Review: Blue Reflection Quartet (Nintendo Switch 2)

Blue Reflection has been a difficult series for Koei Tecmo to manage thanks to its enormously niche premise. Four products in, it’s also difficult to suggest that bad missteps were not made along the way. The original Blue Reflection got itself released and then un-released in parts of the world like Australia for being too much for an R-18+ rating despite really not being that kind of game. Then there was an anime that fans needed to watch before playing the sequel. You might have thought that the games industry would learn from Square Enix’s Kingdom Hearts series that demanding too much back knowledge from players was just asking for trouble, but apparently not.

And then there was Blue Reflection Sun, arguably the biggest misfire of all. Blue Reflection Sun added a male character to the series for the first time and… we’ll get to that, but it really upset fans of a male-free and overtly queer series of girls bonding. Now, in an effort to consolidate the series to date, and perhaps salvage the overall franchise so it can have a future, Koei Tecmo and Gust have brought the four titles together into Blue Reflection Quartet, while also making several adjustments to effectively set the canon and baseline for whatever might come next.

If you’ve never played Blue Reflection before, then what’s important to know is that across the series these are truly beautiful games. The original really was a vehicle for renowned character artist, Mel Kishida, to explore some of his personal creative ideas, and the game that was built around his vision was ethereally, artfully beautiful. Blue Reflection never had the budget behind it of a Final Fantasy or Persona, so the level of technical detail in the characters and environments is not quite the same, but that is also irrelevant because the art direction is impeccable.

Each title follows the story of a group of magical girls as they go on adventures together, form bonds with one another, and defeat enemies through fairly standard turn-based combat. With the two “main” entries, anyone who has played previous Gust games (the Atelier series) or Persona will feel quite at home. Innovation clearly wasn’t the goal with the gameplay systems, but the combat is what you’d expect from highly experienced, confident JRPG developers, who were aiming to get you to focus on the art and stories as much as possible. In that regard, to quickly summarise the plot of the two “main” titles in the series, from DDNet’s previous reviews of both:

Blue Reflection: At the centre of Blue Reflection is Hinako Shirai, a freshman at Hoshinomiya Girls High School. Ballet is Hinako’s one passion in life, but a recent knee injury means she’ll never be able to dance again. Understandably, that’s ruined her life—”Without my ballet, I’m as good as dead”, she says early in the game—and she’s pretty much lost the will to live. On her first day at school she’s depressed and lethargic, a stark contrast to the lively, cheerful girls around her.

Then a strange incident sees her transported to a dreamlike fantasy world. Mysterious voices tell her to channel her wishes into a power, and by doing so she transforms into a sword-wielding, tutu-wearing magical girl. Most importantly, in this world her knee is in perfect shape, and she can dance. She can fight, too, which comes in handy when she gets attacked by strange demons.

Back in the real world, she soon meets the source of those mysterious voices: two of her classmates, twins by the name of Yuzu and Lime. As it turns out, the world is under threat from otherworldly demons called Sephirot, and the twins are “Reflectors”, magic-wielding heroes tasked with fending the Sephirot off. For reasons held close to their chests, they took an instant liking to Hinako and decided to make her a Reflector as well. For Hinako’s part, being a Reflector comes with not just the chance to dance freely in the dream world, but the promise of a wish once all the Sephirot are defeated. It’s the sliver of hope that she so desperately needs.

In order to defeat the Sephirot, Hinako, Yuzu, and Lime need to collect Fragments, which are intense feelings turned to crystal in that other dimension. The Common, as this plane is known, is a manifestation of the collective unconscious, and it allows Reflectors to explore and interact directly with people’s emotions. In the real world, emotions running high causes people to go “rampant”, shrouding them in a coloured aura and opening a path to the relevant zone of the Common. In the Common, the girls search for these Fragments, which offer a glimpse into the cause of the outburst and allow Hinako to find a way to calm the person in question in down. This stabilises the fragment, turning it into a gem that can be equipped to provide various combat benefits.

