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

Playing this after already finishing the sequel is probably the worst thing I could've done for my experience playing this, as it made it impossible not to notice the countless things that were vastly improved upon and by extension their weaknesses here - but at least it made me appreciate Second Light more.

That being said, for all its many flaws, I think this game has the most incredible-feeling boss battles of anything I've ever played. Jesus christ. I hadn't felt like this since Koloktos in Skyward Sword a decade ago.

I honestly only played this because I heard its OST whenever it was included in Atelier games and I was like... DAMN I gotta play that! And the OST didn't disappoint at all, that's for damn sure.

I also quite like the combat system and overall presentation. The combination of the music and the school's visuals give the game a very dreamlike feeling, I dunno how to describe it really... I also really like how some of the Common's zones look like, and the menus are pretty cool too.

The combat system on its own is very fun, I would basically say it's like a mix of Grandia 2 and Bravely Default. The sad thing is that random battles get defanged entirely as soon as you get a few levels and Fragments. Boss battles remain fun the whole way through for me, but they also feel pretty easy. In fact, I would say they get even easier as the game goes on due to how you can charge Ether and use the Timeline boost to almost give you infinite turns. The boss' style and music go hard tho, so I was happy everytime they popped up.

I quite loved the characters and story more than I expected, even if it's pretty cliche. Hinako is particularly great.

My biggest gripes are probably the overall gameplay loop, lame fanservice, and piss poor translation. The gameplay loop mostly consists of grinding out of social events and completing quests in the Common, and the Common is extremely fucking dull gameplay wise. The translation is mostly poor because there's a million typos, repeated words, and some Fragment descriptions say the opposite of what the Fragment actually does.

So yeah, basically this is a game that feels like it flipflops between being mediocre and PEAK. I will applaud the balls on Koei Tecmo for releasing this at 60 (and not having dropped the price outside of sales after so many years)

After having played this to conclusion I honestly can't in good faith, recommend it to anyone. There's a lot of glaring issues in this game. Story is a whole lotta nothing for like 80% of the play time and it isn't helped when just playing through much of the game feels like a chore.

The 'xp' system is unique. You only gain your equivalent of skill points with story and quest progress and 0 from battling, and that you unlock abilities depending on which stat you level up, which does sound interesting on paper. When mixed with the combat system and general gameplay loop, I have mixed feelings about this. It probably works in the game's favour but for all the wrong reasons. The game just feels so dreadful to go through and quest design is awful. The combat system in this game is actually really interesting, but it only ever shines during bosses, of which there are only a handful. Fighting regular enemies feels very mundane, especially when you only have access to your full kit during those aforementioned boss battles, so for most of the game you're just missing stuff and much of the enemy encounters also feel very half-assed. I feel like there are some very good ideas with this combat system but it only reaches its full potential very rarely.

Also on a side note I found that this game was way too fanservicey. Usually in anime and jrpgs I don't think it's the end of the world but in this one it just felt too cringe and that they probably spent more of their budget into making the girls' bras visible when their shirts are wet and bathing scenes than they did into things that actually would've improved the game.

I will say that I did enjoy the characters, boss fights, music, art style and the ending of the story. I really liked all the girls and getting to know them, and seeing how Hina cultivated these friendships and everyone growing as people. Music was great and the way it flowed with the combat was stellar. The art style of the game is very appealing, with nice character models, and all the combat areas looking good, however, the actual graphical quality is... not good. Also, I really do like the magical girl theme of this. As I mentioned before there's really not much happening in the story for like ~80% of it, it's mostly just meeting the girls. However, in the last like 3 chapters I think the story really starts to pick up steam and it makes for a great ending. Although considering how much of the first 4/5s of the story is dreadful I can't really find myself being able to convince someone to push through.

Overall I do agree with much of the consensus around this game and would rate it a 6/10. The characters are likeable, and there are some cool ideas but much of them just fall flat due to bad design or whatever other reason.

