Ever sat there and thought, man I love Sailor moon and Iβm so excited for the new series to come out? Well probably not, however if you have and know of the Magical Girl anime trope that still seeβs multiple uses to this day then this game will be for you.
In a nutshell its your generic anime storyline, girl is upset, girl gets magical powers and girl begins to fight horrible beings who threaten the normal world. If that sounds like all you need to enjoy a game then great news, Blue Reflection is for you, but for anyone else letβs dive a little deeper.
Gameplay wise the game is your standard RPG affair, and really its very disappointing to not see much added to the formula, you run around maps, get into fights, you take turns and the fight ends there isnβt anything new going on here. I wouldnβt say its lazy design but at the same time itβs definitely average, if youβve ever heard of GUST games you will know that their games are not about gameplay if at all, itβs about the character design and the story behind it. However, I will say I do like some of the special attacks, and thatβs just because a lot of them hit more than once, instead of just being a block of damage, itβs like your chipping away at them, and thatβs just really satisfying to me.
The story I will say is interesting, but again its nothing new, if you have played any RPG or watched any amount of anime you will see the tropes screaming at your face and its quite annoying that a game with such fantastic presentation would fall over at this point. Our main character is injured, people start acting weird and you defeat the enemies that are causing their changes. Itβs not new in most anime story lines and its definitely not that new in the magical girl style anime.
However, with that being said itβs not as if itβs a lazy story, the story is well presented and well displayed to the user, it is just, being a story Iβve seen many times before for me itβs started to get a little stale, but if you are someone who is new to this story, or just loves the style in general, I am willing to be you will love it.
Blue Reflection graphically falls somewhere between looking good, but also looking awkward at the same time, I think there are certain βAnimeβ style games that are ahead of the pack, Naruto and Dragon Ball games are perfectly good examples of this. Blue reflection, much like most of gusts other anime style games, have the same issues graphically. Character models look amazing, and they look near identical to the concept art, enemies are wonderfully designed also, and all over looks great. However, the actual animation work at play hereβ¦. leaves something to be desired, at its best the animations look slightly awkward, at their worse itβs just laughably bad for a game released in 2017 to look this bad.
Carrying on with gusts interesting graphical choices, just like all their other games, and one of my biggest nit-picks is the ground looks like actual trash, I just donβt get it. You have beautiful looking character models, interesting looking set pieces and then you put it all together by throwing some of the worst looking ground texture in a late 2017 PS4 game. I donβt know why this bothers me so much, but it just makes the games look muddy and unattractive to me, I get maybe they donβt have good textures for ground and grass, but if thatβs the case donβt use that in your game? I donβt know. Everything else in the game however does look better, effects from your attacks to the transformation scenes have been given clearly much more attention and love than the rest of the game, and Iβm starting to think GUST should hire some new artists because they are seriously starting to fall behind.
Blue reflection is an odd game, it isnβt a bad game, but itβs like itβs the very top of GUSTβs lazy RPGβs released over the last few years. Itβs SO CLOSE to being a fantastic and enjoyable game that it becomes more frustrating to me overall, I just canβt help thinking that if they put a little more effort in here or there it could have been a great game. However, they didnβt and as it stands I feel like there is a lot of wasted potential on this game, if you are someone who likes these sorts of games fantastic this is for you, if you enjoy this kind of story itβs for you. Look into what you want to play, because this is a game that is above average and so close to being great it annoys me, 6/10.
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