It feels pretty rough to dislike this game cuz on paper its more interesting to me than any fighting game to come out in the last 5 years. It goes against the trend of recent fighters by keeping the movement options of Melty, speeding up the pace even further, and emphasizing a new host of defensive mechanics, a development that I would normally think is really sick if not for the fact that in practice, I dislike just about every change they made from MBAACC.

Stages are now horizontally massive and vertically shorter, compared to AACC where stages were really tight and tall. This makes forcing aerial engagements really difficult and combined with the new dash changes gives a lot of power to dashing under aerial movement. Moreover, blocking in the air is really unsafe now, as it will make you fall very quickly while causing no pushback to the attacker, allowing them to start ground pressure from most blocked air normals. If the aerial footsies and air counter hit fishing of AACC is what you like about Melty Blood, then I don’t think you will find that here.
Speaking of which, the new aerial counter hits have hitstun that heavily scales with the button that caused the counter hit which makes them really unstable compared to the old counter hits which had a consistent freeze that helped you get a full conversion everytime. Stuff like Kouma’s 22A anti air no longer nets you a full combo on successful application and aerial jabs can be really awkward to convert from. Not really sure why they decided to do this.

To compensate for the large stages, ground dashes now accelerate to become uncontrollably fast and pay for that speed with a hefty startup, but walk speeds haven’t been increased to accommodate the new stage size. These changes together make ground movement feel like total ass and microspacing feel like an impossibility. The new dash startup and speed forces you to hard commit to movements in neutral that interact really awkwardly with aerial movement and it makes the game feel like a total scramble at all times. Maybe I’m just really bad at this game's neutral, but I feel really unmotivated to learn it when it feels so comparatively bad to play and even watching high level I can see many of the same scrambles and gung-ho movements which doesn’t give me much faith. It feels like the game wants to kill the ability to get rewarded for cautious play and instead wants you to make big gambles to win footsies and I just haven’t experienced a good feeling of back-and-forth in this game.

Type Lumina’s stronger defensive mechanics and weaker offense compared to AACC is probably one of the more eye-catching things about it, given how oppressive offense has been in the last decade of fighting game design. Unfortunately, the way it's implemented in Type Lumina I find rather unfun, especially the new Shield mechanic.
In AACC, Shield required a different input for defending against standing and crouching normals similar to an SF3 parry, and like that game, tighter timing rewarded you for figuring out the opponent’s habits with a guaranteed punish. It’s a mechanic that saw a lot of use once players could figure out each other’s habits and it prevented the game’s defense from ever feeling stale to me as predictability can be hard-punished in most cases.
In Lumina, Shield is now a super block with 0f startup and 10f of recovery that doesn’t care about stand vs. crouch or tight timing, and the reward for shielding an attack is getting to play a looping RPS mini-game that takes away the prevalence of character kits, positioning, and the context of the situation, and instead it forces both parties into a static guessing game. It's so unrewarding yet also so prevalent and powerful because of its ability to remove the Shielding player from any unfamiliar or uncomfortable situation, making both the risk and the reward of shielding feel unsatisfying to me. The only nice thing about the new Shield is that it gives an easy way for beginners to call out and punish Heat activation, but aside from that it's honestly such a net negative for me because the more it's applied the more it replaces interesting situations with the shield RPS game.

When it comes to offense, Melty Blood has never been a series with much plus frames, but Lumina is -1 the game. Rebeats in AACC allowed you to whiff cancel in order to create true frametraps, but in Lumina that ability has been taken away and instead all characters get a universal spaced -1 in rebeat scenarios, which gives the defense some really powerful options to stop pressure and requires the aggressor to do some really hard callouts to counter them. The classic anime 2A pressure feels weaker than ever before due to the slow dash startup and the increased recovery on 2A animations, making it very easy to safely fuzzy mash and causing that type of pressure to be far too risky to be worth it. This isn’t to say that pressure in Lumina is weak, but the way it's designed it only adds to the scramebly nature of Lumina with how many characters rely on weird -2/-1 spacing traps that make the winning and losing options really unintuitive and dependent on character and frame data in a way that I dislike.

This isn’t everything but I think you get the point. I just don’t like any change they made to the gameplay. It doesn’t help that on top of that I am not a fan of the sprites and soundtrack, which aren’t bad per se, but I find the aesthetic in this one to be really plain in comparison to the lively and well animated sprites of AACC, the wacky backgrounds, and the much more experimental and unique music.

