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.
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.
2 Comments
@gang_of_kites its definitely a better game than it was at launch but I don't think any of the core issues have been fixed. You can cancel the startup of your dash into blocking, but that actually doesn't feel like a big change for many characters since dash startup is still slow across the board and leaves you with a "sticky" feeling, If you dashblock in neutral you end up moving nowhere most of the time, and using dashes for pressure is still weak due to the slow initial speed.
Shield now works on parry rules, so mids beat low shield, which is a nice change that makes it less present in pressure, but the post-shield situation is still the RPS gamble that its always been, it just happens less. The changes have far from redeemed shield, it still gets used plenty to defend against gaps in pressure and still leads to the same situation it always has, something that I find to be an overall net negative for my enjoyment of the game.
Despite the defensive mechanics, the game's pressure is still extremely overwhelming compared to AACC, mainly due to combo reward and how easy it is to set up. Every combo in this game, from any starter, will lead to nearly 40% damage and give you an oki/setplay situation at the end of it, where the aggressor has opportunities for many more mixups on block. If the defender guesses correctly, it often leads to them getting a hit into a full combo and oki of their own. This leads to a lot of matches having players alternating whos doing the setplay and pressure, but with very little resets to neutral, couple this with the high damage it makes the game very momentum heavy. The main defensive mechanics also give you a clean hit or a knockdown, causing a complete reversal in momentum to the other extreme even if they don't give a combo due to how strong the pressure is in this game.
Compare this to AACC where, aside from the top 3 characters, damage is relatively low and combos often dont give oki without sacrificing even more damage. This leads to both players getting to trade blows a lot and makes victories feel earned as you need to win a lot of interactions per round. The movement mechanics are what make Melty Blood so unique, and neutral takes advantage of that the best, so getting to play a lot of neutral makes AACC more fun moment-to-moment, and the fast pace goes well with the generally low-damage nature of the game (making matches feel like a series of rapid fire low-risk low-reward decisions that pile up quickly). in comparison, Type Lumina's high damage, constant setplay just...doesn't feel very fun to play.
And above all else, the neutral simply isnt as fun to me in Lumina even when it does happen. Its not bad, but it really hurts how big the stages are, how the extremely lopsided the dash-speed is, and how all of that interacts with air normals in this game. Couple that with the fact that half the characters have powerful fullscreen space control options that discourage movement and it all just feels so much more unsatisfying to me. Getting air counter hits and converting off them still feels good, but honestly, that's the only thing they retained from AACC's design that's still great in Lumina.
I wish I could be less harsh on it, its probably not a bad fighting game at all and I encourage you to enjoy it, but I simply fail to grasp any appeal that AACC doesn't do better for me. Even if I wanted a setplay/pressure game, I'd much rather be playing Guilty Gear Xrd for that kind of appeal as I like the damage balancing and defensive mechanics of that game a lot more. Sorry for the negative response :(
Shield now works on parry rules, so mids beat low shield, which is a nice change that makes it less present in pressure, but the post-shield situation is still the RPS gamble that its always been, it just happens less. The changes have far from redeemed shield, it still gets used plenty to defend against gaps in pressure and still leads to the same situation it always has, something that I find to be an overall net negative for my enjoyment of the game.
Despite the defensive mechanics, the game's pressure is still extremely overwhelming compared to AACC, mainly due to combo reward and how easy it is to set up. Every combo in this game, from any starter, will lead to nearly 40% damage and give you an oki/setplay situation at the end of it, where the aggressor has opportunities for many more mixups on block. If the defender guesses correctly, it often leads to them getting a hit into a full combo and oki of their own. This leads to a lot of matches having players alternating whos doing the setplay and pressure, but with very little resets to neutral, couple this with the high damage it makes the game very momentum heavy. The main defensive mechanics also give you a clean hit or a knockdown, causing a complete reversal in momentum to the other extreme even if they don't give a combo due to how strong the pressure is in this game.
Compare this to AACC where, aside from the top 3 characters, damage is relatively low and combos often dont give oki without sacrificing even more damage. This leads to both players getting to trade blows a lot and makes victories feel earned as you need to win a lot of interactions per round. The movement mechanics are what make Melty Blood so unique, and neutral takes advantage of that the best, so getting to play a lot of neutral makes AACC more fun moment-to-moment, and the fast pace goes well with the generally low-damage nature of the game (making matches feel like a series of rapid fire low-risk low-reward decisions that pile up quickly). in comparison, Type Lumina's high damage, constant setplay just...doesn't feel very fun to play.
And above all else, the neutral simply isnt as fun to me in Lumina even when it does happen. Its not bad, but it really hurts how big the stages are, how the extremely lopsided the dash-speed is, and how all of that interacts with air normals in this game. Couple that with the fact that half the characters have powerful fullscreen space control options that discourage movement and it all just feels so much more unsatisfying to me. Getting air counter hits and converting off them still feels good, but honestly, that's the only thing they retained from AACC's design that's still great in Lumina.
I wish I could be less harsh on it, its probably not a bad fighting game at all and I encourage you to enjoy it, but I simply fail to grasp any appeal that AACC doesn't do better for me. Even if I wanted a setplay/pressure game, I'd much rather be playing Guilty Gear Xrd for that kind of appeal as I like the damage balancing and defensive mechanics of that game a lot more. Sorry for the negative response :(
gang_of_kites
1 year ago