It's pretty rough for magical girls out there in the video game space. Sailor Moon's franchising hegemony of the '90s is long since passed, and contemporary juggernauts like Pretty Cure pursue their marketing largely through other mediums, with video games left an afterthought and certainly never brought to global attention, accessibility or acclaim. Occasionally something adjacent sneaks into a more general public perception, such as Magic Knight Rayearth for Saturn--which largely enjoyed the attention that it did thanks to its notorious localization journey and its publisher-driven audience rather than for its own merits--or even Final Fantasy X-2, which notably borrowed its iconography and battle presentation concepts from the genre... and was lambasted and ridiculed for it in great part. The conversation always exists in whether this sort of material is treated well in adaptive contexts like the aforementioned, but sometimes there's also the sensation that qualitative evaluation isn't the point of contention driving such rejection--rather it is the act of intruding upon a space that is not considered "yours."
2017's Blue Reflection was to be an antidote to dispell the miasma accumulated by such disregard, but it wasn't a healing process that occurred without complications. There was a magical girl RPG by a major studio, an original work that could stand on its own unentangled from licensing needs and restrictions--but it was a game by Gust, whose reputation precedes them for how consistently applied it is across all their catalogue, and exceptions didn't exist here. The existence of a female lead and a female cast was paid for with unrepentant sexualization of the subjects, even as the narrative propped up ideas and sentiments of self-worth and camaraderie between the young women--the dichotomy and rift in the ethics and intent between textual content and visual presentation that exists in all Gust games was brought to its most pointed breaking point here, largely exacerbated by the less fantastical theming of the setting, underlining even further the unexamined exploitation of women the developer has built its business and signature style around. Whether it was too much, tolerable, or just right isn't my call for anyone to make--and when seeking media with specific theming that calls out to one, compromises are often made for the sake of engagement--but it cast a sufficient pall over the enterprise that I washed my hands of it before I'd really even ungloved.
2017 didn't last, and the world is a different place now, even in the small and limited scope of a video game. Blue Reflection: Second Light now represents a burgeoning franchise of its own, with a spinoff anime and mobile tie-in game bolstering the ranks. It's the third Blue Reflection story, the second game, and my first real exposure to the series. Much like contemporary series-redeemer The Caligula Effect 2, I don't regret only now taking the plunge but consider staying my hand to have worked out for the best, as both series shake off their vestigial sensibilities and bring about realizing the promise embodied by their given premises. The upturn with each of them corresponds to the other so exactingly, as well as what the games generally focus on and care about, that it's downright uncanny to consider as an instance of convergent evolution between two frankly unrelated projects in the medium. I cannot conjecture a real connection between, only a happily shared sentiment of reconsidering the 'old ways' of what works or is expected in telling stories like this, and the ability to express something truer to the potential inherent in their creative fibre, with a willingness to move past one's own mistakes.
Second Light's exceptional qualities are perceived by me through a set of obscuring curtains, because I can't tell if they are as such in the context of their series for not having engaged with any other part of it. It's a freeing way to interact with media, in not being overly concerned with carried over connections and intersections of canon, and anticipated and supported by the game itself as it doesn't so much "catch up" a player in the events of past works--they are alluded to and inform the goings now, not recapped to exhaustion--but uses those past contexts as a support for saying and doing something new in the present. Second Light's principal cast is mostly new to the game, but they are rounded out by arrivals from the first game, the anime, and the mobile game--all existing with parity in the most naturalistic and mundane series-internal crossover that I've seen, never falling into artificiality or gimmickry in how the characters interact between one another or are integrated to the overall narrative. Old hands can delight in returning familiar faces, but each and every participant is made who they are by their portrayal within the game itself, absent of any external cachet arrived at through simple recognition and familiarity.
