There’re only a few weeks left until the launch of BLUE REFLECTION Quartet, a special compilation of Koei Tecmo’s magical girl RPG series. The title bundles together revamped versions of all four entries in the Blue Reflection series, including a fully gamified version of the Blue Reflection Ray anime, alongside additional content, features and QoL improvements.
In anticipation of its release, character designer and supervisor Mel Kishida decided to share some tidbits regarding the game’s development, and shed some light on the origin of the “infamous” male protagonist of Blue Reflection Sun.
Blue Reflection Sun was the fourth and latest installment of the Blue Reflection project, released in Japan in 2023 as a free to play title. However, the game started out on shaky ground and ended up ending services in 2024 without ever coming to the West. It didn’t help that even before release, Sun already faced waves of backlash because it would be the first game in the series to introduce a male protagonist. The game was criticized due to “breaking” the series’ all-female cast tradition, but as Kishida recently revealed, this was largely a matter of unfortunate timing.
“The Ray anime and Second Light solidified the series’ ‘girls only’ worldview, so I feel really bad that Sun, which was supposed to come out right after the original Blue Reflection, ended up coming last due to various circumstances and thus made everyone go ‘Huh what?’ Order really matters,” Kishida wrote on X. Apparently, he had already started working on the character designs, and this presumably includes the male protagonist as well, as soon as development of the first Blue Reflection game had ended.
As Kishida explained in a follow up post, due to budget restrictions, the development team could only afford to make female models for the original Blue Reflection. However, they did aspire to create an RPG with both male and female characters, which is how the concept for Blue Reflection Sun ultimately came about. Having a “stereotypical” male protagonist like in a bishojo game was also a conscious design choice the team made in order to execute this idea. However, since this happened immediately after the original Blue Reflection came out, the series still didn’t have the reputation of having a “girls only” worldview.
With that in mind, it will be interesting to see how Blue Reflection Sun fits into the overarching narrative of the series, especially since Blue Reflection Quartet is set to tie all of the separate entries into one definitive package.
BLUE REFLECTION Quartet is scheduled to release on July 30 for PC (Steam), PS5, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2.
