This past week over on my twitch channel (https://twitch.tv/fredcasden 9:30 PM Eastern Start Time Mondays To Fridays, 5PM on Saturdays and Sundays) I've been playing Melty Blood: Type Lumnia. Now I was made aware of Melty Blood existence thanks to someone asking me if I ever played any game in the franchise because the developers of Under Night In-Birth also worked on a number of the older Melty Blood titles. So, it had my attention, because I really liked Under Night In-Birth. But there was a problem, the first being all the old Melty Blood games were release well before 2020, and there was no collection containing them.But then it turned out there was one Melty Blood game released in 2021, 'Type Lumina' which was a reboot of the original fighting series, done in conjunction with the reboot of the Tsukihime source material.
So finally, I decided to play it here in 2026, and visually, it's a great looking sprite base fighter, even if some movements don't exactly make sense at times. The controls are modern, every thing build around fireball back, fireball forward, dragon punch motions, and it's universal, so if you learn one character's moves, you basically can play as anyone. But this is the genius part, every character plays differently. There is a world a difference between playing as Vlov Akrhangel who is one of the tallest and slowest characters in the game who can be very stationary and Noel who has limited projectile uses but has a fair amount of speed and combo routes. Even if every character has the same basics, I've been having fun figuring out what I can do as a casual fighting game enthusiast.
There are some really cool gimmicks, such as the shield block / counters, health regeneration, blood drive, so there is a lot of strategy involved. Especially with Survivor mode where you have to constantly ask yourself do you want to save your meter or use a Arc Drive finish or EX move. This holds true for normal game play as well from one round to the next. But there is also the strategy that involves intentionally losing a round so you can use the Last Arc attack
And this leads me to the difficulty. Most fighting games have a very unbalanced 'AI / CPU' opponent system, as some developers favor extreme difficulty from the 90s (The Breakers), or things become very 'block heavy' (Them's Fighting Herds, Marvel VS Capcom 2). With Melty Blood: Type Lumina, I can actually play against the CPU on the Hardest difficulty and actually feel like I have a chance at winning outright.While I've yet to successfully complete a Time Attack or A Score Attack challenge on Hard, I'm not feeling overwhelmed by the game, and realize where I, as a player, make mistakes,
The gallery is pretty decent, unlocking sprite art work, some original pieces, character portraits and bios that are heavily detailed in giving everyone's back story but without giving spoilers. There are also guest characters from the Fate series in the game, so if you're familiar with those games (which I am not), you get a little more out of it.
All these positives aside, this is not a perfect game. Whoever did the English localization used text too big to fit in the text box, there is not English voice over cast, many of the titles that you unlock are in Japanese. But these are just nitpicks for the sake of nitpicking. Obviously the biggest problem Melty Blood Type Lumina (and specifically on the Xbox side since that's the version I'm playing) is that as an older fighting games (old as in 5 years in this case...) there is no one online to play against. I'm not saying I'll do well in online play, but it would be nice to see what the net code is like... and I've proven as recently as this year with Dead or Alive 6 and Mortal Kombat 1 that I can hold my own in online matches.
If any of this made any sense to you, then I highly recommend that you check it out. I know I'll be messing around with it for the next few weeks because I do want to spotlight every characters.
