Intro
This used to be called "first impressions" but perhaps now I'm a little past the point where I can accurately use that term. I've continued to ruminate on my thoughts regarding Blue Reflection: Second Light and proceeded to put more time into the game in service of keeping my thoughts from being too undercooked. After eighteen hours of enjoying Blue Reflection Second Light/Tie, I can move beyond this overwhelming sense of novelty where my jaw drops at pretty much everything, like that GIF of Espurr with its mouth agape. Now that I'm more confident I have a grasp on the gameplay loop and I'm gotten more practice with all of the different mechanics, both in combat and outside it, I feel ready to talk about it in more detail. If you spoke to me when I was 1 hour in I'd just be an endless wellspring of "I like the music. I like the characters. I like the combat. I like the UI."
No story spoilers here so I'll be speaking in general terms in regards to characters and game progression. If talking about unlockable difficulty levels there are is enough of a gameplay spoiler to worry you, this is your warning that I'll be talking about that stuff too.
PSA: Recommending Barrel Wisdom as a New Player's Resource
First, some advice. The excellent Barrel Wisdom site has a wealth of resources for both the original Blue Reflection and its sequel, and has been a favorite reference of mine when it came to managing my 100% run of the first game. For Second Light, Barrel Wisdom includes not only handy FAQs, mechanical explanations, and reference resources. Second Light has some rather significant missables in comparison to its predecessor so resources like Barrel Wisdom and other guides help avoid some potentially frustrating scenarios. Even if you're not aiming for 100% (which is actually impossible on a first playthrough anyway), the Second Light FAQ offers some much-appreciated clarity about the game and the broad strokes of what to expect.
Barrel Wisdom also contains a repository of gamesaves as well. Why are these gamesaves important to us as a new player? Well, Second Light now has four difficulty modes (instead of Blue Reflection's two): Easy, Normal, Hard, and Deathwish. The sequel's difficulty has also been reworked to be harder across the board, with Second Light's Normal difficulty feeling very close to the prior game's Hard. Considering that one of my primary complaints about the first Blue Reflection was its easy difficulty, even on Hard mode, this a great change. One wrench in the works is the requirement to beat the game once in order to unlock Hard and Deathwish difficulties, which that above link will help us sidestep. Simply copy over the System Save and you now have access to all four of Second Light's difficulty levels, which you can switch on demand just like the prior game. Make sure the System Save is the only save you download. The other saves will skip you to NG+ content and/or endgame, which as a new player I'm assuming you won't want.
With your system data now replaced, you can now access Hard and Deathwish right from the start, which you may need to switch to as you progress through the game to keep combat challenging. I generally stay on Normal or Hard, straying upwards to Deathwish when I'm feeling up for a particular challenge or down to Easy when I'm farming materials. As I clock more hours in the game I find myself sticking more to Hard, now having a more comprehensive kit to address more difficult challenges. My still-in-the-works recommendation for new players is to download the System Save that unlocks all the difficulty levels, then start the game on Normal; switch upwards to Hard for major encounters and bosses when you feel comfortable enough. That said, you might want to switch the difficulty down for any material farming session since grinding normal enemy encounters on Hard or Deathwish early-game can be a bit of a drag after a while. The wild-and-wacky difficulty curve of Blue Reflection is a topic I've written about in length elsewhere so I am eager to discover what the second game has in store for me--hopefully it's a smoother experience.
More, Bigger, Better
Now it's time to gush about this game, because there is a lot to love.
Character writing is strong, and made all the better by some excellent voice work.
I have to stop myself from writing a whole page just dedicated to this point. Second Light's characters are so much fun, and GUST has covered every angle to bring them to life. Animations are expressive, voice-acted segments are plentiful, diverse vignettes and interactions are plentiful, and even the unvoiced side cutscenes still have a level of effort and attention that was not present in the first Blue Reflection. It's clear that the sequel's expanded budget has helped immensely in painting an even more vibrant picture of its cast of characters.
Camerawork is even more cinematic.
When it comes to games, "cinematic" is buzzword at risk of death. Here, it really is the most appropriate word. Cutscenes are evocative of drama films and anime with some high-effort camerawork. Dramatic framing backed by truck or pedestal shots. Breathtaking pans, tilts, and dolly shots that reveal the extent of the expansive vistas and variety of detailed environments of the world. The letterboxing during cutscenes isn't just a cheap thing GUST slapped on to make cutscenes superficially feel more movie-like, but an intentional element that works with the way these scenes are composed. I would bet that the game's cutscenes have some pretty detailed storyboards in order to achieve some of those dramatic peaks that, in its best moments, Second Light is happy to dole out with regularity.
Sometimes the game made me laugh out loud.
