I missed out on Blue Reflection Ray when it premiered last year, but I've become curious enough about the two video games in the franchise to give their anime companion piece another shot. Granted, I still haven't gotten around to playing the games yet, and according to my research, Blue Reflection Ray is very much connected to the stories and characters of both the first game and it's recent sequel (something that became pretty obvious as the series went on). Still, multimedia franchises like this tend to develop their television projects with newbies in mind; how else are you going to entice new fans to dive into the different projects? So, my general hope going into Blue Reflection Ray's 24-episode run was that I could still enjoy the story as a standalone piece, and maybe even get more invested in finally playing those games as a result.

Well, there's good news and there's bad news. The good news is that I was eventually able to engage with Blue Reflection Ray on its own merits, and that it even turned out to be a pretty okay time, despite the anime's many faults. The bad news is, well, the whole “many faults” part, not to mention that when I say that I was eventually able to get into the story, I'm talking about a full 8-10 episodes. That's nearly half the series.

Now, the first half-ish of Blue Reflection Ray is by no means awful, but it is often incredibly slow-paced, and the story and characters struggle mightily just to keep your attention. Anyone that knows me will tell you that I'm not opposed to stories that take their time; the problem here is that, for a good long time, BRR simply does not have the kinds of stories or characters that can justify that languid pacing. Hiori and Ruka are, to be frank, pretty boring heroines, and as much as I like the idea of having the two protagonists actively work on their friendship in order to reach their magical girl potential, these particular girls simply lack the personality and charm needed to drive a whole series on their own.

The girls have a mentor, Momo, who is slightly more compelling, since it's not very often that you meet an academically struggling super-senior in these kinds of shows. I also liked their civilian pal, Miyako, who adds a much-needed dose of spice to the group's banter, but the improvements hardly matter, because none of the girls are given much of anything to do in the first batch of episodes. The conflicts that create their classmate's fragments range from “My mother threw away my homemade gift” to “My best friend made a slightly passive-aggressive comment about my behavior, so now she must hate me”. Points for being accurate and relatable to the teenage experience, I suppose, but the stakes hardly feel intense enough to justify all of the magical girl shenanigans. Then, around that third or halfway point of the series, Blue Reflection Ray reveals more of its hand, and not only do things get significantly darker, but the struggles that both the Blue and Red Reflectors have to deal with hit much harder than before.

Soon, we discover that many of our heroine's foes have struggled with extensive poverty, abuse from their parents, rampant neglect, mental health issues, problems coming to terms with their own sexuality, and so on. By the time the series reaches its ultimate climax, it is much easier to see that BRR really does have something that it wants to say. Previously one-note villains like Niina and Shino become multi-faceted characters with genuinely complex goals, and even though the back half of the series still takes its damn time to spell out what everything is about, the process of moving through the story is nowhere near as much of a chore as it once was. To be clear, the story never hits the dramatic heights of something like Madoka Magica — even when the plot kicks into high gear, BRR is often too melodramatic and sloppy to keep you from completely casting aside your reservations — but the show definitely improves as it goes on.

Well, it improves in the writing department, anyways. The one area where the show never quite finds its footing is in its visuals. Director Risako Yoshida and the crew at J.C. Staff clearly have some ambitious ideas for giving the series a fairy-tale, paper-doll sort of vibe, and in giving the otherworldly battleground of The Common a distinct and striking aesthetic. The problem, as always, likes in the execution. Blue Reflection Ray is, simply put, not a pretty anime. Characters look washed out and flat whether they're at school or in magical girl mode, the animation itself is stiff and unconvincing even in the best episodes, and The Common all too often devolves into a parade of visual noise that reminded me just a little bit of that all-time great visual disasterpiece, Hand Shakers. The English Dub isn't stellar by any means, since the characters all fall into the exact same vocal clichés that we've heard for decades at this point, but I would still consider it the best way for English speakers to watch BRR, because it means you can get away with giving your eyes a break every now and then without missing out on the story. The music is also pretty good, so that's a plus.

Here's the best thing I can say about Blue Reflection Ray: It didn't convince me to not play the games. There are enough interesting ideas and likeable character moments here to convince me that the franchise must have merit, and there are more than a few episodes that came very close to tricking me into thinking that I was watching a good anime. Unfortunately, when you take the series as the sum of its parts, it becomes a lot harder to give it the benefit of the doubt. This is the kind of ambitious mess that stumbled more often than it soared, for me, though I can absolutely see it winning over any fans that are more keyed into its particular wavelength. It's far from a terrible anime, but it's nowhere near as good as it could have been, either.