Lumines Arise – PS5 Review

Lumines Arise is the last of the loose trilogy of Synaesthesia Engine games from Enhance & Monstars, following Rez Infinite and Tetris Effect, both being Tetsuya Mizuguchi jams. The concept might be familiar to you, first appearing as a PSP launch title and with a subsequent sequel on the same format. They relied fairly heavily on licenced music tracks, but the 360/PS3 versions and subsequent iterations on Vita and PS4 skewed more towards original music, generally by Genki Rockets and loosely connected to another Mizuguchi joint, being Child of Eden.

That didn’t quite set the world alight in terms of sales, much to Ubisoft’s chagrin, but it did lay a lot of the groundwork for subsequent games. Much like Rez, it was an on rails shooter, but even more visually stunning in terms of flourish and needing to be in sync with the music in terms of succeeding. We never quite managed to scale the heights that our friend did (thanks Chris) but the set pieces remained no less spectacular.

We suspect that the deal that Mizuguchi signed to get Child of Eden published led, in part, to the founding of Enhance. So not all bad then. It did use that forgotten Xbox peripheral, the much-maligned Kinect, so probably was written off by many as a result of that, even though you could control it via the controller. It was also released on PS3 at the time but we only played on 360, so don’t know whether it supported the PlayStation Eye and Move controllers or not. A quick Wikipedia check later confirms that itdid work with Move controllers.

The bulk of the music here is performed by either Hydelic/Noburo Mutoh or Takako Ishida, with collaborators-a-plenty spanning multiple genres. Hydelic were also heavily involved in the music for Tetris Effect, so you’ll likely know what to expect. Some of the tunes bring to mind previous games a little bit, but we have to confess that we felt a little disappointed by the no-show of Shinin’ by Shinichi Osawa/Mondo Grosso from the very first stage of the original game twenty years ago. It got us into a genre of music we’d never have explored otherwise but given this is in effect, a twentieth anniversary edition, it feels like a missed opportunity to have no callbacks of that sort. We sorta understand the lack of inclusion of tracks from Lumines II¸ as many of the tracks on there were well known contemporary music of the time, but some of the obscura from the past otherwise would’ve been nice.

The first game Lumines: Puzzle Fusion had us hooked from the off, to the extent that we suspect if we found our PSP and the battery hasn’t expanded to twice its normal size, we’d easily lose a few hours to it. The same can be said for the glorious Vita version, Lumines: Electric Symphony, that we did everything it was possible to do, completing all the puzzle stages and unlocking everything. We still feel hard done by that there was no associated platinum trophy for that accomplishment though. Lumines Remastered on last gen consoles was also welcome, again the handheld version on Switch being our preferred way to play. So you might conclude that the series is best enjoyed on the go.

Lumines Arise though, is currently a PS5/PC only joint, with Switch owners being left out in the rain looking in at the glorious lightshow on offer, for now at least. And goodness, it is truly glorious. Continuing yer man Tetsuya’s fascination with all things synaesthetic,

Takashi Ishihara takes the lead as director here with Mizuguchi-san being joint credited with the concept lead, so it’s still very much his game in many regards.

If you’ve never played a Lumines game before, your aim is to get rid of squares of usually two-colour blocks as they fall from the top of the screen. A timeline sweeps from left to right and as it meets a completed square of a minimum of four blocks, they’ll disappear. The bigger the block cluster, the higher the score. And if a cluster is bigger than a three by three, you’ll trigger a combo. This somehow feels less intuitive in Arise than it did on the Vita, to the extent that we’re not stringing together lengthy combos as we once were.

The structure will be familiar to those who played the prior Lumines games for the most part, challenges are present and correct as is a tutorial mode for advanced techniques. We actually learned a few things as we played in terms of interaction with the mechanics of the game.

Make no mistake though, Lumines Arise is designed, above all else, to be accessible to all. No more will you have to play survival mode and go on a tear to see all the levels aka skins in the game. Instead you have Journey mode which feeds you four skins at a time, beginning with Dissonance and culminating with Destiny.

