Blue Reflection Ray

Individual pieces of human emotion usually take form as flowers known as "Fragments." The select few who possess strong enough Fragments can become "Reflectors," beings who equip specialized rings that allow them to connect their thoughts, memories, and emotions to those whose feelings waver. There are two types of Reflectors—those who wear blue rings to protect those falling into depravity by preserving their Fragments, and those who wear red rings to prevent negative emotions by stealing the Fragments of those who begin to develop severe woe.

Despite wanting to socialize with people around her, transfer student Ruka Hanari's shy and introverted personality always gets in her way. In a chance encounter, however, she bumps into a woman who happens to drop a blue ring as she hurries away. Unable to return it, Ruka brings it back with her to her dorm. There, she meets the outgoing Hiori Hirahara, who also has a blue ring. They find themselves in several conflicts against red Reflectors, slowly realizing the true power of the rings that they hold.

Now striving to become Reflectors themselves, Ruka and Hiori must learn to work together and become stronger so that they can save not only the people around them, but also themselves from the emotions that hold them back.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Hanari, Ruka Main

Chisuga, Haruka Japanese

Hirahara, Hiori Main

Iwami, Manaka Japanese

Hirahara, Mio Main

Ueda, Reina Japanese

Komagawa, Uta ing

Tanabe, Rui Japanese

Yamada, Nina ing

Tamaki, Nina Japanese

Tanabe, Momo ing

Takakura, Yuka Japanese

Shirakaba, Miyako ing

Oowada, Hitomi Japanese

Mizusaki, Shino ing

Izawa, Shiori Japanese

Saiki, Yuri ing

Sakura, Ayane Japanese

Tachibana, Ryoka ing

Hirayama, Yurika Japanese

Aoi, Hiroyuki Producer

Okada, Kouji Producer

Takashino, Shuuichi Producer

Yoshida, Risako Director

Reviews

Sep 24, 2021

AnimeEnjoyer420

Recommended

Recommendation: A strong mahou shoujo series if you can get past the terrible animation. The anime is standalone, it's neither an adaptation nor a sequel to the video game Blue Reflection, and features only a handful of characters from the game.

Story: A pair of magical girls called Reflectors, Ruka and Hiori, fight to protect other girls from a group of predatory Reflectors that try to steal their Fragments (analogous to a person's emotions or soul, they become emotionally dead and zombie like, and later fall into a coma without it). The story takes some wild turns (which I won't spoil) building off that ... premise, and ends up in a radically different place than where it starts. It's certainly never boring, though occasionally it gets a bit too convoluted or abstract to follow exactly what's happening. Tone wise, it's squarely in the camp of "dark mahou shoujo", though it isn't excessive about it. It deals with some very heavy issues though, including child abuse, abandonment, suicide, self-harm and teenage prostitution. Listing all those off in a row makes it sound more depressing than it actually is though. The series doesn't wallow in despair or revel in the suffering of its characters. It's actually a pretty positive series overall, even a bit corny.

Audio/Visual: This show has a phenomenal OST, it adds so much to the series. Battles feel more epic, tragic moments hit harder, and moments of triumph give you chills. It is everything you would want from a soundtrack. The VA work is solid but not notable for the most part.

Then, we have the elephant in the room. Frankly speaking, this show looks awful. It isn't even the often-lampooned character designs, those simply have a shoujo manga look that's different than what you'd expect but not bad in and of itself. The animation is absolutely atrocious though. Characters are frequently off model, have eyes pointing in different directions, and have some of the most poorly drawn hands you'll ever see in anime. Aside from the battle scenes, which actually have some cool effects at times, and the nice, unique looking backgrounds of the Leap Range and the Common, there is almost nothing positive you can say about the series visually. It's a major letdown that a series this good was failed by its animation so horrendously

Characters: This series has excellent character writing and a wide variety of interesting characters with unique personalities. Ruka's character progression is very well done in particular, as she goes from a shy girl with no friends to a crucial voice of reason and motivator of the group. Hiori's initially generic "genki girl" attitude is also memorably subverted during the second cour. The side characters are complex and each have their own roles to play, and no one is extraneous. With so many things stacked against this series (the low budget, video game adaptation, etc...) it's kind of a miracle that it ended up being good, and the excellent characters are the main reason for that.

