Words cannot simply describe how much this game means to me. I played the original Summer Pockets in 2021 and absolutely loved it, and my feelings have only grown stronger after playing Reflection Blue. Reflection Blue preserves everything that was great about the original game---the characters and their interactions with one another, the heavenly music, the fantastic art, and the beautifully heart wrenching scenario---while adding a full-game's worth of new content.

The new routes for preexisting characters, while perhaps not as strong as the original four character routes in certain cases, are a very welcome addition, with the completely new character route introduced in Reflection Blue being arguably the single best character route in both versions of the game. Reflection Blue also tastefully supplements the routes from the original game with additional CGs and insert songs, strengthening the already excellent direction.

The new take on the original table tennis minigame is quite fun and adds a lot of new character interactions that fans are sure to enjoy. In addition to the character routes and main scenario, the game also contains a lot of hidden interactions and encounters, creating a world that feels genuinely alive.

I waited for years for Reflection Blue to receive an official English release. I became active on Twitter for the express purpose of begging VisualArts/Key's then-President for an English version of Reflection Blue. I ended up becoming fluent in and learning how to read Japanese during that wait, leading to the quite ironic outcome of me playing Reflection Blue in Japanese even after it was officially released in English (which is part of the reason for my long playtime; there were still quite a few characters that I did not know how to read and had to look up in a dictionary. I should however note that it would not be surprising for someone reading in English to spend over a 100 hours in this game due to the sheer amount of content contained within it).

Even though this was technically my "second playthrough" since I already played the original game previously (and I've also watched the anime adaptation), the game's emotional moments were just as strong as they were during my first playthrough. Quite simply, Summer Pockets is a masterpiece, and Reflection Blue is the definitive version of Summer Pockets.

With all outstanding "technical" issues now resolved, you should not hesitate to purchase this release if you are interested in playing this game.

True to its genre as a work of "chuunibyou" ("Eighth-grader syndrome"), I first thought I would dislike this game as it appeared to be nothing more than a self-insert power fantasy written by an eighth grader. However, as I overcame the cringe-worthy writing of the game's first ten hours, I discovered a highly thoughtful, critical exploration of the human condition and of humanity's myriad attempts at explaining this condition through the various mythologies and legends of old.

This is a visual novel full of action, beautiful music, great acting from a renowned cast of voice actors and actresses, and references to the religions and mythologies of the ancient Semites. Its main issue is its age, which makes running it slightly inconvenient on modern machines: on my 1440p screen, the only way I could run this game without having massive lag spikes was to change my desktop resolution to match the game's 720p resolution.

The most brilliant aspect of this game's story is that it is a Japanese creation, and as such offers an outsider's perspective into the Judeo-Christian mythological tradition and associated folklore. The game even has a handy "lore" section that explains the concepts and characters that we who were born into this tradition take for granted (such as "Heaven," "Hell," "Adam," etc) which the original Japanese readers of this game might have been unaware of.

In short, this is a great literary game if you can get past its first route, but make sure you set your screen resolution to 1280x720 so that the game doesn't make your PC go haywire when you try to run it in full-screen mode.