It's hard for me to talk about this one because on the one hand I honestly don't personally vibe with this style of RPG (but that's not the game's fault and I feel like it does it fairly well) and also it made me feel weird and anxious and uncomfortable (which speaks to the quality of the game and its art direction but does mean that I did not Like It in the traditional sense). BUT. ALSO. It looks so fucking cool, the claymation thing kicks ass, it's like 3 hours long which is great, Somsnosa please call me. I love the existence of any art that can make me feel weird and nauseous and annoyed even if I don't Like It. Can't wait to play the second one and want to die the whole time.

My friends who’ve heard me talk about this game are going to think this score is nuts. I’ve told everyone how much I love this game. I’ve gushed about this game. I’ve made gifsets and fanart. I’m going to replay it 500 times and make a gazillion player characters. I really, truly love it, and there’s so MUCH to love. The scope, the ambition, the responsiveness of the world and the characters. I love the world and the stories, the way nearly every quest has a million ways you can sneak through or around it. I love the breadth of characters and all of their arcs. I love the recurring theme of how revenge rarely feels as liberatory as you want it to and yet sometimes it still has to be done. I love the themes of autonomy and losing it and taking it back. I love how the characters can grow and change even when you don’t outright convince them. I love how the game looks and the art direction and the lighting. It also drives me fucking nuts. And it’s not even (entirely) the game’s fault.

To be clear, there are, genuinely, things wrong with the game in and of itself. It’s buggy in places — Act 3 especially — and every fix or patch adds three new bugs for every one it removes. Wyll’s arc is short-changed in a way that’s hard not to see as antiblackness. The turn-based combat means that every encounter with more than five or so enemies ends up being slow as sin, and there’s no meaningful attempt by the game to circumvent this issue. Moving through the world out of combat never feels bad, but it never feels awesome, either. Some of the side characters who are from older games are characterized completely differently and often contradictoraly from their old appearances, which is bound to piss off old fans. But, honestly, all of these issues on their own would still have me slapping a 4.5 or even a 5 on this game and moving along, because it really is still GREAT.

No, the real issue is the fandom. They’re insufferable. When they’re not making petitions to add new romances (always with men, incidentally!) or having meltdowns because a writer dared to say that continuing the cycle of abuse was a bad end, they’re trying to dox the devs so they can get new Rolan (another man!) content added. “Rain,” I hear you say, “That’s not fair. You can’t punish the game for the fandom.” That’s true! I’m not out here badly rating Sonic or Dragon Age games just because those fandoms need to be nuked from orbit. The problem here is that Larian fucking worships the fandom. They’re making changes to arcs and endings and characters on patch 900-whatever to appease the fandom! Lae’zel is too mean? Oh, okay, we’ll make her nicer! This ending is too sad? Oh, okay, we’ll soften it! You think Gortash is really sexy? We’ll borrow fan conent to add new stuff for him! (Were those fans PAID? CREDITED?) To be clear, on an objective level I LIKE some of the changes they’ve made. But I don’t WANT to play “Larian’s game but filtered through the lens of what I personally like,” I want to play “Larian’s game and Larian’s story.”

The lack of willingness in the gaming world right now to create games that don’t cater to the player, where the devs and the writers tell the story they aim to tell and build the mechanics they want to use and STICK TO THAT VISION, even if it adds friction or some gamers won’t like it or some fans complain drives me insane. I don’t want something that appeals to everyone, I want something specific and real. The idea that some fucker got mad because Larian dared to make a character that didn’t worship the player immediately and Larian bowed down and caved to the shit makes me want to blow up. STICK TO YOUR VISION AND YOUR STORY, PUSSIES! I’m about to get mad about the ME3 ending shit again good god.

It’s just such a frustrating encapsulation of everything wrong with gaming right now and how fandoms have too much power and too little imagination, and it breaks my heart how much it’s soured my stomach on a game I do genuinely adore. It’s so good where it’s good! It’s goddamn perfect! The love from the team is dripping out of every pore. But it’s impossible to look past the fact that the game that exists now is a different game than the one that was initially released, with different characters, because some people on the team felt that compromising their artistic vision was worth it if it’d make some fandom rando happier.

I still adore this game and, seriously, if you love RPGs or the like this really should be a must-play. It’s a joy. Its scope and ambition are second to none, and I have to cheer that on (particularly given how every other big studio is playing shit so safe right now) even when it doesn’t stick the landing. I love my gang of bisexual war criminals. Despite the tone of this review, I even love Larian; the next Big Game I plan on starting is Divinity: Original Sin 2 entirely because I love this game and Larian’s work on it so much. It’s such a wonderful piece of art. I hope the next one they make will be one with choices they have the guts to stick to.

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.

For the most part, this game is junk food. It's not the most fulfilling, but it's fairly low-effort way to experience an appealing if trashy flavour. The combat is never particularly challenging, but it still demands just enough input from the player - and shoves enough flashy nonsense into your eyeballs - that it remains engaging without being stressful, so you can pass the time well enough while you sit back and enjoy girls being gay.

It's worth noting that I skipped straight to this game, not playing the first - it seemed to be reviewed quite a bit more poorly, with reports of fanservice that might've bordered on outright uncomfortable. I was already taking a gamble, with very little idea if this would actually be any good, so it made sense to shoot for the best chances.

One really standout aspect of this game is the way Rena and Yuki's relationship is handled - undeniably explicit, a core part of their arcs, and a consistent factor the game still pays mind to once it's established. It had me grinning from ear to ear. That said, it does make all of the other casual intimacy in the game kind of weird - like, in almost any other context, I'd be saying "yeah these girls are gay as hell", but since the game has proven it's willing to actually come out and say it... what does it mean when it doesn't? I dunno. Nonetheless, seeing the girls walk around holding hands and go on "dates" where they lie in bed together is good for the soul.

The game does have a number of rough edges that add up to a janky experience, like, I could seriously nitpick all day. So I will.
- The camera in fights is all over the place.
- Enemy designs are just kind of weirdly abstract without any connection to what's going on in the game.
- The skill names all being in different languages for ~aesthetic~ makes them very difficult to memorise and assign meaning to.
- The crafting system demands a tedious excess of material grinding if you care about upgrading everything.
- The fragment system has a lot of niche or redundant effects, rather than encouraging interesting builds.
- The stealth segments are godawful and contribute little.
- There's a lot of asset reuse and padding - even if that one time it was totally justified and really cool.
- Having to wait for skill animations to play out makes timing awkward when blocking big attacks or in the whole one-on-one mode.
- Asking a whole second playthrough for the true ending in a game that is neither short nor deep is very questionable.
I definitely wouldn't go so far as to call this an outright bad game, it's just, I dunno - making good art is really hard, actually, and when you focus on the standout masterpieces that's easy to lose track of. Sometimes you need a little mid in your life.

That's a lot of complaining, but the game's pleasures are comparatively simple, as already described - flashy spectacle, hella yuri, and a relaxed pace. Ultimately, I did enjoy my time, and the game was exactly what I needed right now.