There’s also a combo system that rewards continuous attacking, meaning that your attacks will become faster and more powerful as combat draws on. On reaching the third gear, your character will transform-magical girl style-into their Reflector form, unlocking stronger versions of their moves as well as separate more powerful moves. Using abilities also speeds up your ether generation, eventually triggering a gear shift for the character. Characters move along the timeline as they generate Ether (the game’s mana/energy) at set rates and return to the beginning as they spend it to use combat abilities. Order of combat is determined by a timeline at the bottom of the screen. The combat itself is an interesting twist away from the standard turn-based JRPG systems. “The combat itself is an interesting twist away from the standard turn-based JRPG systems” Food is also an important mechanism by which you can boost the combat power of your party during key moments. Bonding events can also reward you with powerful Fragments which are equipables that give party members buffs. Aside from the effects of Talent Points, instalments built in the school often carry powerful combat bonuses-not only does the Beachside Café prove to be a cute date spot for the characters, it also increases your attack by 10%. The game makes significant efforts to tie its more ‘slice of life’ activities to the battling experience. Exploring or slaying enemies to find materials for crafting is less tedious knowing that it doesn’t serve a typical JRPG purpose. And once Second Light’s focus is clear, the rest of the game feels improved. Though the systems are rudimentary, there’s something undeniably charming about the characters cooking food together, crafting new installations for the school, and just hanging out. This shift in focus aligns the gameplay with the story’s themes of bonding, the making of memories, and home. Rather than the combat grinding that is a staple of most JRPGs, character attributes and abilities can mostly be enhanced through Talent Points, which are obtainable through interacting with characters, completing quests for them, or going on dates with them. Once you make it through the jumbled first chapter of the game, Blue Reflection: Second Light largely seems to find its rhythm.
#Blue reflection how to
Gust clearly has the instincts to know how to craft a captivating plot, and the sense to slowly feed the player information to keep them hungry, but the way they manage these things is at times incredibly clumsy. Rather than realising that the Heartscapes they venture out into are representations of their own memories and experiences, again they’re told by ReSource. Rather than deducing that the demons that they’re fighting are embodiments of their own emotions and struggles, the protagonists are simply told by ReSource. But again, this seems to be in fact the clunkiest possible way to handle the mystery of the game. But ReSource falls short of being a Pokédex or a Navi and instead functions as a way to drip feed the game’s revelations to the player. The game also leaves a substantial amount of exposition to ReSource, a strange AI that talks to the girls through a mysterious app on their phones: FreeSpace. Wouldn’t it be more intriguing to experience the events of the game chronologically? Wouldn’t it be more engaging to have our perspective aligned with Ao’s, to experience the jarring transition of walking to school, opening the door to our classroom and realising we’ve been transported to an entirely different world? It seems to be perhaps one of the worst ways to handle the opening sequence of events. Wouldn’t it be more intriguing to begin at the point where Ao is transported to the other world? Instead, the story begins a few days afterwards, with a lot of the occurrences of the first few days shown via flashback. But the starting point of the game seems strange from a narrative sense as well. You get the point.įor the most part, what pulls the player onwards is the intriguing storyline and the anime-style characters, written to be endearing and idealistic. We walk through the school and initiate a dialogue cutscene, before walking to another point in the school to initiate another dialogue cutscene, before walking to another. Cutscenes are administered so frequently that the agency of the player is undermined and the game shifts into almost visual novel territory. But this isn’t just told to us, we learn it, and then we’re treated immediately to a flashback of Yuki being unable to use her powers. A particularly egregious example is that we learn one of the characters, Yuki, is unable to use powers like the rest of her companions. The story is strangely non-linear and there’s an irritating reliance on flashbacks.
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