As a story, Second Light could be considered post-apocalyptic fiction. High-schooler Ao Hoshizaki is spirited away from a life of unremarkable normalcy to a pocket dimension of endless water, drifting through the void on a patch of land housing the remnants of a school much like her own. It's there that she meets her adopted classmates and fellow survivors of a calamity whose nature is not clear to any of them, making the best of their days within the abandoned infrastructure of their former lives and wondering if an end will ever come to their state of being caught in suspended, anxious tranquility. Post-apocalypse stories are often ways for people to express and vent anxieties about their own culture and lives and where they might be headed, but the flipside of the kind of cautionary tale surface premise that they can appear as is an equally as prevalent tendency to wield worst-case theorizing about human nature and human effects on their environment as a kind of wish-fulfillment escapist fantasy depending on the context of its creation. A sense of almost salivating expectancy is inherent to much of the genre, and it's easiest to see in works written from the perspective of Anglosphere creators whose participation and lived experienced in their cultures inevitably carries with it a privilege and an internalization that if it were all to come crumbling down, they would have the most to lose, giving rise to violent fantasies of taking up arms in reaction to mass upheaval. The disaster iconographies instilled by such works can read as jingoistic daydreams in the best cases, rather than whatever else they profess to thematically explore.
Make no mistake that Second Light is also a kind of fantasy where wish-fulfillment is integral to its voice, but the avenues through which it can explore its theming are more limited and ultimately more focused. Its apocalypse is quiet and unknowable, and its survivors number twelve in all, no more. The game's cast is literally all they have, whether they're spending their unending days at their facsimile of a school, or exploring the symbolic Heartscapes--environments given form by their respective psychologies--in search of answers or a way out. The antagonists in the form of abstract demons exist on the level of game systems, but that's the limit of their interaction--they are a silent mass of opposition that is never explicated or commandeered by something verbal to rage against or trade barbs with. It's a solitary end of the world, where reprieve from its loneliness is not reached through those kinds of momentary conflicts, and so the makeshift student body turn to each other in every way they can. The serenity of the game in these moments is its own brand of fantastic escapism, a scenario not crafted from the matter of bootstraps survival fantasies but an existence immortalized in an eternal adolescence, a summer vacation that does not end, spent between young women in their protected, self-sufficient private commune.
It's the intimacy that defines Second Light in what it's about and what it wants to explore with the framework it's contrived for itself. The absence of foils on the antagonistic end pushes the cast together to define themselves entirely through mutual patter, sincere heart-to-hearts, spats and arguments, aching drama and romantic flirtations. Oh, the relentless come-ons. Ao as protagonist is set on her course no matter what, but at the player's behest she can turn up her charm or rib others in their various conversations through dialogue choices, many of which involve said gleeful flirting. The magical girl genre has always been partly defined by its queer and lesbian subtext, whether it's willed and imported by the audience on their own, or something that's recognized as an appeal of the concept and deliberately cultivated by creators. It's great fun seeing your ships interact, but the bitter resolution mostly always comes in that realization of these gestured-at relations is never fulfilled even if they're heavily suggested. If Second Light acceded to this baseline, its dedication to queerteasing through Ao would be open to a less charitable read, but it's to the game's lasting credit that it does not merely exploit this aspect of itself but commits to it on a fundamental level. There is a lesbian romance and relationship here that's not left ambiguous, not shuffled off to the side, not made optional--it's part of the game's central narrative, partaken by its main characters, given time to develop through backstory, flashback and multiple "dungeons" and beyond, as the relevant couple continue existing in the game in their new dynamic and are recognized as such by others. It's a treatment handled with such gravitas and dedication that it casts Ao's less focal romantic shadings as more tenable, respected and genuine by association than they otherwise would have been--as real possibilities for these characters and how their relationships might read and develop, instead of transient teases.
