#blue reflection second light

[elkinboots]

WELCOME to the beginning of a silly fun idea - i've airdropped the tetro cast into one of my favourite games, Blue Reflection Second Light! I think a summer in oasis would fix them.

i'm not saying that tetro and BR2 have the exact same premise or tone, but there are enough similarities in storytelling & tropes i enjoy that really scratch an itch in my brain in each. also, i love making characters into magical girls and giving them guns

watari would adore blue reflection 2

i've split the characters here into girls (and okazaki) and boys, but you can imagine them as one big happy group too. moko's there no matter what <3

you don't have to be up on the lore and junk, i like to describe BR2 as 'the magical girl commune game' (a heartscape's like a dungeon born of your life experience and imagination - everyone gets one, usually as you collect each character they unlock for you to explore)

expect more of this! they don't even have their magical girl outfits yet (and br2 is all about hanging out, my favourite thing to doodle characters doing)

[yuri-game-tournament]

Congratulations to the winners of Season Two of the Yuri Game Tourney!

Runners Up: In fifth place we have Fatal Twelve, and in fourth, Blue Reflection: Second Light!

On the Podium: A Year of Springs takes third place, and in second place, we have Seabed!

And our first place winner is Bad End Theater!

Congratulations to all our winners! Thank you to everyone for voting and playing. If you're interested in a third round, please submit your favourite games here! You can view the winners of season one here if you want to. Thank you again everyone!

[bijeille]

pompompurin yuki for calla!

[burgers-in-anime]

Blue Reflection: Second Light (2021)

[luna--flare]

October 8

Happy birthday to Rena Miyauchi, from Blue Reflection: Second Light - an international lesbian born on international lesbian day. October 8th is also a date important to me for unrelated personal reasons. What an unlikely confluence of factors.

[jewlwpet]

This is so sweet.

Then the sequel game came out... Hiori's in it, and Ruka is not.

And, what's worse, there's no indication that Hiori misses her at all. I haven't played it all the way through, so I can't say for sure, but I don't think it's ever brought up that Hiori had a Reflector partner other than her sister in the past.

The game is a great sequel in some ways, particularly how it develops Uta from a one-dimensional villain to a complex human being worthy of redemption. But it would be so much better if we got to see that Hiori and Mio missed their old partners.

[obscurecharactershowdown]

Group F Round 2

[image ID: the first image is of Miyauchi Rena, a girl with light brown hair and brown eyes, wearing pearl ornaments in her hair. she wears a combination yellow-and-blue-plaid and black satin dress. it features a bones motif--on her chest, hands, and knee-high black socks--and glowing cutaways on her waist. the sleeves are puffy, as is the bustle. the second image is of Tiger of the Wind, a horned blue and white wolf with yellow eyes. the third image is of the book cover of The Enchancted Island of Yew by L. Frank Baum. the color of the cover is gray, and it depicts a woman with dark hair, in an updo, and large flowers on the side of her head. she's wearing a pinkish, sleeveless dress with her right leg completely exposed, the material also reminiscent of flower petals. the cloth of her dress is raising with her up-stretched arms to frame the title. she's standing in a white flower, and her feet are bear, but around her right ankle is a piece of the same material of her dress. she's holding a long, black stick, like a fairy wand, that emits a glowing yellow light on the end. end ID]

Miyauchi Rena

shes a magical girl in plaid with a bone laurel and bone gloves and a hula hoop she beats you up with. shes a canon lesbian and heavily autistic coded. she became a magical girl to save the life of her first love. she failed and she doesnt know. she lost her memories while hidden from the apocalypse and didnt question the empty school on the island in a sea that stretched for forever. she wants her memories back but more than that she wants to know why she lost them.  [additional propaganda 1]

Tiger of the Wind

Pretty sure he was my furry awakening if we're being honest.

The High Ki of Twi

it’s never really made clear whether they’re a single person that operates two bodies in perfect synchronity or two different people with two different consciousnesses that share a mental link so deep they always act the exact same and to be honest i’m not sure which is worse. primary ruler over a country (twi) entirely composed of doubles like them. also on that note “ki” is a title that denotes a ruler (as seen in the secondary rulers, the ki and the ki-ki) and it’s not said whether or not they have an actual name. they were once separated physically and mentally due to a magic spell gone awry (and managed to cause a whole civil war before they got it fixed a few days later) and boy if that didn’t fuck with my head the first time i read it. the author is pretty fond of fucking with identity like that. this one wasn’t even because of dismemberment like they usually are. also worth noting that they are by all means a girl and only use they/them pronouns because they’re like. two girls actually. it’s all very confusing

[tatsumi-rin]

Youtube offered me google translate for some romaji - Emphasis on google translate, because last I checked this was a little inaccurate

I think she actually died you know

[bernkastel-ao3]

I'm going to be returning to Blue Reflection: Second Light soon, after I was able to get it digitally, discounted, recently. Playing a magical girl themed game is something that I've had a bit of a want for relatively recently.

[fishingsleep]

i think one of the funniest but also most fucked up thing about BRSL is there's this one extremely important person to you, just to find out you aren't their extremely important person and repeat 😭

[yuri-game-tournament]

Yuri VN/Game Tourney S2: Third Place

A Year of Springs vs Blue Reflection: Second Light

Info and propaganda under the cut! Not guaranteed to be spoiler-free

A Year of Springs

Description/Propaganda: cute game focusing on a group of three friends and each of their experiences as queer women!