Second Light isn't a funeral. There's a sense of fun that permeates through the game, sometimes bubbling up in some rather comedic moments. Obligatory "humor is subjective" but as someone who almost never laughs at games I have to admit there were some moments in Second Light that just hit right. Some scenes made me crack a smile, and I actually laughed out loud on a couple occasions. The emotive movements and expressions of the game's characters play a huge part in making this work, and feel executed in a subtle-enough way where you don't feel patronized with a direct plea of "this was supposed to be funny, please laugh."
The game can be hard when it wants to be.
Since I'm not ruthlessly optimizing and grinding, Hard mode feels just right in terms of difficulty. Boss fights are legitimate challenges and I'll find myself dying once or twice on some of the more tricky fights, barely scraping by on the first try for others. Deathwish actually feels like the New Game Plus-tier difficulty level it's intended to be, with some bosses one-shotting party members on their first turn. To me this reinforces my gut feeling that maybe Hard should have been unlocked from the start, with only Deathwish being locked behind your first completion of the game.
There's plenty to do but it's never overwhelming.
Let me balance that statement by saying that Second Light doesn't have a wealth of different mechanics and side content to engage with, at least this far into the game. But there are enough options as to how to spend your time that you feel like you have some freedom, and that freedom is backed by enough direction and some very well-organized menus and UI that it doesn't feel aimless. This is something the first game did incredibly well, and the sequel here continues that tradition gracefully, even while upping the complexity of the different systems you can play around with and expand in conjunction with your progression through the main game story.
Major boss fights are appropriately epic.
The most fun I have had with the combat system is with the big chapter-defining boss battles, which really let you spread your wings and use all the combat system's elements together in concert. It's only fitting that these moments are matched with a sense of scale, significance, and gravitas that make these fights stand out. What I've experienced so far is great, and I'm very hungry to get more.
Audio is the perfect mood-maker.
The soundscape of Second Light works wonders in setting the scene and the mood. Footsteps, chiming UI cues, and environmental sounds punctuate the world's background music, dynamically mixed as your focus zooms in and out depending on what you're currently doing or focusing on. Continuing the tradition from the first game, your hub has a variety of tracks that play depending on the weather and time of day. Blue Reflection as a series has always done a great job of immersing you into its world and evoking the very feeling of its environments, all through the excellent use of sound.
Story is an absolute treat for series enthusiasts.
Although the story of Second Light can be enjoyed in isolation without knowledge of the other entries in the series, it really pays to have an eye for detail on all the subtle (and some not-so-subtle) references to the greater world of Blue Reflection that pop up throughout dialogue, Database entries, and even some environmental storytelling. Certain story beats carry so much more meaning when you have experience with the rest of the series and can draw those connections to what happens onscreen during Second Light's runtime, and it almost pains me to think what someone might be missing out on if they make Second Light their first ever experience with the series. Not that I'd dissuade an interested potential player from making this their first exposure Blue Reflection since I think it's a fine place to start, especially if you're looking for more higher-budget polish, but not having personal experience with the other parts of the series definitely will make some story moments feel more flat than they were intended to be.
The Rough Edges
There are some parts of Second Light that I'm not so much a fan of, or are beginning to wear thin. Here are some of them, in brief:
- Gameplay loop can feel repetitive
- Environments can feel too big for their own good, lots of downtime and empty space
- Environmental gimmicks feel a little too slow, and their frequency makes them feel a bit annoying
- The first 1-2 minutes of any battle are the worst-feeling, which is a shame when normal encounters are numerous and short
- Playing normal combat encounters on harder difficulties feels like a waste of time rather than a fun challenge
- Brisk combat pace is good, but can feel a little too fast when all my attention is on my gauges/timeline and ignoring the rest of the screen
- Dying in battle now kicks you out to the main hub instead of teleporting you away from the fight but still in the same zone, making retrying hard encounters just a tiny bit more frustrating
- Material drop rates from battles and harvesting spots feels a little stingy; I wish higher difficulties bumped them up like they did in the first game
- Stealth sections needed a little more testing to not be so inconsistent and occasionally frustrating
- Being locked to walk speed during dates is only an inconvenience thanks to menu-based fast-travel, but boy what an annoying one
- I need more of the excellent soundtrack since some tracks get reused a lot
None of these issues ruin the experience for me but they do serve as a nagging reminder as I play that Second Light is not perfect. That's fine, though, as the reason I love this series is not for its flawless polish, but for the feelings of nostalgia, wabi-sabi, and occasionally courage that Blue Reflection evokes in ways that no other works do.
What next?
I continue to have an excellent time with Second Light each session I play. As my opinions on the experience continue to formulate, I'm still confident that whatever it holds, it'll contain that same magic of the other series entries that have captivated me so much and solidly establish my love for the series.