’t know how to get out from underneath. Hinako knows this better than anyone because the stakes of her situation aren’t reversible, which puts her in a position to relate to everyone easily but also use the experience of helping them to figure out how to cope with her own issues.
This is all enhanced by the structure and style of the game. While there are obvious stylistic cues from the Persona 3 school of anime teenager games in terms of the social link-esque systems that drive the side content, Blue Reflection strategically has no time management feature and no expendable resources that limit the way you interact with the cast or the world. As long as you don’t choose to advance the story, you can live out as many days as you want between chapters. You can max out your friendship with everybody, take your time doing those sidequests, spend your leisure in the Common grinding out materials for crafting. An endless malaise of this dreamlike, dissociative routine, cutting everything but the stuff than anchors you: no school, no adults, no travel, shit dude, no transitions between animation poses. Only the thick haze of the summer afternoons, locked forever into the twilight hour of a sunset so dense you can’t see people on the roof if you catch them at the wrong angle, slowly gliding through the hallways to the softly ethereal piano-led edm that never stops, just tinkling away through every moment of the game.
This malaise is so hard to break out of, but Hinako learns to, slowly. I think the power of friendship gets a lot of hate as like, a concept, but it’s good, it’s a good thing to hitch a story to, you just have to do the work. Blue Reflection does that work. It becomes meaningful when the person who utilizes the Power Of Friendship to battle gods and shit has to do a lot of work on herself and with herself and others to empathize with other people and reach out to them actively, even though she is loathe to do it. It’s not nothing. Throughout the game Hinako is doing this stuff but she’s also being used, manipulated, lied to, and betrayed, in cruel ways, ways that cut to the most vulnerable parts of her, by people who mean a lot to her because of her experiences as a Reflector. This doesn’t come out all at once, but unfolds, small revelations unwinding over the course of the back half of the game, and it means more for her to choose to love and to protect other people anyway when she thinks she will come out the loser for it than it would if Hinako was a plucky character who believed in hard work and like, enjoyed other people’s company lol.
All in all I’d say I had a great time with Blue Reflection, way better than I thought I would. I even liked the parts where you play it, which most people seem to think are bad too. But given how much I got out of the vibes and the narrative (the game is STRONGLY vibes-based I’m not gonna sugarcoat how much of this clicking has to do with music and visuals hitting heavy) when most people seem to think it’s not worth the bother or like, mediocre at best, maybe I am just built different. Perhaps I am simply the champion of mid RPGs. The world may never know. I do feel like I should clarify though, having not really mentioned it much, that the game is like 75% pervert shit, there is just really no talking around it. It’s nonstop pervert shit, just pervert stuff all the way down. All the good stuff is there too but it’s coated in this layer of pervo nonsense. You just gotta take your lumps sometimes I guess.
Anyway if you’ll excuse me I’m a busy lady I have to go watch a 26 episode Blue Reflection anime that nobody has even heard of that inexplicably got an English dub two years after it came out even though no Gust game has been dubbed for like fifteen years. So I can play the sequel game afterwards. Obviously.
However in the intervening years I’ve fully become a “do media in release order” bitch so BR 1 it is and I really went in expecting the worst and given that mindset I was so pleasantly surprised. It’s not that this isn’t a game for perverts because certainly it is, deeply. But the creep shit in this game is simultaneously so present and also so incidental, so just kind of irrelevant to anything happening except that it’s there too, it very quickly kind of washed over me. Never not chafing but almost always accompanied by a game that, when I let it in, revealed itself to be more thoughtful, more economical, and more tightly constructed than it seemed at first glance.
Blue Reflection follows Hinako Shirai, a teenaged ballet dancer at the top of her game who has suffered a catastrophic injury that has left her able to walk but fully unable to exercise at all beyond a light jog, let alone continue her ballet career, which she had until now dedicated her life entirely to. She was good at it. She had a future. It was her passion. Gone. And she’s fifteen. So Hinako is experiencing the midlife ennui of a person mourning their life at an unfortunately early age, she’s entering her fancy school late in the semester due to her intensive physical therapy, in the regular program, not the scholarship program for gifted students that she was accepted into because her gift has been taken from her, and she’s depressed, and she’s ashamed, and she’s kept her circumstances as secret as she can.
