La5t Game You Fini5hed And Your Thought5

Blue Reflection: Second Light isn't the otaku-bait echhi-courting game it might first look like, despite the, er, curious search engine text for it on Sony's store.  If anything it feels like it has more in common with shojo manga like Sailor Moon in its tone.  No wait, stop, please keep reading...

The basis is that a bunch of schoolgirls find themselves trapped in an abandoned school, surrounded by sea.  They've all lost their memory, and to survive, they find themselves collecting resources from the demon-infested Faraway.  It's serviceable as plots go, but the real appeal is the girls themselves.  I felt they were almost all very well-written and endearing characters.  There's a lot of getting to know the other girls in both story beats and through going on 'dates', which feels like a mistranslation - you date at the facilities you craft on the school grounds, and there's nowt romantic about staring at a space suit.  It's genuinely enjoyable getting to know most of them: even the apparently fanservice character turns out to be a deadshot hunter and a food connoisseur.  The exceptions are the two rather dull main characters of the original game and the prequel anime, but they're in the minority.  Outside some slight Uncanny Valley stuff in the character models from time to time and the odd pervy camera moment (and - sigh - optional swimsuit costumes), it's all pretty heartwarming stuff.  

The Faraway is your source of dungeons and battles and danger and that.  The dungeons are some of the better examples in the genre: tedious 'travel gimmicks' are outweighed by the surreal and varied aesthetics.  The battling sadly is not quite so good, although you won't think that at first.  It's a mixed turn-based/real-time system with plenty of initial depth: the girls snowball in power as each battle goes on, learning new moves, growing in each individual combat.  The trouble is, there aren't many new battle elements introduced throughout the story.  You'll rely on the same moves and strategies at the start and the end of the game, with little-to-no evolution of the system.  This was worse for me because I accidentally overlevelled, making the latter third of the game a walkover.  Pro tip: for the best experience, don't use any optional exp-boosting equipment or facilities.

And that's the game's problem in a nutshell really: almost everything starts off well, but doesn't stay that way.  The girls are great to know initially, but by the end there are too many of them, and you can find yourself skipping through ten dates in a row late-game.  The battle system starts well, but it has nowhere to go.  The landscapes are colourful, but spending time with the girls reveals technical flaws in the visuals.  The music is cheerful enjoyable stuff, but there's a paucity of themes that you really feel when you've heard three pieces of battle music after 20h.  The dungeons are fun, but it's easy to overlevel and make them feel like tedious slogs by the endgame.  The final dungeon nearly made me slash a mark off my score.  Developer Gust seemingly had the time/budget/expertise to make a really charming enjoyable 20-25h JRPG, but the game lasts 40h.  What we're left with feels slightly bloated, and yet at the same time lacking in material.

On here, where we're all male and I'm not sure how many of us like indulging our feminine sides for 40h, Blue Reflection: Second Light was always going to be a hard sell, even before it began to drag in its last third.  It's a JRPG where the main selling point is talking to teenage girls as a teenage girl.  I would still recommend it though, just.  It's a cosy charming game full of good characters.  If you want a relaxing heartwarming time that has more in the way of gameplay than Chicory, you could do much worse.



p.s. Whoever decided to lock the 'true' ending behind New Game + can sod right off.  It's only twenty seconds of difference, look them up on YouTube after.