P.S. I have seen that there is a sequel, and it seems better received and apparently has fixed a lot of the issues and improved upon the first game, so I will try that one out sometime and hopefully I do enjoy it.

idk if the sequel is directly related to this game so maybe if you liked the sequel and are interested in this game's story then maybe get it on sale and give it a shot

A very cozy game with characters I was sad to say goodbye to by the end of the game. Hinako isn't the strongest protagonist but she is no-nonsense which creates some very interesting dynamics or comedic reactions. I actually really liked the enemy designs, and the battle system wasn't bad either. The music was very calming as well. I just wish there was more to do in the school. Also, I never fully understood the dating/social sim aspects.

I discovered this game from researching Persona-likes and while it wasn't exactly what I was looking for, it scratched the itch enough.

Mahou shoujo, despite having an immense popularity in other forms of media, is relatively unexplored in games, limiting itself to existing properties turned game. Which is why, when Gust announced their new IP, Blue Reflection, I was into it from the first trailer: not only did it feature exactly that subject matter, but it was an incredibly stylish game to boot -- I was so pumped. The final product, however, was a game I had to drag myself through finishing.

The game follows Hinako Shirai as she returns to Hoshinomiya Girls High after a serious depressive episode. Hinako's life used to revolve around ballet, and she had a promising future in it... until she suffered an injury and was forced into early retirement. Her world having fallen apart, a chance presents itself: after an encounter with an oddly overemotional girl, then with the very eccentric pair of twins called Yuzuki and Lime, she ends up awakening to the powers of a Reflector, which allow her to see through her peers' emotions and help them navigate troubling feelings. Through those, she can not only help her colleagues, but there's also the promise that, should she fight off the monsters that threaten her school, a wish of hers will be granted, and in her mind, it's pretty clear what that wish would be.

The game is divided in chapters which tend to follow episodic formulae, at least until the later parts of the story: a new girl is presented along with her troubles, Hinako and the twins try to learn more about her, something causes tensions escalate to a boiling point, the girl breaks down, they use their Reflector powers and fix everything, befriending the new girl in the progress. In between these main story segments, there's free time, during which Hinako is free to go out with her newfound friends, help minor characters around the school and explore the magical world of Common, where their battles take place.

The ingredients are all here: There's a mystery: why was Hinako chosen? Who, or what are the twins? And why is Hoshinomiya a target for monsters? Plus, there's a wide cast of characters, consisting of the main trio and a whopping twelve girls that join over the course of the game and each have their own history and traits. Sure, one might say there's a lot of clichés in there, but that's like saying the baker uses a lot of flour: what matters, in the end, is how those characters interact and grow. Nobody at Gust needs to be told that, as they are experts in creating emotional character-driven stories with large, lovable casts, even if the premises seem like nothing much.

...and yet, that's exactly where Blue Reflection falters. While it has the makings of a good slice of life slash coming of age story, it lacks the character development to allow it to truly blossom. The main story's pacing suffers greatly from the long series of character introductions, and when it finally picks up, it mostly focuses on Hinako, Yuzu and Lime, not resolving a lot of the conflicts presented over the narrative and ultimately failing to justify the size of the cast. Past their introductory chapters in the story, most girls end up not having much relevance, the idea having been, I guess, for each of them to develop their characters over the course of the dates with Hinako as well as through specific character events but, well...

I suppose it's better to just talk about the elephant in the room: Blue Reflection was rushed out the door, and while the game is complete, it's severely unpolished. In no feature is this felt more than in the character relationships, which, for one, are not voice acted and feature shoddy animation and direction, resulting in very dry scenes. They're also formulaic to a fault: I mentioned that what really matters is how characters interact and grow, and the main issue here is that they don't do that. Throughout the character events, you'd expect the girls to grow in some way, to navigate some sort of problem or develop a part of their character, but instead, most character storylines don't lead anywhere: some loop back to where the character started, and there are a couple girls that come out worse than they started.

It does not help that all events have the girls interacting one-on-one with Hinako, who, save for the Achilles's heel that is her ballet injury, is on the stoic side, resulting in rather one-note conversations. Plus, when hanging out, Hinako takes every friend through the same list of locations instead of picking from those that would trigger more interesting reactions. Every girl has a scene on every location in the game, which include common points of interest in the city, like the station, the general store and temple, but also a few more... exotic picks, like the locker room, the showers, the pool scenes, as well as events where they stand under the rain, uniforms wet. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess the motivation behind those isn't exactly character study.

