Melty Blood: Type Lumina is cool as hell. I wasn't sold on Melty Blood for years, but I did get to play some matches in the previous entry that I enjoyed - so I ended up picking this one up on launch, just for that early fighting game experience. Sure enough, this game lives up to it's predecessor and remains a great time. A tight roster that brings all the best bits of the returning fighters back and creates fun, new movesets alongside stunning spritework gives the game a lot of personality, and makes each character and stage memorable. I was dissapointed by the lack of a return of many fan favorites, including Aoko Aozaki and the now notorious Neco-Arc - but nonetheless, the roster is very solid. The mechanics of the game are fantastic, too! The shield system is unlike anything I've ever seen before, and create high octane, hair-raising situations just out of blocking a move. The soundtrack for the game is also phenomenal - Raito never dissapoints.

I have a few problems with the customisation options - mostly a lack of custom colours. It feels undeveloped. A colour picker would've been way cooler. I also feel that the single player content is a bit.. same-y. Not a big criticism, as there is a LOT of single player content, but I wasn't super satisfied by a lot of it. I also ran into numerous bugs on the PC release - which are hopefully being smoothed out, but still worth mentioning.

That being said, though, Melty Blood: Type Lumina is another swing and a hit for the fighting game genre this year. It's fantastic, and if you're interested, I'd reccomend getting in on it early and learning the meta as you go. Definitely one of the better games to release this year.

ADDENUM: 22/12/2021
I was wrong, this game had like zero longevity for me at all. Cool gameplay, but especially following the creepy first DLC addition and my lack of interest following the first few release weeks - gonna have to lower this one dramatically. Not even close to a game of the year. Fun enough, but had no longevity for me at all.

PS. Fuck Rapid Beat

MBTL is good fun. I don't enjoy it or play it nearly as much as MBAACC but it's cool that they made a new Melty game at all really. It's held back by being a weird TsukiRe prequel AU story or something. Because TsukiRe isn't finished yet you lose out on a lot of potential characters for story reasons. I don't mind Fate characters necessarily but I really don't care for this game having so much Grand Order content especially when you're missing so much of the original game's cast. I personally wouldn't have been as bitter if it was F/SN or Mahoyo stuff instead, but I'm not nearly as engrossed in Type Moon as a lot of people are. If French Bread wanted to make a Type Moon crossover fighter I would be super on board, just don't shove that shit into a Melty Blood game imo.

Still fun though. It's certainly worth trying for big Melty or Tsukihime fans.

At least from what I played, this seems like a good go-to anime fighting game to recommend for newer players to the genre while still having enough depth for higher level players.

I know some people complain about auto combos and the current shield mechanics, but I think they're integrated perfectly fine.

While common among a lot of modern fighters, there doesn't seem to be any character too overpowered or too underpowered. Feels like a generally balanced game where all characters are competitively viable for now.

Having rollback netcode on all versions is a great blessing, it'll help the online scene stay alive a lot longer than most fighting games that aren't the most popular.

There are still a few flaws though:

1) I get this is supposed to be a tie-in to the Tsukihime remake visual novel, but it's sad how little single player content there is. The story modes are ungodly short, even shorter than Under Night's arcade mode.

2) The roster is just a tad too small, has some weird omissions (though I assume more will come with Tsukihime Remake Part 2), and they're resorting to putting Fate characters for more sales.

Other than that, a solid game but note quite in my top favorites yet. If they had some missing characters and had more single player content in a future version, this has potential to go up even higher fo rme.