What makes a person who they are is an endless ocean of choices, decisions, and mistakes. It’s nearly impossible to sum up the human experience succinctly, no matter how you go about it, but the past always returns as a unifying factor. Going through life, with every fleeting moment influencing, or influenced by, an infinite amount of moments, what gives someone that unique spark among the almost eight-billion could be condensed to the minutiae of human life, the trials and tribulations of living on Earth. Each trauma, each miracle, every fear and passion, coalescing into an approximation of humanity, the individual soul.

Blue Reflection: Second Light initially seems wrapped up in this hypothesis, with memories and recollections of the past at the forefront of determining who we are. Waltzing across each character’s reified backstory, a physical representation of themselves, the keypoint in coming to terms with oneself is found in accepting what came before. Throughout the story, however, there’s this constant rhetorical question being asked, an implication that shines doubt what you are approaching as a goal. As you weave between the collective backgrounds of the game’s cast, the detours through the various Heartscapes becomes secondary until… something happens. Somewhere between spending precious hours beside these characters and learning their experiences one by one, Blue Reflection… opens up. The narrative isn’t about "the before", the uncountable and infinite universe of outcomes that fused into what becomes an individual. The "past" isn’t “you”, so much as it’s context for “you”. What makes someone who they are after that, in the moment, is just as much the bonds they share, the loves that flourish, the passions ignited and fears embraced, as it is an arbitrary “past”.

…It’s sort of inescapable that this game is focused on the meaning of “moving on”. The summer vacation framing, the constant allusion to people not wanting things to end, the oppressing fear of what comes next and the change it brings… The future as we know it is beyond the horizon, endlessly far off but within reach, all the same. What happens to the friendships we made, the stories we’ve told and moments we’ve shared, five years from now? Ten? Fifty? Facing the crossroads at the end of an era, what will you take away, and what will you leave behind? Even looking at Backloggd itself, it eventually vanishing is a sure-fire possibility. Not now, maybe not in the near future, but… what do you do with that? For most, this site, the one-liner reviews, the heartfelt tangents, the caustic arguments, will all vanish without a trace, while others will hold the memories earned here close, all gained by sharing a passion with, to be blunt, total strangers.

Inevitably, this will end, and we’ll all move to new corners, a sort of “moving on” itself. But is that necessarily a bad thing? If the site died tomorrow and the community surrounding it shriveled up, would that change the love and hate that went into the words etched into it? Just as the past gave context to who we are now, does this community become another page of backstory, a background to appreciate as we move onto the next thing?

…These are some thoroughly navel-gazey thoughts brought out by what could be surmised as a “cute-girls-doing-cute-things” game, and I won’t pretend I haven’t gone off on similar tangents for an endless slew of slice-of-life anime. But over the entirety of Second Light, with every new character thrown into the party, I saw a familiar face, a person I recognized personally. Chalk it up to great writing, or chalk it up to me seeing what I want to see. I’ve seen these stories, not in a “trite anime trope” way, but in a “I know someone like this” sense, and even on a niche video game logging site I’ve seen the people who are deftly portrayed in Blue Reflection. I won’t go as far as to say this is an essential introspective reflection on community or something pompous like that. I’d imagine for most crowds, this will come off as a very well done character-focused slow burn, and that itself is by no-means a negative reading. But I suppose I can only say this, the story, what it meant in the grand scheme of things, hit me at the right time.

disenchanting poetic anarchy. quills soaked in blood transcribe fragmented stanzas across pages soiled with tragedy and insanity. hatred sows its seeds, obsessed with the universality of inner struggle. the seeds grow beneath lush fields of thriving imperialistic medievalism. faithful sacrifices are made in the strive towards a greater power personified by the beliefs of humanity. a single man who can only speak in genocidal tantrums sparks the beginning of the end. there is never motivation to continue forward nor is there ever a satisfying feeling of triumph. caim is just going through the motions while others beg for mercy at his feet. violence is a mundane necessity rather than an expressive resolve. not a single ending closes with excitement, only the depressive upset of loss. frenzied classical chords and pounding industrial symphonies amalgamate to feed the player’s own misery. drakengard is chaotically demoralizing, if nothing else.

Caim is literally me. No other character can come close to relating to me like him. There is no way you can convince me that I’m not Caim. Caim could not possibly be any more me. It’s me, and nobody can convince me otherwise. If anyone approached me about this not possibly being me, I immediately shut them down with overwhelming evidence that Caim was me. Caim is absolutely me; it is indisputable. Why anyone would try to argue that Caim is not me is beyond me. If you held two pictures of me and Caim side by side, you’d see no difference. I can safely look at Caim every day and say, “Yup, he’s me.” I can practically see Caim whenever I look at myself in the mirror. I go outside, and people stop me from commenting on how similar I look and act as Caim is. I chuckle softly as I’m assured every day Caim is me in every way. I can smile each time I get out of bed each morning, knowing that I’ve found my identity with Caim and I know my place in this world. It’s amusing how similar he is to me; it’s almost like identical twins. When I first saw Caim, I had an existential crisis. What if Caim was the real me and I was the fictional being? What if he actually became aware of my existence? Did he have the ability to become self-aware?