And honestly the biggest thing is that looking at all these changes from a big picture perspective, I really can’t figure out what new direction this game is trying to push. A better balance of ground and air neutral maybe? An emphasis on flashy interactions with the clashes and shield RPS? But I don’t think it really works. Contrary to what the last 1000 words would lead you to believe, I didn’t come into this game wanting it to play exactly like old Melty, and I would have liked to enjoy whatever new direction they chose as long as it's solidly implemented. The way it is now though, I just don't see it, as everything that used to be appealing about melty is still in Lumina, just done worse, and every new addition doesn’t do much but detract from those appeals.


I guess the one good thing I have to say about the game is that it's nice to have autocombos that allow new players to get to mid level much quicker and it's nice that its got a somewhat functioning ranked and lobby system compared to AACC. But aside from it being easier to get my friends into, I can’t find much reason to commit to learning this game. I can’t help but finish my sessions with this game feeling rather unsatisfied everytime, something that I haven’t ever felt with a fighting game. Maybe this is just me being stuck at a mid level wall and I will eat my words later, and perhaps the later versions of the game will clean it up and make it feel a lot nicer, but I don’t really see anything I complained about changing. The reception to the game is really positive and most recognize that the game’s mechanics are total clownshoes but “loves the game for it”, whereas I’m really not vibing with the clown fiesta. Is it unfair to compare a highly polished doujin fighter with multiple revisions to a newly released modern fighter? Probably. It just sucks that I can’t really see what new gameplay style or unique flair Lumina is bringing to the table. If I could see some unifying direction behind the changes, then I would respect them even if I didn’t like them (which was the way I was with Strive), but the changes feel so unpleasant and whatever explanations I draw out for why they would design the game this way feels so wrong and worrying for the game’s future.

Until Type Lumina’s qualities aren’t just worse versions of what I like about older Melty, I don’t think I will be excited about playing this game. I wish they’d have embraced a whole new direction rather than making a game that feels almost familiar yet so off.

Extraño hijo de UNIST, Dengeki Bunko: Fighting Climax y la F-Moon de Melty Blood. La experiencia general es un enfoque más grounded con mecánicas de los antiguos Melty Blood de por medio, siendo su mayor punto en contra los autocombos debido a cómo puede joder cadenas por mashear.
El juego de lo que probé está bien, pero es una dinámica radicalmente diferente a AACC y ni en pedo lo va a reemplazar. Si te gustó UNIST o Dengeki Bunko: Fighting Climax, es recomendable probarlo.
Aprovechando, el nuevo modo arcade es una mierda por cómo está estructurado, bloqueando personajes por un orden que te piden o siendo en muchas ocasiones batallas sin alguna justificación mínimamente decente, algo que hasta Street Fighter desde sus inicios hacía. Btw, Fuck Nasu, hongo de mierda hipócrita.

This game is insanely fun, it's so easy to pick up and play. But to master is a different beast. The combos are so fun and feels very creative. The moon system and counter block are pretty cool even if I forget they exist like 80% of the time. Fights are so fast-paced that if you're not use to it you might get annoyed constantly. But that's why you practice if you truly want to get use to it.

I heard people were negative about this game so I went in with low expectations but I don't see anything I would consider bad or terrible. The music isn't bad and the stages are really pretty.

I may not know much about the characters but most of their design isn't god awful. Sure, some are boring than most but I don't really care, I'm not playing those characters so it's whatever.

Anyways it's a really fun game and I see myself playing it whenever I'm in the mood for it.

I wish I possessed the ability to manage my time and anxiety better, because if I did I would play way more fighting games.

Back when I was in high school I was introduced to Super Street Fighter IV by a close friend of mine. My younger brother had an Xbox 360, so he ended up buying a copy and started getting really into "traditional fighters." Having previously only played Super Smash Bros. Melee and the occasional SoulCalibur II on the GameCube, or mashing my way through arcade fighters like Marvel vs Capcom, or Mortal Kombat, SSFIV became my first opportunity to "actually learn" how to play a fighting game in the comfort of my own home. I appreciated the time tremendously, as the most intimidating thing for me as a child playing a fighting game with other children was figuring out how to do command inputs. Nobody ever told me, and I didn't understand what the notation on the arcade cabinet meant. Street Fighter IV was my opportunity to actually figure it out.

