Magical Girl the RPG: Blue Reflection Review

Talk about a game that took me by surprise. I wasn’t expecting a bad game, but I wasn’t expecting a game that turned out to be this good. A magical girl RPG where you get stronger by dealing with powerful emotions in order to save the world from giant monsters isn’t a game I was expecting to have much mechanical or narrative depth too it, but here I am in pleasantly surprised.

Let’s start off with the story of the game, focusing on the life and adventure of Hinako, a young Ballerina whose leg was irrevocably injured in an accident. Upon returning to school, she is drawn into a magical world known as The Common, where she gains the power of a Magical Girl and is promised that if she helps the others to save the world she can get any wish she desires, that, of course, being restoring the functionality of her leg in the normal world.

You play through the game forming bonds with various other girls to collect fragments created by their emotions and fight off demons in the common who try to destroy these fragments. All this is to fend off the Sephira, and I’ll get into why they are awesome in a little while. For now, the plot itself is pretty basic. That said, and I won’t’ spoil this for you, there is a twist that comes near games end that really does come out of nowhere but in a good way. It’s very emotional, and a lesser game may have copped out and tried to give you a completely BS happy ending out of nowhere. This isn’t too say the ending is just sad, there are a lot of things to take in both happy and sad, but it’s hard to really explain without ruining that twist. Just know the ending of the game is very much worth seeing.

And with the plot proper until that twist not too much happens, the game carries itself mostly on the strength of its characters and the interactions they share. The portions of the game that take place outside of The Common take a very slice-of-life approach to the story. The stories never get too deep, but they have an impact all the same. This is in part because the characters are varied and unique. Most characters have something about them that is really out there, but it’s not every aspect of the character, one who has been diagnosed with Savant Syndrome being an exception. The relative normalcy of the rest of the characters make this stand out all the more, so fits well within the setting.

This also goes for each individual character. Most people you know in real life aren’t completely normal or completely weird, but a bit of both. The game does a fantastic job with that, and the whole cast feels like they are very rounded characters as a result. A somewhat early example you see of this is Sanae, a fairly reserved but excitable girl who was a big fan of your Ballet before the injury and admired you from afar beforehand. And you find out that she is, indeed, a pretty hardcore rap fan. Like, super big into it. As you witness future events with her a Rap Battle is a thing that happens, and I’ll avoid further details than that. But you can expect varying degrees of things like that among all the members of the cast.

So to the mechanics, and this is another area the game shines. That said, there are some hang-ups that serve to drag the game down a bit. I’ll start with gameplay in the real world. During the after school period you can do missions that involved stopping people from Rampaging, something that happens when their emotion fragments are attacked in The Common. Jump in, perform a task that involves gathering fragment pieces or slaying certain enemies, and then all is good. You get some form of an item for your trouble. Also, you can find random glowing objects on the ground, though what they are is never specified, and eventually you’ll get missions to talk to people with the object in hand, and you get recipes for new items you can craft. While fun at first, around halfway through the game these get a bit repetitive and can feel like a waste of time, especially when the items aren’t really necessary for more experienced gamers of the genre, though could be handier for newcomers.

There are also things you can do that don’t have any real impact on the game and are just for fun. There is a little ‘raise your own monster’ minigame, talking with friends, and reading Ako’s Articles that recap events that have already happened, all done via the phone menu. A personal favorite was ‘Hide and seek’ where you would get a hint as to where one of your friends has moved her stuffed bear around the school, and you can go look for it. Just a lot of silly little things that are cute and fun, but can be ignored entirely if you don’t care about them.

The final thing to do is go hang out with your friends, build your relationships, and gain new fragments from them. This leads to some great scenes between you and the other girls and serves to give you a large number of hilarious lines and bits such as “It’s not that I do too little exercise. It’s that everyone else does too much”, or every time Sanae is looking forward to some alone time with you, only to get cockblocked when Lime and Yuzu, the other two magical girls, show up. You also get to see the aforementioned girl with Savant Syndrome interact with all your other characters, and they all manage to play off each other exceptionally well. While I only saw all the scenes for three girls and a good chunk for the rest, I was always enjoying what I saw. It’s exactly what a slice-of-life should be: fun, charming, funny, and a bit emotional.