This is the person that mysterious magical girls Yuzu and Lime intentionally target to enlist in their secret war against the Sephirot, ancient beings in competition to remake the world to their desired image, while the magical girl Reflectors fight to preserve humanity from within the Common, a realm of collective unconscious that manifests itself based on the heightened emotions of the people unlucky enough to find themselves in the vicinity of the Sephirot, like the people as Hinako’s school. Once she’s been roped into the scheme with the promise that if they win she’ll get one wish granted (she will wish for the returned use of her leg, obviously) and accepted her mantle as the point man Reflector of their little team, the shape of the game emerges, where each chapter is centered around one of the girls’ classmates going through some emotional crisis and the girls entering her brainspace to stabilize her feelings via the combo powers of beating up monsters and also Hinako learning to empathize with people. The literal power of friendship. Occasionally a fifteen story tall tank made of meat or something will roll in and try to level the school but this only happens like nine times.
All of this could come off as very rote, and because it’s a Vita game clearly designed with a handheld stop and go philosophy in mind, stories are relatively thin and their volume is high instead. Most chapters will have a girl be introduced in one scene, there will be a second scene where her problem is explained and she freaks out, there’s a very brief dungeon crawl in her brain, and then the resolution is an equally short cutscene. Then, between chapters there are periods of side questing and Persona-esque social linking for as long as you want before you opt into the next story events. Only maybe four of the twelve supporting characters factor into the story in a big way after their introductory chapter, so how well you get to know these characters is entirely up to you, and I wouldn’t say all of them are even worth getting to know. Maybe half? But with fifteen main characters I’d say half is a pretty good hit rate for interesting guys.
The glue here is Hinako herself. One of my favorite recent video game protagonists, she’s the only person who doesn’t realize that she’s in a story about the power of friendship. Or rather, she isn’t convinced that that’s a thing that is worth making all that big of a fuss over. Hinako is depressed, and short tempered, and inarticulate. She can barely find it in herself to be civil with almost anyone on a good day if whatever they’re saying doesn’t hold her interest, but she has good reason to be pissed off. People are needling her constantly: volunteering her for extracurricular activities without her consent, needling her about her absences, joking with her about her leg, pestering her Not To Give Up The Dream Of Ballet, bullying and then bribing her to be a superhero against her will when she’d really rather just be left alone. NOBODY will leave her alone, and nobody really tries to understand why she’s not happy to be treated like she should be happy or plucky.
Of course the story won’t let her be this way for long, not entirely, and her job does require her to understand and empathize with other people in order to help them heal emotionally, something that is challenging for her, because she’s not healed emotionally herself. But eventually she comes around enough to want to be for other people what she isn’t getting. “I want to understand her better” is a line that starts popping up over and over in the back half of the game, even when she backslides, even when she lashes out, even when she’s challenged by people who hate her and when she’s most vulnerable and when she feels betrayed by people she thought she trusted.
It’s okay that the immediate stories of the supporting cast are so thin because all of them feed back to Hinako’s interiority, and this story is so intensely focused on her growth from someone who is isolated and apathetic to someone who Gets It and wants to be the person who helps other people Get It, even when everything else is in pieces.
Because Blue Reflection understands how being a teenager can be such a deeply isolating experience, that this is a feeling so many of us carry around when we’re that age, and that it can manifest in a lot of ways and in so many circumstances. Every girl in the game is going through their own shit but almost all of them are really just experiencing a loneliness or a fear of loneliness that they don’t know how to get out from underneath. Hinako knows this better than anyone because the stakes of her situation aren’t reversible, which puts her in a position to relate to everyone easily but also use the experience of helping them to figure out how to cope with her own issues.
This is all enhanced by the structure and style of the game. While there are obvious stylistic cues from the Persona 3 school of anime teenager games in terms of the social link-esque systems that drive the side content, Blue Reflection strategically has no time management feature and no expendable resources that limit the way you interact with the cast or the world. As long as you don’t choose to advance the story, you can live out as many days as you want between chapters. You can max out your friendship with everybody, take your time doing those sidequests, spend your leisure in the Common grinding out materials for crafting. An endless malaise of this dreamlike, dissociative routine, cutting everything but the stuff than anchors you: no school, no adults, no travel, shit dude, no transitions between animation poses. Only the thick haze of the summer afternoons, locked forever into the twilight hour of a sunset so dense you can’t see people on the roof if you catch them at the wrong angle, slowly gliding through the hallways to the softly ethereal piano-led edm that never stops, just tinkling away through every moment of the game.