Blue Reflection Second Light: At its core, Second Light is the same as its predecessor: it is an often bittersweet and wholesome coming of age story for its large ensemble cast. This time around, though, it happens within the context of what can only be termed an “ethereal mystery”. See, each of the girls finds herself trapped in an otherwise deserted school that seems to exist on a different plane of existence to reality, surrounded by water, and she awakens in this world completely without her memories. By delving into special dungeons, she can remember key events and lessons that she learned in life, gain her memories back and (often) summon another girl that is important to her into the world. That girl is without her own memories, so the process starts anew. Meanwhile, as this happens, cracks appear in the sky, an “AI” application that they’re all forced to subscribe to claims to be a helper, but only deepens the mystery, and during idle moments the girls wonder about how they ended up on this island/school prison. Theories range from this space being a period of “waking up” after a long period of cryogenesis, or that they’re all dead and this is some kind of heaven.

Naturally I’m not going to tell you the answers here, but the overarching narrative moves at a good pace while keeping the revelations going. It’s also not the real focus of Blue Reflection: Second Light’s storytelling. Rather, the deepening relationships between the girls it’s what the story wants you to really focus on. Much like in a Persona game, the main protagonist, Ao, can take girls on dates, and by deepening the relationship with them, she can power up the team for the dungeon delves. That’s the mechanical value of doing so. The narrative value is far more simple: these are a great bunch of girls and you’re going to want them all to hook up. Just so they can be happy.

To be clear: Second Light is very yuri and makes no pretence otherwise. It’s overt even in comparison to Blue Reflection (which itself was really not trying to hide it). While there are no sex scenes, the flirting and depth of soul-bearing during the deep-and-meaningfuls between the girls make it clear that this magical girls story is less Sailor Moon than it is what if Sailor Moon gave Tuxedo Mask the flick and hooked up with Sailor Jupiter instead? (yes, please!). What I did love about Second Light is that it really came across as being sweet and wholesome about it all. It was less a blunt and forced statement from a character to the effect of “I’m gay and now we kiss” as we’ve seen in certain big Hollywood films in recent years, as it is simply a matter of these girls naturally developing deeper relationships with one another and, yep, eventually they start holding hands and talking tenderly to one another.

The other two titles are essentially bridging and supporting these narratives. Combined, you’re looking at around 100 hours of solid magical girl warmth and good vibes in this collection, and while I wouldn’t necessarily call any of it subtle, it is almost relentlessly wholesome. From the moment that Hinako first dives into one of her classmates psyches to rescue her from distress (it makes sense when you sit down for it) in the first game, to the long walks that the girls take in the second, hand in hand, discussing their feelings and helping one another talk through their anxieties, the Blue Reflection series almost never drops its focus on solidarity between girls, and it’s so heartfelt and sweet that, even having played these games a dozen times by now, I can’t help but be invested in them as both characters and symbols for various coming of age realisations and experiences.

With this collection release, the narratives and gameplay of the two main games is maintained, and Koei Tecmo has worked hard to adapt the other two to fit within the collection. Ray, for example, has been turned from an anime into an interactive space to wander around, allowing you to take control of the protagonists and collect memories, which tick off the plot points of the anime. It has an additional intro and epilogue to better connect it to the rest of the series, too. Sun, meanwhile, has kept its story while being rebuilt from a mobile gatcha game into a console experience and now plays more like the other entries in the series. With that being said, there have been changes, and I do really need to address them because I’ve seen plenty of people on the Steam forums and elsewhere pre-emptively prepare themselves to get angry about those changes.

Koei Tecmo chalks it up as “scenes that have been toned down to meet modern social standards”. In practice, those scenes that have been edited are small and mostly incidental. For one of the main examples, in Blue Reflection, Hinako bathes every day. You never saw anything sensitive in the original release, of course, but it was a body in water nonetheless. Here, the water is milky (bath bombs?) with a lot of steam that now hides even the implied nudity from the carefully selected camera angles. In other examples, change room scenes have the characters wearing more; some costumes and camera angles have been edited for modesty, and when characters go out in the rain, they still end up with wet clothes, but the clothes no longer become semi-transparent. The other Blue Reflection titles have edits to similar effect.