The functional isolation of the cast leaves them converging on one another as part of narrative necessity, but also as the bedrock of game's most important mechanical systems. Second Light remains an RPG, but as a game defined by battles and number formulas, its merits would be slight. It's not a question of the relevant design being not up to par--it's an ATB-like melee of overlapping player and enemy turns on a timeline which delightfully becomes a sort of pseudo-Punch-Out!! rhythm game for the big setpiece duels--but whether the game is interested in pushing itself to an extent that learning its nuances is made a priority for survival and the inherent joy of taking part in its systems. There is no call or mandate to approach it as such, because the battles can be set to partly automated and never feel like the experience is robbed of something for their increased expediency. What you do in battles is ultimately less integral than the things you've already done in preparation, as represented by the light crafting and basebuilding aspects at the academy grounds. Members of the cast think and bring up installations and projects for the group to pursue building, each of which confers passive stat boosts that quickly overtake the numbers curve in their potency, and they also serve as date spots for Ao and the others as conversation topics and meeting places. This arrangement falls such that dungeon exploration and battling become secondary to the game's lasting appeal where it's better to view it as a dialogue-based game in which you sometimes fight rather than the opposite. The dates are ceaseless--it's not uncommon to arrive at a new juncture in the story and find Ao's phone popping with DMs from literally every one of her friends, and it's never something to dread, as they constitute the game at its truest self, devoted to uplifting the relationships between the girls as its most important and developed aspect instead of an accompaniment to the main event.
While there isn't a single character in the game that I think wasn't treated well and portrayed with sincerity, my conception of it as such further transformed in its later stages. The last of the cast to appear is one Uta Komagawa, a girl like the rest but at a remove from them. The narrative basis for her dynamic has roots in the anime, from which she originates--in there, she played the villain, in a rather monomaniacal and lurid treatment of sadomasochism. The Uta of Second Light is privy to the same narrative maneuverings the rest of the cast are, in being robbed of their memories to facilitate later revelations and development, but a more thorough re-conceptualization of the character happens with her than could be projected from the earlier incarnation. This Uta struggles with her identity not just in relation to her past actions, but in the way she sees and interacts with the world on a fundamental level and how it responds to her needs in kind. Uta is a story of neurodivergence in ways that video games don't explore often--they might more so in the indie space, but very rarely from big publishers like Second Light has. To see Uta miss conversational context cues, interpret things too literally, be perplexed by empathic concepts, maintain a flat emotive affect and be chided for it, hyperfixate on some things while not comprehending others is to be seen by any one of these aspects that ring true and are reflected in her, as the complete person she is in her portrayal. Uta is not made into a caricature or a simplistic reductive picture of her diagnosis, whatever it may be, but a person who is different and recognizes her differences, sometimes at peace with them and sometimes striving to change. There are more mirrors here to an autistic worldview and other social models of disability than in any other work in the medium that I've encountered, and I cannot stress enough how incredibly powerful those aspects are when portrayed through a character as multi-faceted and nuanced as Uta is, who is treated equally to her peers, and is as valid and developed a partner to Ao as anyone else--romantically or otherwise. There is no talk of "fixing" Uta because she isn't broken, and the narrative arcs around her always treat her with dignity as she continues reaching for her most genuine self. Video games have rarely provided me catharsis as deeply felt as what she represents.
Second Light is difficult to portray as appealing in a general sense because its strengths are so lopsided. I did not play it for the numbers game and was moderately compelled in that context--it was a momentary breeze that occasionally reminded me of the ecosystem facilitating its presence, but no more. It is however a game rooted in conversation, in atmosphere, in literal handholding, in melancholic ennui even at its chirpiest, with a cast of nervous and hopeful introspectives propping each other up and through the very apocalypse itself, with no one else's shoulders to lean on. If that sounds interesting in the least, I don't think anything else compares or is even attempting to speak the language that it does.
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There's much more that could be said about Second Light, like its enormously expressive character models and conversational staging, Hayato Asano's landmark score that could carry the entire game were the rest of it not up to the task, or the sheer volume of substantial descriptive text to be found in its various item, enemy, location and other miscellaneous catalogues--all written in the individual characters's personal voices--but at this point I'd rather just point people toward the game if the interest's there. It's a good one!
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