...so let's talk about the second elephant in room (yes, there's two, it's a big room): it's not unusual for Japanese games to feature some degree of moe, and there's a line between that and just plain sexualization. Some games trip over that line sometimes. Blue Reflection somersaults over it -- it is creepy to the point of being disturbing. Many people mention the panty shot of a character going through a moment of grief that happens in the beginning of the game, which is terrible, but it's also the tip of the iceberg. Throughout the rest of the game, we have magical girl outfits that would make a stripper blush, we have jiggle physics on 14-year-olds, we have skirt flipping, see-through wet uniforms in the rain, underwear scenes, sexual assault played off as a joke, sexual assault not played off as a joke...

That alone would Blue Reflection incredibly hard to recommend even if the characters and gameplay were properly developed. Which is to say, even forgetting all about the issues with the writing and judging the game purely based on gameplay, it doesn't fare all too well either. Yet again, there's something here: the game features an enticing and stylishly presented turn based combat system that is centered on a timeline gauge in which characters advance towards the center to take their turns: by using resources correctly and aiming for enemies weaknesses, the player can monopolize the time gauge and prevent opponents from even taking turns.

This system shines the most during boss battles, in which foes often consist of multiple parts that attack separately, further playing into the idea of denying turns. Other mechanics, like overdrives and supports, become available later on, expanding the possibilities during battle. Outside of battle, characters can be built in different ways, earning them different skills that can then be customized through the fragment system. Fragments allow the assignment of additional effects to characters' abilities and become critical in the mid to late game. Both of these systems are inherently capped in how much you can power up between main story segments, meaning you're always at an appropriate power level during boss battles -- never stomping, but never quite getting stomped either.

Sure, the normal enemy encounters are much, much less exciting, but that's the case with a lot of RPGs, and is not the real problem. The real problem is that the game is entirely lacking in level and quest design. The mahou shoujo part of the game takes place in the parallel world of Common, which consists of maybe twenty or so different rooms that are reused throughout the entire game. Quests are similarly lacking in variety, with there being three types of fetch quests that you are forced to complete a number of to complete the story. That is what makes normal enemy fights become unbearable in the long run: the sheer amount of repeat journeys into Common in order to perform the same tasks. Add to that an unhelpful and sluggish UI present both when learning and customizing skills, and there's also potential for frustration, with the player losing due to bad builds and not quite knowing what's wrong.

Gust, I'm a fan of your work, but... this is not it. Blue Reflection shows a lot of promise and delivers on some great ideas, but completely fumbles the landing, becoming a disappointment to anyone who got hyped for it on its announcement. I hear the sequel is much better, and I will give it a shot some time, but I'm less than hopeful it can make the time I spent with the prequel worth it.

Okay, so like here me out: Jungian psychotherapy mixed with slice of life magical girl business. Before you speak—shut up, before Persona there was Xenosaga so let us not speak of it. So shit man, the collective unconscious back and it's apocalyptic dreams are becoming a reality; cue high-school girls who have the magic power to bring order to teenage girl emotions by leaping into the common and beating up weird analogous demons.

Yeah, so this game has got some jank, weird. Style wise this game is going for a more grounded anime style, there ain't no primary hair color bullshit her, however a few characters do have reasonable dyed hair. Something is just ...off, with the visuals here; the analogous color palette leaves me longing for the beautiful pastels of Sailor Moon, instead there's a white haze lingering in the air that feels a bit empty. Eyes, you know those huge expressive fuckers in anime, well they're more resembling children of the corn here, there's zero life to them and they just kind of exist. It can be difficult to decipher the mood of characters and for a game about emotions it really stands out.