I understand why Koei Tecmo did all this. It was just this year when certain militant and deeply puritanical groups went on a rampage and succeeded in getting the payment processors to threaten game store fronts. Those campaigns basically force the entire industry to take a big step towards adopting Saudi Arabia’s attitude towards women’s bodies. And it was relatively easy to make these decisions because, for the most part, these edits don’t change the dialogue or key narrative themes. That’s not to say there aren’t any thematic losses. One of the more complex and nuanced themes within Blue Reflection, particularly the first, is the way that the body interacts with water as both a source of comfort and vulnerability, and that is a little undermined by making edits to hide both responses. Losing that theme does suck, because it was beautifully depicted in the original Blue Reflection, but it also wasn’t the key theme here, and I choose to maintain perspective here; in a difficult creative environment, Koei Tecmo’s decisions on what to cut haven’t harmed the heart, soul, warmth or beauty of the series.

However, while I don’t blame Koei Tecmo for being risk-averse, I do want to say that it is disappointing that this has happened and reflects negatively on society more broadly that it had to happen. It’s disappointing for one specific reason: I cannot state more firmly that nothing in Blue Reflection was explicit, pornographic or fundamentally designed around sexual titillation in the first place. Nudity, sensuality, vulnerability, physical beauty and sexualisation are not interchangeable, and we should not be seeing them as so; unfortunately, the edits imply that the developers accepted the opposite to now be true. At best, the edits act like a defensive awareness by Koei Tecmo that to far too many people out there, there is something inherently sexual about the female form. To use a real-world parallel, it’s like how we as a society are increasingly being forced to listen to some people freak out at the sight of bikinis at the beach or pool.

In fact, just the other day I saw a video clip of a beautiful dancesport Rumba on Facebook, only to find the comments underneath it both offensive and aggravating because it was a flood of complaints about how “sexualised” the dance was because the dancer was wearing a standard Latin costume. This now strikes me as relevant to Blue Reflection because, remember, the protagonist of the first is herself a dancer. Leotards and dance costumes (which magical girl costumes do resemble) are targets for these same conservative histrionics. We live in a society that is being so heavily forced into an increasingly extreme religious conservatism that comes out of the US that we’re now meant to see bodies as something inherently linked to sex, and we’re told that the only response we’re allowed to that is discomfort.

Or to be blunt and repeat myself, the attitude towards women between the US and Saudi Arabia is not as far different as groups in the West like to pat themselves on the back over… and in the US in particular those attitudes are regressing fast. So, yes, while it’s not Koei Tecmo’s fault for complying with that social pressure, it does leave a particularly bad taste in the mouth when considering that Blue Reflection was too innocent and wholesome to deserve giving those clowns credibility with their complaints.

Just as a final note, the one criticism I have of this collection is the decision to retain the male character in Sun, when, with the effort that went into basically rebuilding the entire game to make it play like the other Blue Reflection titles, there was the window to rewrite that character as a girl. Part of the reason that Blue Reflection as a series is so wholesome and innocent is that it doesn’t have male dynamics complicating the interactions, and the tone could be set at a sweet and uplifting yuri and bonding between girls. Thankfully, the male protagonist’s influence is restricted to Sun, and by the time you get to that game (assuming you play them in the recommended order that is laid out for you when you first load up the game), you’ve already seen the best of the series anyway. I just really don’t understand the creative stubbornness in retaining that character. I’m usually one to defend developers and publishers for sticking to their guns when they’ve made a creative decision that the fans react poorly to, but in this case nothing about that male self-insert style character defends its existence. Sun is still disappointing, even though it’s no longer a gatcha game.

Overall, the changes made to the four stories in this Blue Reflection collection don’t compromise the central thesis of the series (even with Sun and that pesky male character): These are truly, almost painfully ethereally beautiful magical girl JRPGs with a relentlessly wholesome message behind them. I have no idea if Koei Tecmo sees a future in something this niche, but even if this collection is the grand sum of the Blue Reflection vision, it’s an enormously heartwarming 100 hours that will linger with you long after you stop playing.