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.