Melty Blood: Type Lumina Review

Out of all the fighting games that I have played so far, Melty Blood: Type Lumina stands out a lot in terms of its presentation. In a good way.

Developed by Japanese fighting game developer French Bread, Melty Blood: Type Lumina is a reboot of the niche fighting game series Melty Blood. It serves as a prequel to Type Moon's visual novel, Tsukihime.

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The new game ensures that it updates itself to modern standards, with a streamlined battle system, tools for new players to pick the game up and play, suitable training mode, and much more. In fact, this title has more positives than negatives.

Fourteen characters join the battlefield in Melty Blood: Type Lumina

Melty Blood: Type Lumina acts as a prequel to the Tsukihime visual novel. Just like most anime fighters out there, the game does not have a single drawn-out story.

Instead, gamers can select the character from the roster and play through their character storyline, following their shenanigans. For example, Shiki's character story follows him patrolling the estate and eventually fighting Vlov.

Each character's story acts as a way to tie the game with the Tsukihime visual novel.

The story is provided with fully voiced, still images in visual novel style, minimal environment animation, and character portraits changing with different expressions. Each character is voice acted by prominent Japanese voice actors, and there is no English dub for the game.

So if you expect any sort of voice acting localization, I would say that will disappoint you.

A scene from Shiki's character story (Image via DELiGHTWORKS)

Regardless of that, character portraits and environments are beautifully drawn and almost look like the anime. In fact, most of the game looks like an anime in motion, which is great.

Pick a main, slay in gameplay

Melty Blood: Type Lumina ditches its predecessor's complex battle system and opts for a more streamlined battle system. In the past Melty Blood titles, players had to select one of the three moon styles, each of them having different specials or movements.

Type Lumina remains true to the spirit of the Melty Blood series with updated systems, allowing even users who normally avoid fighting games to enjoy thrilling battles with simple controls. Not only do they have access to the usual movement tools in a fighting game, but to make the newcomers feel at home, Type Lumina introduces a system called Rapid Beat.

It is an auto combo system that allows newbies to press a button quickly to do complex combo they otherwise would have to do manually.

Arcueid using rapid beat on Shiki (Image via DELiGHTWORKS)

Apart from the movement and accessibility options like Rapid Beat, Type Lumina also has some pretty good defense tools. Players can shield themselves from their opponents using the “shield” button.

Ciel shielding the attack (Image via DELiGHTWORKS)

The shield will allow them to block most of the incoming attacks from an enemy. What’s more, a shielded attack can be countered and followed up with a shield counter-attack, opening up the opponent for damage.

Ciel countering the shielded attack (Image via DELiGHTWORKS)

But what users want to use higher, damage-dealing specials? Type Lumina allows for that.

They can use something called the Magic Circuit, a bar right below the screen, to unleash special attacks. The Magic Circuit bar starts filling up over time and fills up faster when doing combos against the opponents.

Each special consumes one Magic Circuit bar. The Magic Circuit is also used to go into heat mode.

The Magic Circuit bar (Image via DELiGHTWORKS)

Going into heat mode allows players to deal extra damage, recover a portion of their health lost in battle, and boost their characters’ abilities.

Heat mode allows for health recovery (Image via DELiGHTWORKS)

Using a complete heat bar will allow users to go into Blood Heat mode, which lets them use a very high damage special called “Last Arc”, which is flashy, hard-hitting, and brilliantly animated.

Saber using her last arc (Image via DELiGHTWORKS)

A well-made tutorial is there for extremely new players, which is highly recommended to try out before one starts playing the game. Type Lumina has a lot of systems, and someone new to the series might get overwhelmed by all of it.

The tutorial mode (Image via Melty Blood: Type Lumina)

The overall gameplan of Melty Blood: Type Lumina is a mix of fast-paced movements, quick defense, and efficient usage of the Magic Circuit bar. The movement options provided in Melty Blood: Type Lumina are crazy, and using Shield can produce some pretty hype outcomes in a match.

Moon Icons

Instead of using moon style from past games, French Bread opted for a more streamlined battle system mechanic for Melty Blood: Type Lumina. Called Moon Icons, it allows players to go into a special mode that enables faster movement, greater damage, and special abilities.

Moon Icons start building up when an opponent attacks and is used for two systems:

The Moon Skill, which deals higher damage than the normal specials. Moon skill can be used when a moon icon is filled and uses simpler directional inputs compared to standard specials.

Shiki using his moon skill (Image via DELiGHTWORKS)

The Moon Drive, which once activated, opens up a wide variety of move-set options for players. Moon Drive can be used if the Moon Icon is half full and adds buffs to the movement and attacks. It temporarily boosts Moon Skill, increases the magic circuit bar, and even increases the possible number of jump/dashes.

Arcueid triggering her moon drive against Ciel (Image via DELiGHTWORKS)

The Moon Icon is a well-thought, well-planned battle system that might look simple on the surface to an average player. However, it opens up tons of variety for those who want to play the game on a high level.

Performance and Netplay

Melty Blood: Type Lumina was tested on a Ryzen 2600 setup with GTX 1050ti and 16 gigs of RAM on a Hard Disk Drive. In terms of performance, the game is brilliantly optimized to run on any modern system with any amount of system specification.

French Bread ensured that while Melty Blood: Type Lumina looked pretty, players did not feel any sort of slow-down or lag. Speaking of pretty, Melty Blood: Type Lumina is probably one of the last few 2D fighting games that use a sprite for its characters.

Kohaku fighting against Ciel in Tohno mansion (Image via DELiGHTWORKS)

The sprites are highly detailed and look phenomenal. Along with the sprite, the environment and stages are still drawings with some amount of motion added, and my god, does it manage to look visually delightful.

Coming to Netplay, Melty Blood: Type Lumina uses Rollback Netcode. For the entirety of testing, I played with my friends living in India, as well as online ranked.

Apart from a few instances where there was a desync because I skipped the starting intro, the matches were relatively lag-free and without any noticeable input lags. Safe to say, Melty Blood: Type Lumina can be cemented into the list of good fighting games with brilliant Netcode.

Players can also host their own lobbies and play with their friends.

The lobby system (Image via Melty Blood Type Lumina)

The lobby is pretty simple, easy to navigate, and players can go into training mode while staying in their hosted lobbies to lab and check their combos while using the range of tools in training mode to perfect their play-style. Melty Blood: Type Lumina ensures that the Netplay provided in the game doesn't become a headache for players.

In conclusion

Melty Blood: Type Lumina is the age-old Melty Blood, modernized and made accessible for newcomers while also not losing its age-old identity of being one of the top anime fighters in the market.

Coming jam-packed with a deep battle system, meaty training, tutorial mode, brilliant Rollback Netcode, and beautiful graphics, fighting game newcomers and even series fans should check out the game.

What is more, as of writing this review, DELiGHTWORKS announced that four new characters would be added to the game in the form of a DLC. Overall, Melty Blood: Type Lumina is recommended.