We chose to play on Normal difficulty, presenting something of a challenge rather than the far easier Easy difficulty or the rather more testing Hard. By doing so, we took things at our own pace a little more. That’s not to say it was particularly easy, but the beauty of playing Arise is that if you crap out mid run, you can continue where you left off. As we said, accessible. Once you’ve beaten journey mode, you’ll be able to play Journey Survival which is much more like the Lumines we’re familiar with, to the extent that a successful run covering all the stages combined was just under two hours play. Thank goodness for suspend mode on PS5 is all we’ll say.

By completing pretty much any task in the game, you’ll unlock ingame currency to use in the ingame gacha machine, penned the L-pon. Oh yeah, before we forget, you unlock Loomii as you play. Each of them corresponds to a real-world player, so our in-game avatar is winging around the ether in other player’s games. The gacha lets you unlock all manner of cosmetic items, except for four day-one DLC items. They’re fun, but it’s more a case of FOMO we suspect. We’d like a Rez avatar as much as the next Mizuguchi fan, but not for an additional premium.

A new feature in Arise is bursts. After you’ve cleared a certain number of squares, you’ll be able to activate a burst. That lets you clear a large chunk of squares in one hit, all of the same colour. Our biggest cluster is three shy of a hundred and the associated trophy. It’s best used when you have a largely clear playfield as if you have a cluttered screen, you won’t be able to build the biggest combos up. You can trigger a burst once the counter is over fifty percent but it’ll only last for a short time, our preferred option being to wait until our burst meter is maxed out.

Challenge mode combines the likes of puzzle mode from prior Lumines with a number of extra modifiers as you progress through the twenty-six levels on offer. They start out basic with rudimentary challenges like clear a certain number of squares in a set time, but soon ramp up to the extent where you can’t rotate your squares before you drop them for example. Our least favourite modifier has to be the stages where your squares automatically drop to the beat, the first time it shows up, that isn’t so bad. But the incidence in the advanced level challenges had us gnashing our teeth a little bit.

We suspect we’ll be battling the remaining challenges for a while yet, as along with the trophies for fifteen combos in a row and a burst scoring more than a hundred, they’re our final remaining trophies. It helps that Lumines Arise is a lot of fun so we’re sure to return again and again.

The time trial modes are included under the multiplayer menu along with Dig Down mode that first showed up in Lumines Supernova on PS3. It’s the standard sixty/hundred eighty/three hundred second affair that you’ll likely be familiar with from prior games. Dig Down is as it says, your squares get rid of the lines coming up from the bottom of the screen. We somehow got an S-rank on our very first attempt, which was unexpected, especially since we’ve barely managed to get close to the high score we first set. It’s great fun though.

In addition to the modes we mentioned, the actual multiplayer component is Burst Battle in which you play against either local opponents or online players. The latter requires a paid PSN subscription, but we’re happy to report you can bag all the trophies without needing to play against a human being. This is a big step up from the likes of Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 which locked a great many of the trophies behind the multiplayer.

Burst Battle itself is a battle mode in which you attempt to overwhelm your opponent by sending junk blocks to them via bursts, we expect it’s really challenging against a human opponent and they’re likely to go for the cheesiest strategy. We’ve not tried it yet, but we expect to get outright pummeled. We’ve played thirty or so games against the AI as practice at least, so might well venture into ranked play soon enough.

Each weekend you also have Loomi-Live which is a bit like the social events you have in Tetris Effect Connected, carry out actions in the multiplayer hub towards the community goals. We noticed on release weekend the community goals were reached in double quick time, a little less so last weekend. And today that progress has been slow again. We’re sure this is down to the typical people moving on to the next release that prevails, but it’s still great fun to participate.

Just like Rez Infinite and Tetris Effect, PSVR2 is supported, though unlike those two, it doesn’t feel quite so integral to getting the full experience. Enhance do recommend stereo headphones to play with though, so it feels like less of a barrier to entry in some regards.

In conclusion, Lumines Arise is really very good and really quite addictive. The community aspects are well integrated as is the progress you make towards the cosmetic unlocks. Everything you do counts. The tutorial is genuinely useful, even to Lumines veterans, though some of the challenges are a bit too tough for our liking. No callbacks to the original PSP game feels like a missed opportunity though, especially given twenty years since the first game have passed. We’re not as addicted to this as we were with, say, Balatro, but we’ve still had a lot of fun and we see ourselves returning on the regular when we want to chill out.