This malaise is so hard to break out of, but Hinako learns to, slowly. I think the power of friendship gets a lot of hate as like, a concept, but it’s good, it’s a good thing to hitch a story to, you just have to do the work. Blue Reflection does that work. It becomes meaningful when the person who utilizes the Power Of Friendship to battle gods and shit has to do a lot of work on herself and with herself and others to empathize with other people and reach out to them actively, even though she is loathe to do it. It’s not nothing. Throughout the game Hinako is doing this stuff but she’s also being used, manipulated, lied to, and betrayed, in cruel ways, ways that cut to the most vulnerable parts of her, by people who mean a lot to her because of her experiences as a Reflector. This doesn’t come out all at once, but unfolds, small revelations unwinding over the course of the back half of the game, and it means more for her to choose to love and to protect other people anyway when she thinks she will come out the loser for it than it would if Hinako was a plucky character who believed in hard work and like, enjoyed other people’s company lol.
All in all I’d say I had a great time with Blue Reflection, way better than I thought I would. I even liked the parts where you play it, which most people seem to think are bad too. But given how much I got out of the vibes and the narrative (the game is STRONGLY vibes-based I’m not gonna sugarcoat how much of this clicking has to do with music and visuals hitting heavy) when most people seem to think it’s not worth the bother or like, mediocre at best, maybe I am just built different. Perhaps I am simply the champion of mid RPGs. The world may never know. I do feel like I should clarify though, having not really mentioned it much, that the game is like 75% pervert shit, there is just really no talking around it. It’s nonstop pervert shit, just pervert stuff all the way down. All the good stuff is there too but it’s coated in this layer of pervo nonsense. You just gotta take your lumps sometimes I guess.
Anyway if you’ll excuse me I’m a busy lady I have to go watch a 26 episode Blue Reflection anime that nobody has even heard of that inexplicably got an English dub two years after it came out even though no Gust game has been dubbed for like fifteen years. So I can play the sequel game afterwards. Obviously.
i really like the 3 main characters more than i wanted to
Music and the cutscenes were definitely the best part of this game
give this game 20 hours so every character arc has more time and not just 20 minutes or something. make the combat more difficult and it would be so much better
i think it is a pretty decent game. i like it
Music and the cutscenes were definitely the best part of this game
give this game 20 hours so every character arc has more time and not just 20 minutes or something. make the combat more difficult and it would be so much better
i think it is a pretty decent game. i like it
The best part of this game was the music, loved the two main battle themes (OVERDOSE and Contact Material especially).
Character designs were mix (some good some indistinguishable) and the weird 'rain' scenes and shower scenes felt OTT for fanservice (SHIORI especially weirded me out for this).
Overall the story was pretty lackluster, with more time it may have done better but the overall message fell flat when u spend less than 10 minutes per character with NOT MUCH extra development coming after that. OH and Hinako connecting every girl's struggles to Ballet felt a little far stretched sometimes.
The Battle system was interesting but easily broken and felt far too easy even on the most difficult mode sadly...
Will I play the second game? If I wanted to be in pain, maybe... AND THAT PLAT WAS... Painfully slow to get 🤐
Character designs were mix (some good some indistinguishable) and the weird 'rain' scenes and shower scenes felt OTT for fanservice (SHIORI especially weirded me out for this).
Overall the story was pretty lackluster, with more time it may have done better but the overall message fell flat when u spend less than 10 minutes per character with NOT MUCH extra development coming after that. OH and Hinako connecting every girl's struggles to Ballet felt a little far stretched sometimes.
The Battle system was interesting but easily broken and felt far too easy even on the most difficult mode sadly...
Will I play the second game? If I wanted to be in pain, maybe... AND THAT PLAT WAS... Painfully slow to get 🤐