I figured it out, and eventually figured out the fundamentals of fighting games other than Smash.

The same friend who introduced me to Street Fighter also then invited me over to play Marvel vs. Capcom 3 when it released. I wasn't a huge fan of it for a while, but then Ultimate MvC3 came out and for some reason I was all over that. I have incredibly fond memories of hanging out in my other friend's basement and the three of us going at it at UMvC3, slowly-but-surely learning stronger combos and strategies with our respective teams, only scratching the surface of the more competitive aspects of fighting games at that point.

The same friend who got me into Street Fighter asks if I watched EVO that year. I had no idea what that was.

Fast forward to now and I'm much more familiar with the FGC and fighting games. I don't play them nearly as much as I'd like to, given that I'm no longer in school, I live away from my brother, and my current friend group isn't nearly as into fighters as I am.

I buy way too many games as it is, and can't stop buying games on my wishlist as they go on sale.

"Oh woah, the new Melty Blood is on sale. I remember Melty Blood being that fighter that people joke about being played in the bathrooms at EVO. People love that game, I should try it out. The art style isn't really my thing though, and I don't get why the character designs are so bland, but I'll give it a chance."

And then I ended up buying Melty Blood: Type Lumina four more times on steam for some close friends for Christmas.

I love this game. Absolutely adore it. I have some small general mechanical problems with it, but I don't care because the positives outweigh the negatives for me. For the most part, I think it's fair to say that MBTL single-handedly reignited my excitement about fighting games as a whole. I've been keeping up with general fighting game news and hype for the past several years, but this is the game that I actually started playing consistently.

And it's not even the best Melty Blood game.

A gorgeously-drawn 2D poverty fighter based on Type Moon's Tsukihime remake, where you play as attractive anime high schoolers/vampires with subdued, yet extraordinary powers in beautiful urban-fantasy stages while listening to an absolutely godlike OST. Type Lumina's systems are expressive, fast and faithful to the original Melty's airdashin' re-beatin' gameplay, but a number of very apparent flaws, from the single player non-tent to the overbearing autocombo and shield mechanics that take a while getting familiar with, to the poorly implemented one-sided rollback netcode make Melty a great game, but a very hesitant recommend.

Enjoyment - 7/10
Difficulty - 5/10

Very interesting anime fighting game. Played through PS Plus Extra and enjoyed learning all the different characters. The majority of the time I was playing single player to mess around and achieve the platinum trophy. Only played a bit of online. Maybe I would have a different opinion if I played more online and competed at offline events? Still, a solid game worth checking out.
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So, listen. I don't really play fighting games. I know what most of the terminology means and generally understand what the frame data people talk about means, but when I'm playing these games I am two measly notches above truly mindless button mashing. I'm never the person who excels in games due to superior mechanical skill, so I'm not particularly interested in getting deeply invested in a genre of games where I'll never feel capable of mastering anything.

But this game? This game feels good. Other reviews here seem somewhat displeased with this game's potential as a competitively viable fighting game, but this is a dream for someone who engages with fighting games on the same level as I do - a level where you "learn" a character until you feel like you can do some mildly cool shit sometimes, and your eyes glaze over when you see some 40-input combo string appear on your screen. The lightning fast pace and truly bonkers mobility options set things up so you always feel like you're a split second away from doing something flashy and just laying into this little idiot baby who thinks they can cook you. Even defense feels chunky - successfully shielding an attack feels like a lightning strike. I can't even be mad about it, I get just as hype watching them block my own attacks.

Gotta love the characters too. These are VN characters, baby, and Nasu can't stop you before each match to make you read for 45 minutes about what constitutes a "vampire" in Souya, so it's a lot of fun seeing how they've adapted the newly-HD cast to squeeze character expression out of the animations. Mostly, this work was already done with previous iterations of Melty, but it's still fun to see the way Shiki and Aoko's mentor/mentee relationship translates into moveset similarities (and the way you can show someone three seconds of gameplay from the identical red-haired maids and they would immediately understand the dynamic the two have). Not exactly reinventing the wheel in terms of characterization here but it's schlocky anime fun all the way down. Even its most serious cast members are wound so ridiculously tight that you can't help but laugh at them ("the perfect combination of human and demon blood").

It is completely brain-off fun? No, but it's as close as a mainstream fighting game will come to providing that kind of experience.