That said, a thing to note is there is no time limit or action limit on how much of this you can do. That said, you don’t always get a special scene when talking to someone, and you just get a few lines and then the next day starts. It makes sense in a game like Persona where you have a limited amount of actions you can take in that regard, so filler bits where nothing happens makes sense, makes you plan out what you are going to do better. Here it just means you’re going to have to walk up to the girl and talk to her a few more times to get some things done. It’s quite frankly a waste of time, but it’s necessary.

You see, you don’t level via battle like other games, in this one you gain levels by finishing the story based missions, as well as every five times you hang out with another friend (up until you have done it 99 times total), you gain a level. You aren’t limited to doing it that number of times, you just stop gaining levels for it, but this creates two problems. The first being the aforementioned time wasting, the second being very exploitable. I ended up steamrolling through the majority of the game without even meaning to exploit it on purpose, I just wanted to see the various scenes play out between the characters. You can gain so much power so early, even the hard difficulty becomes a breeze up until chapter eight.

I won’t go into to much detail for regular fights, as it’s mostly what you would expect of an RPG. Turn-based combat, a variety of attacks, buffs, debuffs, and a handful of exploitable weaknesses. The game uses a system very similar to the Grandia series with attacks that cause delays to your opponents, which the game uses well to create a good amount of strategy. You can build your ether gauge to make multiple attacks, and this basically sums up the normal gameplay. Gather materials to craft items that can be used outside of battle to temporarily boost stats while still in The Common, and there you have it.

The boss battles, however, have a few elements that make them the highlight of the battle system. Firstly is the bosses have multiple stages that trigger at certain health intervals and multiple parts. The battle ends when the core dies, and all other parts constantly regenerate. When it would be their turn, if they are incapacitated, they recover. However their HP doesn’t fully restore and goes down each time (To an extent), so they keep getting easier to drop. Some boss stages add more pieces to the mix. Destroying one also lowers one stat of the boss briefly. These fights feel wildly different from any battle you will have inside The Common.

The last part of the boss fights is the use of support characters, as the fight takes place in the ‘real world’ as the borders cross when the Sephira arrive. Taking to much damage support characters will flee, but they can make actions following your attacks every so often depending on the four you decide to have supported you. Basic buffs, healing, damage, and some unique effects are all possibilities depending on the character. While changing nothing about the core of the game, Blue Reflection does an outstanding job at making these boss fights feel above and beyond the other things you do in the game from a mechanical standpoint.

The last major thing I’ll cover is the games use of atmosphere. See, the art design of the normal world is pretty standard, though very pretty to look at. Nothing seems all that out of the ordinary, and you see what is just a typical school that looks like it could be part of the actual world. Then you see the beautiful and magical scenery of The Common, a world comprised of peoples emotions, and it seems so majestic compared to the real world, and the contrast is utterly fascinating. It truly feels like you have gone to a different realm altogether. And then you get the Sephira, and when you see that first one it is mind-blowing. All this beautiful scenery and majestic landscapes, and suddenly you get this creature that looks like it crawled out of the bowels of hell itself, so much so that visually I could see a couple of these things fitting right into a Dark Souls game. The contrast is such that they really do feel like something that is going to tear the world asunder. The game uses it’s visuals masterfully to get across the emotions it’s trying to convey.

That said, there are a few minor things to bring up. While the visuals are great, at times the facial animations can feel a bit flat. Hinako, many times, seems to have the same expression for anger, frustration, and surprise, and eyes can look a bit lifeless. Not enough to take away from the game entirely, but it’s noticeable. There are also a lot of glaringly obvious spelling mistakes, more than should be acceptable. It’s also frustrating how easy the game was for a long stretch due to the leveling, but at the same time you have a lot of control over each character on how they level up, what additional attacks they learn, and once you hit chapter eight and suddenly get rocked by a boss you weren’t expecting a fight from, the game does pick up in that regard. I just wish it could have held a more steady difficulty throughout rather than an out of nowhere ramp up the end game.

Blue Reflection is an absolutely fantastic game. It’s a premise that hasn’t really been done in an RPG before, it’s charming, it’s gorgeous, and despite some fairly glaring flaws, they don’t stop the game from being a blast to play through. Definitely gets a recommendation from me.