The combat system here isn't anything special; it's a nice balancing act, choosing when you want to add an extra turn to a round and deal some massive damage, using knockback attacks that push the enemy down the timeline or regenerate your ether. There's no grinding here, you level up by finishing quests, the issue with this system is that there's nothing stopping your from grinding social links; it's very easy to just become overleved resulting in battles ending after a single turn. You only get item drops from enemies, and it sometimes leaves the feeling of just doing the bare-minimum to get by. So like Persona you attend hig—fuck I said it—shit, okay whatever, yeah you attend high-school and get to learn about your classmates and solve their mundane emotional issues in order to stave off the quote unquote COLLECTIVE UNCONCIOUS. Sometimes you're forced into doing side quests to progress the plot.

Since I brought up Persona again I might as well go into more detail. The world of Blue Reflection is not fleshed out very well. I don't even remember if it mentions the name of the school you attend; the interior design looks stark, would have been interesting if they went for a old fashioned wooded school-house since the setting is in a sleepy little town. The uniforms aren't striking either, none of the characters have that slight flair to make them stand out, you gotta go by hair style. There's not really any activities that happen either, there's a festival that's brought up a lot but that's it; would have been nice if there was a school trip or something. Another strange thing is that they hide all of the school staff, the only characters you will interact with are students, it just feels like they didn't fully utilize the school setting to craft something more bold.

Look, there's one last point I feel like I need to mention; you already know the name of this elephant, the big booba oogas side of anime culture. A good mount of the cinematography likes to linger on skirt shots, however there's no explicit upskirt action. Dialog often happens in communal showers so there's side-booba, top-booba, bottom booba, sometimes even the exotic mosaic booba. There's no cringe features like clothing... tearing apart in battle or striping down for ultimate attacks; honestly the demographic seems to be aimed at more feminine audience.

So, uh yeah. It's a rough around the edges magic girl Persona, with chill vibes. The Jungian focus has become a common theme in recent times due to growing popularity of SMT; however overused, you cannot deny that it makes an excellent spine to focus on character studies while also giving meaning to enemy designs and the alternate realties. For a directors first shot at his own IP there's heart and isn't cynically low effort for a change. It doesn't dig too deep into character trauma, could have made better use of the psychological themes, but characters still come across as likeable but maybe too simple. Nothing here is going will blow you away, just a fun time and I for one welcome any JRPG that foregoes the generic fantasy settings.

Side note: There is alot of speling mistakes goimg on here, nothinf seriou but just found it kinda funnt OK

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.

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 🤐

Of all the games I’ve played, this is one of the ones I think about most. It ends up being such a mediocre game, but I think it’s more interesting than an “average” game. I wouldn’t see this game as missed potential if it didn’t have so much promise. It is such a mixed bag of aspects I wanted to see more fleshed out, things I will never forget, and a couple of awful decisions as well.

The artstyle of the Common is incredible, as it really sells an otherworldly, serene setting. A lot of the games’ UI and menus also have a really pleasing aesthetic. Unfortunately, someone decided that the camera during cutscenes would always be placed in the most uncomfortable location possible. It genuinely drags down the entire experience. Even aside from that issue, the game feels really low budget. Even animations like walking around can look really odd and it’s a little distracting.

I was really interested in how the story and characters might go after playing the first 30 minutes. There was a lot of promise to have a well-developed coming-of-age story for high school girls. While it’s trying to do that, a lot of the dialogue and development doesn’t really work. It’s all very generic and the conflicts the characters go through aren’t given nearly enough time or focus to really mean anything. The first 15 hours of this game were spent introducing a lot of characters and the struggles they were going through. I really thought the game was setting up characters for the first half of the game so the story could really go somewhere in the second. Instead, the game ended only 3 hours later.

The gameplay loop is another part of the game that could’ve been much better. While the actual combat mechanics are solid, everything around them is very lackluster. For one, the enemies are incredibly weak. I did not have a party member die a single time the entire game. There’s almost no challenge on the normal difficulty as you get a lot of strong attacks that hit every opponent. Because all HP and MP rest after every battle, you can just spam these moves at the start of every fight and win before your opponents even do anything. The enemy variety is also really small, so your strategy never really needs to change throughout the game. The one time combat really gets better is during any of the few boss fights throughout the game. The level design is incredibly basic with pretty small areas that you constantly revisit, so there’s no sense of exploration either. The incredibly generic and repetitive side-quests don’t help either.

