Video game review: Lumines: Electronic Symphony
Remember how I said this game was a little glitchy because of a patch? That’s still true, but I got on a kick for playing this game and finally worked around the glitchy d-pad controls. At this point I’ve beaten the Voyage mode and played every other mode except duel. And that’s only because I only have one other online friend playing this, and we’re never online at the same time. Anyway, I’ve tried out the playlist feature, messed with the Master Modes, and played all level of stop watch mode. I’ve learned that there’s an XP cap at level fifty, but earning XP and gaining levels doesn’t really seem to do anything for me in the game. Doesn’t really matter though.
Lumines: Electronic Symphony isn’t a port so much as a reboot specific to the Vita platform. The blocks had been remade from sprites into 3d tiles, which look really pretty on most levels. This was true of the version I played on Steam last year, and the colorful blocks on highly animated backgrounds is a great way to show off the Vita’s gorgeous screen.
Just the graphics and the puzzle playing aspect would be enough to addict me, but Lumines also goes for my other weakness, a love of all kinds of music. I’ll admit a few of the songs are merely okay, but the vast majority are really catchy, and I found myself humming or singing many in between gaming sessions.
Those unfamiliar with Lumines despite its long history will find the concept instantly easy to grasp, and veterans will find the new Vita features are useful instead of feeling forced in. Blocks of four tiles come down front the top of the screen in combinations of two colors, and to the left of the playing field is a three block preview of the block combinations that are coming up. Match up four or more tile, and you clear those tiles and earn points. As the music plays a time slider wipes away blocks you’ve cleared, and the stack collapses, forcing you to reassess the queue and plan ahead.
I found that there were several more songs in the playlist mode that aren’t in the Voyage mode. This is in no way a complaint because just playing all the levels can take a while. Like, and hour and a half, or so. I’ve done it, and looped the game back over the to the sixth level. But getting toward that finale is almost an endurance event, and the final two levels are simply insane for how fast they chuck block at the playing field.
But those extra levels still deserve mention, and once you’ve unlocked them, it is nice to have something different to mix into the playlist to make it different from Voyage mode. Thee added tracks could fairly be called the B-side tracks, because they aren’t quite as good as what’s in the main playlist, but they’re still catchy, and I didn’t find any of the selections grating. Then again, I loved the original Tetris theme on the Game Boy. So my taste in music may be considered kinda…liberal.
Two special blocks show up randomly, or can be summoned as a power of your player avatar, also displayed on the left hand side of the screen. Tapping the avatar will grant you a special tile with a + symbol on it. This will attach to every connecting tile of the same color, which can lead to some pretty chain reactions with proper planning. With one tile placed well, I can remove a vein of one color all the way across the screen, and on the next sweep of the time slider all the same color blocks of the opposite color are also wiped out. Gotta love it. (^_^)
Other avatars unlock another tile that I’m conflicted about. It also drops randomly, so even if you don’t want to see this bastard, you will. At first, I was calling the symbol shuffle, but the tile doesn’t swap colors of what’s already there on the field. For instance, the random tile can be dropped with a block of all white tiles, and when that block hits the bottom of the screen, all the tiles randomly shift. They may all go the opposite color, say, black, and clear themselves out. Or they may end up with some combination of the two colors.
The problem comes when you’ve lined up a beautiful battle plan and don’t see the random tile coming in the queue. Either that or you do, but the whole bottom of the screen is covered in blocks that you’ve carefully placed for best scoring effect and can’t move out of the way. And then, you scream “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” in slow motion before BLAM, fuck your plan, because all the tiles are now different. Time for a new plan, like now. No pressure.
Now, the thing is, at later levels, random can be your best friend. This is because tiles come down so fast that mistakes are inevitable. So you build up an ugly unworkable stack trying to juggle these tumbling blocks as best you can, and it seem like you’re doomed. Then you hit random, and suddenly lots of tiles are cleared.
Sometimes. Other times you end up with an ugly mess that’s only slightly less unsolvable. Which is why I sometimes ended up calling this the “fuck your plans” tile, because that’s what it does every time. And yet, I kind of like it, because it forces me to constantly adapt to a changing playing field. Add this puzzle solving frenzy to music, and I can lose track of everything for hours.
There is another avatar ability, which will hold a block above the playing field for several seconds longer than normal. This temporary ability can be very useful when you have a high stack problem and need time to think. Trick is, you can only use one avatar ability per “Voyage,” So you have to commit to whatever strategy works best for you. I prefer to use the chain tile for my avatar ability, since it can bail me out in a lot of tricky situations. I can’t bring myself to summon the random tile as a strategy, but it sure does keep me on my toes whenever it shows up on its own.
Where the back touch plate comes in is the recharge period after an ability is summoned. If you don’t tap the back plate, your avatar energy will still fill up, but at a slower rate. There’s a bit of a trick here, in that tapping the back screen makes moving the blocks a little more tricky. I found I could do one or the other, but doing both usually led to problems. Some levels are slow enough that I could position a block and then tap the back while waiting for it to hit the bottom. But a lot of other times the level moved so fast that I just had to let the avatar regenerate on its own.
One feature that I was iffy on, the World Block, could be fun if it’s been fixed now. It does seem to be improved in the last two days. The World Block is a social aspect where blocks you erase in all other modes count toward a giant block made up of a few million smaller blocks. It’s kind of cute, now that I’m seeing it working right. My initial complaint was that the World Block size was something like six million, and there just aren’t that many people playing every day yet. But the last two days, the starting size has been two million, and so the small team of 1600-1700 players has a better chance of hacking the block out of existence. And as more players join in, the size of the block can hopefully increase so it doesn’t become too easy either.
I was a big fan of the Steam version of Lumines, so pitching a basic remake would have been fine. But these all new level designs and updated music tracks are worth the full price of admission for this reboot, even if I’ve already seen the game before in another incarnation. I’m still having some troubles with the glitchy d-pad controls, so I’m taking off one star for that. Another patch could fix this soon, I hope. But that still leaves the Vita version of Lumines with four stars, and I really can’t gush enough about it. I wouldn’t say its an absolute must have for a day one Vita purchase, but after you finish Uncharted: Golden Abyss, this should keep you entertained for a few weeks.