As a final note, this series has a lot of content warnings associated with it, as mentioned above, but there is a particularly extreme sequence of child abuse in episode 22 that most viewers will probably find troubling, especially those that are sensitive to that issue.

Reviewer’s Rating: 7

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Sep 25, 2021

SanaeK10

Mixed Feelings

I do feel that this show has gotten kinda of a bad rap, especially by people who write 1/10 reviews for attention and publish them the moment a show ends in Japan before subs are even out. But Blue Reflection Ray has been a rather captivating, if flawed experience that actually made me interested in the greater franchise.

Full disclosure, I never played the original game, and without knowing the show is actually a sequel to the game's events and it fully expecting you to understand the plot of the first game, I didn't have a good time the first time through. After reading and watching ... a quick synopsis though, I began to appreciate the show more. The animation is lousy, and unlike Sonny Boy it doesn't have much of a cinematic flair to it to compensate for it. But perhaps because of that, I ended up appreciating the plot and characters a lot more.

The show does feel quite aimless in the first half, up until the 10th or so episode I wasn't actively engaged; but come the second half, the show starts becoming a lot more focused in the story it's trying to tell, and by then I was hooked until the very end. Up to the point where I'm even seriously considering to get Tie to see where it all continues. Hiori and Ruka are really cute as leads and I do like the charm their social awkwardness adds to the show. I will say that the show does have one of my personal pet peeves, with abuse victims being main antagonists. It's not depicted that well here too, with it basically giving a lousy justification to Shino's actions. But aside from that, the core cast is still likable enough through and through.

It is a shame the Blu Rays were cancelled for this. I think maybe giving the show more polish can help in its presentation, but hey at the very least, the show did its job in convincing at least one other person out there in the world to give the series a proper shot.

6/10

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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Sep 24, 2021

KANLen09

Not Recommended

You know what I hate about game adaptations? It's not the final product that's the anime itself, but the production staff, or more precisely anybody who has the cheek to say that they can prolong these works to something like a 2-cour show (meaning 24 to 26 episodes). Please Japan, even if you won't listen to the Western fans that we absolutely DO NOT NEED shows like this, at least please consider that making a show is not cheap at all, and you can make-do with another show that will serve your budget better and have a better audience reach.

I've never even heard of Blue ... Reflection the video game itself, but based off of Metacritic scores for the original 2017 game, it's "mixed to average reviews", but the same could not be said for the anime adaptation, which is a spin-off of the main series. And boy oh boy, I suffered through this hellhole just to make this review to tell you the TL;DR that this show is already doomed for failure from the start. And if the anime Blu-Ray release was cancelled mid-way through the show's life, you know that the message to completely skip this show is warranted, even if it's for "various reasons" (it's clear that it wasn't popular, geddit?).

To be clear, magical girl series are a dime a dozen. We've seen this with Madoka Magica, Assault Lily and many others like it, but not all of them hold the distinction of being a rip-off imitation of (especially) Madoka Magica and one of my favourite recent underrated masterpiece shows of the modern age, Granbelm. There's just something about Blue Reflection Ray that kinda divulges from the whole Mahou Shoujo formula, but yet have no staying power because of waning interests that "nothing else is going for it". Look, like some people who can recognize that this show is good for them, it's that it tried to be emotionally mature with its setting, and it's a decent start and ending all things considered, I'll give it that. But to pad it out in the span of 6 months, man, does this become so tiring and boring to look at. If it was a game that I cared about, I'd not mind if it was that long if the story and plot had some substance to it, but Blue Reflection Ray, unless you played the game before, as an anime-only, your interest is as good as "Dropped" after the 3-episode rule.

The plot is so barebones; the characters feel like one-toned characters (especially the main female MC Hiori Hirahara because she's just a walking plot device and nothing more); this is kinda the best of the worst that J.C.Staff (that stands for Just Crap Stuff) could muster without much effort and all; and the music really is the only aspect I'll call decent from reputable music artistes like EXiNA, Eir Aoi and ACCAMER (especially the 1st Cour OST set I really vibe to it a lot, that set was really good).

I am not disappointed, it's kinda to be expected when Japan tries to pump out game adaptations to its own audience, and got the short end of the stick when even the anime fails to capitalize and influence people to the relevant IPs. For the rest of the world, you can pretty much just skip this one, there're other noteworthy Mahou Shoujo shows that will make your time investment a lot better than this turd.

Reviewer’s Rating: 1

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