A lot of this is really negative, but there’s one part that kind of saves this game for me. The soundtrack is my favorite OST of all time. Aside from the pretty mediocre vocal themes, the rest of the soundtrack is amazing. Every single song in this game is so emotionally charged that it’s unbelievable. As someone who basically lives off listening to video game OSTs, I cannot say playing this game wasn’t worth it. Field theme, battle themes, dialogue themes, all of it is unbelievably good. It’s so good that it can make you think the rest of the game is better than it is.

Even if you don’t have any desire to play this game (completely understandable), at least listen to the soundtrack. “Sayonara (ALL PHASE MIX)” leaves an irreparable effect on a person.

I have a lot of problems with this game. This game is poorly optimized for the PC, has typos semi-often in its translations, and it has very problematic fanservice. All that, and it's a pretty boring and generic game.

The fanservice made me feel gross while playing. Often I'm able to look past 'anime camera angles' that linger on parts of a girl's body for too long. But this game is the worst I've seen it in a very long time, and definitely the worst I've seen in a video game. Most of the special events in this game are themed around the girls at the pool, taking showers, getting caught in the rain, or chatting in a changing room. And of course for most of these, the camera doesn't take things easy. Hell, the game has a system for wet uniforms, so you can see their underwear when their shirts get wet. There are special events for each character, showing them getting caught in the rain so you can see what kind of underwear they have. It's pretty gross. And again, I usually can overlook when these aspects show up in anime and similar media, but it's just so egregious here, I hated it. And the fact the art style makes these girls look way closer than usual to real high school girls doesn't help at all.

The story is pretty generic too. While it has an interesting hook, the plot barely takes any interesting twists and turns. It follows the same pattern, up until the final boss. It's really disappointing. And there's so much boring padding, too! In order to grind up each friendship meter to its max, you have to sit through boring dialogue at the same locations that gets so monotonous and old. Not to mention all the characters who you max said friendship with are mostly cookie-cutter trope characters: the tennis club member, the sporty genki girl, the genius who has no social awareness, this game has pretty much all of them. I think this game would absolutely have been better if they stripped half of these away.

The only good thing about this game was its combat system. While on the easy side, it was pretty fun. It almost feels like it was taken out of an Atelier game, which makes sense when you consider this game's developer. Also, I was pretty disappointed that even though Kishida Mel did the designs for these characters, you don't really see his art unless you're on the title screen or watching the credits. This game just did not have CG events! I wish they would have made that clear, since other games I've played by Gust have had them.

But yeah. Even though I hated most of this game, the gameplay itself kept me going. If they manage to fix all of these things in the sequel, I may play it when it goes on deep discount. But I'm kind of worried this isn't the case. Which sucks, because they could have absolutely done a lot with this premise.

This is an incredibly frustrating game. I wish I could sing the praise of it, cause yeah, the writing is fluffy and cute and pleasant, the combat is fun and interesting (if a bit easy in most places), the UI does some cool Persona-like stuff, and the whole game is full of that kind of low-budget ps360-era plucky jank that gives it a specific underdog charm... problem is it. just. won't. stop. being. extremely. gross. about. its. high-schooler. protagonists.

Like, seriously. I love the low-stakes high-school shenanigans Blue Reflection is built around. They're pleasant and nice and as well written as something like that can be. But it very much grosses me out when the camera won't stop staring at these kids' asses, while said high-school shenanigans take place.

It would already be eye-rolly and off-tone if the characters were adults. But it's just gross when they're high school students. Especially because this is not just a couple of unfortunate shots, the whole game is filled with SO much of this bullshit. It's gross and creepy and bad and honestly infuriating, because it just gets in the way of what would, otherwise be, a fairly pleasant game.

I dunno, I just want a fun fluffy low-stake magical girl jrpg that's not constantly trying to gross me out and embarrass me for liking it.

This game makes me sad.