Lumines is a game that in concept works really well, you have a simple 2 colour matching puzzle game that plays to music and shifts through stark visual themes and audio genres - however the stylistic choices make for a singularly ugly audio-visual experience.
The gameplay itself is always great to come back to, I actually have a lot of fun with the colour matching, finding patterns, trying to create combinations by placing the asymmetric pieces, and the challenge of timing your placement so you don't overlap with the sweeping bar. This is all well designed gameplay that is engaging and fun, but the accompanying music and art, and the way it's implemented results in an experience I can only tolerate in small bursts.
The music choices are a mixed bag, by which I mean it feels like someone dumped a bunch of discount demo tracks in a bag and pulled the play order out at random. The PSP games had a few early 2000's rock and pop hits that themselves didn't work together, mixed in with a variety of generic in-house songs from across the genre spectrum. These tracks are then broken down into samples which play based on your gameplay actions. Sometimes it works but often this approach turns the song into a random cacophony of noises with half the 'song' missing.
Remastered features the in-house tracks exclusively and hasn't managed to do any better with them. You jump wildly between genres, the playlist has no stylistic consistency, and for whatever reason the sound director on these games loves this specific blend of loud distorted noises that appear constantly. Any one of these issues by itself would be tolerable, but the resulting mix of miss-matched music, the way it's broken down and spat back at you as you play, and the clear lack of theme to the soundtrack makes every entry in the series the worst sounding music games I've played.
Lumines feels like the result of a really great premise for a game put in the hands of someone who has no artistic taste. The music is wrong, the sampling is wrong, and even the colour schemes that rotate with each track can range from great looking to 'I can barely see what I'm doing'. There's an artistic deafness to the series that runs deep into every entry. It's a testament to the strength of the gameplay that I end up coming back to each one, hoping desperately they got it right this time, only to be disappointed again. As such, remastered will remain a tolerable game to play on mute.
The gameplay itself is always great to come back to, I actually have a lot of fun with the colour matching, finding patterns, trying to create combinations by placing the asymmetric pieces, and the challenge of timing your placement so you don't overlap with the sweeping bar. This is all well designed gameplay that is engaging and fun, but the accompanying music and art, and the way it's implemented results in an experience I can only tolerate in small bursts.
The music choices are a mixed bag, by which I mean it feels like someone dumped a bunch of discount demo tracks in a bag and pulled the play order out at random. The PSP games had a few early 2000's rock and pop hits that themselves didn't work together, mixed in with a variety of generic in-house songs from across the genre spectrum. These tracks are then broken down into samples which play based on your gameplay actions. Sometimes it works but often this approach turns the song into a random cacophony of noises with half the 'song' missing.
Remastered features the in-house tracks exclusively and hasn't managed to do any better with them. You jump wildly between genres, the playlist has no stylistic consistency, and for whatever reason the sound director on these games loves this specific blend of loud distorted noises that appear constantly. Any one of these issues by itself would be tolerable, but the resulting mix of miss-matched music, the way it's broken down and spat back at you as you play, and the clear lack of theme to the soundtrack makes every entry in the series the worst sounding music games I've played.
Lumines feels like the result of a really great premise for a game put in the hands of someone who has no artistic taste. The music is wrong, the sampling is wrong, and even the colour schemes that rotate with each track can range from great looking to 'I can barely see what I'm doing'. There's an artistic deafness to the series that runs deep into every entry. It's a testament to the strength of the gameplay that I end up coming back to each one, hoping desperately they got it right this time, only to be disappointed again. As such, remastered will remain a tolerable game to play on mute.