Content Warnings/Other Info: None submitted. Available for $4.99 USD on Switch, Steam, GOG, Google Play, PS4/PS5, and Xbox

Blue Reflection: Second Light

Description/Propaganda:

A rare non-VN game/RPG with yuri at its centre! Blue Reflection Second Light is a magical girl RPG made by Gust (the Atelier company), and is the sequel to Blue Reflection, but can be played on its own. While its predecessor was mainly yuri bait, the second game has explicitly sapphic relationships in it.

The main character, Ao, finds herself awakening in a mysterious school surrounded by endless ocean, with only herself and three other girls inside it. The four of them build a new life for themselves inside the school while trying to recover their lost memories. The game is full of yuri hints. The girls live and work together in the school, and in their free time, go on "dates," which range from fully platonic to very romantic. Ao has ship teases with many of the girls, most of all the villain-turned hero, Uta. Additionally, you get a special ending with whichever girl you spend the most time with.

While the whole game feels yuri-esque, what makes it explicitly a yuri game is the revelation that two of the girls, before they lost their memories, were in love with each other. Their story before they lost their memories ended tragically, but now, they have a second chance to be in a romantic relationship with each other. Their relationship is cute and heartfelt, and it was such a pleasant surprise to hear them say "I'm in love with you" explicitly.

Blue Reflection: Second Light is a heartfelt, cozy, and exciting game deeply focused on the relationships between girls, whether platonic, romantic, or somewhere in between. It's fun to play, has beautiful art and music, and wonderful relationships. Please give it a try and consider voting for it!

Content Warnings/Other Info:

referenced self harm, death, and animal cruelty referenced terminal illness

available on Switch and Steam (Windows) for $59.99 USD

[carrogath]

one of these days i am going to have to make a post about blue reflection ray + tie/second light. bc the gentle emotional realism of the game combined with the complete fucking insanity of the anime is extreme mood whiplash played so utterly straight that it whips around to being like this niche multimedia masterpiece that no one has ever heard of and like. i want more people to have this experience. preferably you would go into both blind like i did and walk out a changed person but for those who do not have the time. y'all you have to know. you have to understand

[stiltsthegm]

GOTY 2024 #8 - BLUE REFLECTION: Second Light

BLUE REFLECTION: Second Light is a game that came out in 2021. At least A Highland Song came out in December of 2023, so it almost counts as a 2024 game. However, you will increasingly discover in my GOTY list that I do not care about release dates. I only truly care about when I played the game.

BR:SL is a sequel to the first Blue Reflection game made by Gust, a game studio with a really fascinating if often shaky track record. Although the Atelier series is by far their most popular and successful franchise, my introduction to Gust was via Ar Tonelico: Melody of Elemia, a game that blended a pretty standard RPG plotline with VN dating sim elements and a pretty cool and unique combat system. The writing was...okay at best, and often far too heterosexual for its own good, but it was a style of RPG I had never seen before, so I appreciated Gust's moxie even if I felt the end result was kinda mid.

BR:SL reminded me a lot of Ar Tonelico as I was playing through it. The story is certainly better than Ar Tonelico's, but still nothing I'd classify as "great". It's way too grindy and a bit long in the tooth (I still haven't actually finished the game, but I got very close). It is, however, an audacious game in all the ways I adore.

It throws you into an ATB-esque combat system where combo chains matter, you can interrupt enemies (and vice versa), and every action you take causes you to move back into the turn order by a different amount. It trusts you to learn on your own when to go for the big but slow hit, when to delay acting at all so you can guard just when a boss unleashes a powerful attack, and when to push for just one more chain attack to stagger an enemy. And then once you've gotten comfortable with that, it reveals that there's ANOTHER combat system layered inside the first one, where a party-member can go one-on-one with an enemy to really do some damage.

It introduces a crafting system where you can make new items (beds, vending machines, martial arts training dummies, takoyaki stands, etc.) with all the other magical girls trapped alongside you in a weird, liminal dimension that consists solely of a high school building and it's immediate grounds. You can then take each of the girls on dates to these points of interest you've crafted out of bits of abstract material dropped by emotion demons.

And by god does it have yuri. The player character--Ao--is an absolutely relentless yuri warrior, taking every opportunity possible to flirt with the other girls. Once Ao's affection with a girl is high enough, they'll hold hands when they wander around the school. The whole game was a parade of new things that made me smile and/or shout "really?!?!" at my screen.

It's just delightful.

I'm so glad it exists.

[luna--flare]

losing my absolute shit at this book from a video game

[jewlwpet]

I heard there's going to be a new entry in the Blue Reflection franchise that is in a different universe from Blue Reflection: Second Light (splitting off from Sun, which takes place after Ray).

That's exciting for me to hear because, as much as I did enjoy Blue Reflection: Second Light, in some ways it's not a very satisfying sequel to Ray. For one thing, because so many of Ray's characters weren't in it at all. For another, while Uta's redemption arc was by far my favorite part of the game, it relied on her losing her memory--I wanna see how it would happen if she hadn't lost her memory.

I think my biggest hope is that I'll get to see Uta and Niina interact again. At the end of Second Light, Niina said to Uta, "Right now, the only thing I feel is the desire to face off with your soul." I really want to see that!

But even if it turns out that neither Niina nor Uta is in whatever's coming, there are lots of things that it could do to satisfy me. Like Ryoka and Amiru, it was obvious they were going to be a couple once Amiru got her memories back, but we didn't get to see it. And then there's Ruka, who was my favorite character when I originally watched Ray. I want to see more of her! And Momo too! (Miyako is, at least, a side character in the mobile game which Eclectic Fansubs is subbing videos from on youtube--not that we've seen her in anything they've uploaded yet, but she's been mentioned).

[mostly-magical-polls]

Best Magical Girl Video Game - Round 1