Great characters. Good character development. Some filler episodes. Each episode were an average of 60-90 minutes long. Auto-saved constantly, so easy to pick up where you left off. All characters were distinct and memorable. Great intro and outro songs. Good voice over. Easy gameplay. Amazing graphics. Intriguing storyline. Upon launch, Leo was the first protagonist you play and sets up his faction. Then there’s the bad guys and the in-between side characters. Each week was a new episode and new character. Side quests were fun and helped to acquire more skills and items. Overall, I loved it, even though I never got to finish about 8 of the episodes, including the final episode before shut down.
As someone who's been into the game since day one and has played it daily, I can only say I'm incredibly sad to see it gone, and while I understand the reasons why it got taken down and how it was pretty much predestined to fail, I can only say it had amazing characters and a great story progression. I'm sad we'll never get a conclusion to the story but I have zero regrets about getting into the game, and it'll always have a special place in my heart.
There was this movie in the 2000's called Vantage Point, it basically tells a single story but in the perspective of multiple characters, and that's what I felt like Luminaria did, there's this story going on and as players we would see all sides of the main story in the point of view of multiple characters + some of their own unique stories. That concept was wild for a gacha game story telling, I think if only Bamco was not responsible for Luminaria and the game lasted longer, they could have probably had one of the best story telling in gacha games
It was a free to play mobile game where the only gacha was for equipment rather than characters, which was always going to be less incentivizing for the majority of players to actually spend money. The game was also a fairly high-budget project for a mobile game, with 3D character models, hour+ long story chapters dropping every week, and a full English dub (featuring some pretty well-known VAs). On top of this, it’s from an IP that’s fairly niche in the west and has a history of failed mobile games. I loved what I played of Luminaria, but I’m absolutely convinced that the game was some kind of money-laundering scheme because I don’t know how anybody could have looked at it and expected it to make money.
I really liked Crestoria and Luminaria. I liked all the perspectives and stories. I have learned to not expect for tales mobile games to stay open long sadly.
looking into each person's perspective, from both sides of the spectrum and everyone in the middle of the wars, was something unheard of to me at the time, and with the bite sized, "anime episode" type of layout the game had made me fall in love with it at the time. I still don't believe the game had shut down. I knew the complains about it would naturally give it a short lifespan, but I wasn't expecting less than a year, let alone barely 8 months! Still, with what the game had to offer, my only hope is that some unknown indie developer picks up the style of it and makes something unique with it.
I had it pre-downloaded before it had even launched and by the time I decided to play it the first thing that popped up on screen was the end of life announcement...
Speaking as someone who played it, Outside of the marketing which could've been better, the game had good story and characters. The story mode was decently well enough balanced, some of the secret missions were aggravating, and then there was the gacha and raids... Gacha had no pity, and you needed to constantly pull to get your characters strong enough to do the raids in a reasonable amount of time... in many ways. Raids were grindy as hell. It took hours of doing the same stuff over and over again to get the 5* upgrade ticket which was basically the only thing of real worth in the raid rewards. The big issue was that instead of the bosses over time being side-grades where different characters may be better... It was basically always a harder boss than the last which I can only imagine made it harder for new players to really get into raiding as if you weren't doing the hardest difficulty you weren't getting anywhere fast. For the combat each character has a decently different combat style. Although they weren't really balanced very well. Gaspard was always decent as he had a CC that could hold the boss down and let everyone else do damage, but if you just wanted straight dps you may as well just go for August who just did a ton of damage and also had a shield. Also near the end raid combat was more about putting out as many damaging status effects as possible as they'd take off percents of a giant health bar. If there was one change I'd make to the combat it'd be to make skills flowed with your normal attacks more easily. Essentially skills and mystic artes worked similarly. You charged up a meter, stood still to activate them, and a thing would happen (usually a lot of damage one way or another). The biggest difference outside of the amount of animations and power level is that if you got hit while using a skill you'd get staggered out of using it. One part of Tales of combat is that skills tend to be woven into combos, meanwhile Mystic artes are little breaks where you get rewarded with a little break and animation of your character doing a lot of damage. Luminaria skills were just mini-mystic artes that made you stationary and gave an abrupt halt to combat.
Having played the whole game, I genuinely did love a lot about it. Aside from the typical compliments to its amazing story, character design, and especially its music (which, aside from banger OSTs, also featured original songs by frederic and Keina Suda!), it felt like its developers had put a lot of effort into listening to player feedback. In only the first couple weeks the devs had already gotten back with bug fixes and QoL improvements based around the current complaints in the community which felt really promising. The only flaws I found with its story were that some characters felt too tropey, and that their role in the story was mostly filler. Each faction had its central characters who were really interesting and further complicated the mystery behind the war the game revolved around, but it felt like these factions had just as many filler characters as they did key characters. I still loved them the same, but it made the pacing feel very slow, with many early chapters focused on setting up these side characters in more lighthearted ways before we could really start to appreciate them in a more serious story context. Even the small amount of story events were just filler. I can only remember one about some Valentine's Day gag. The fact that the one-hour story chapters were released weekly made it hard to stay up to date after a while, but the idea of presenting the game like a weekly anime was a pretty cool experience. It was even cooler in the sense that there was no defined order; it was more about piecing the story together than about experiencing it in the most optimal order. For most people who played in release order though, it meant you'd get to see what people were saying about each newly aired episode, which you could find in comments that were built into the game itself. This system's problem though was that eventually, most people got burnt out, and if you were unwilling to catch back up afterwards, then usually you'd quit for good, which is a shame considering the story really did start to pick up towards the end of the game's life. But, and understandably so, the game's identity as a portrait-only experience was very controversial, and deterred many from getting the chance to even see how cool the story was in the first place. Even still though, I did appreciate their attempt at trying something new. You could play it in public without looking too out of place, and it autosaved frequently so that you could put it down and not worry about starting too far back. It really felt like a story-oriented game that could actually be played anywhere. I took advantage of that as I was able to play small portions of it in my free time on the bus or during lunchbreaks. The main menu was even organized like a social media app, which really helped to make the game feel casual, which although cool, I suppose it only hurts the game if the goal is to make money. Add that to how its monetization strategy was focused on pulling for character gear instead of actual characters, there was no real incentive to spend any money on the game, though most people in general were hesitant to spend from the start anyway having known about how Crestoria went. Outside of story content, its co-op boss events were tiring and overly-grindy for... cooking ingredients mostly? There was some limited gear and cosmetics, but the only real incentive to work on improving your characters was so you could complete these same boss raids faster and join lobbies with stronger people. The story difficulty was adjusted to your characters level anyway, so if you didn't care for events then the gacha and events practically meant nothing to you. Tl;dr it's no surprise that the game shut down. The thing that made it such a memorable game was its story, which was unfortunately brought down by the amount of filler due to some characters being less important in the central conflict from the get-go, which affected the story's pacing. The rest of the game was honestly just not worth the time. My hope is that the game lives on in a manga release, because although it perhaps wasn't the most original story, it was still very interesting and enjoyable, and full of lovable characters to boot. I really do think that the game itself had ruined its story by repelling a lot of people who would otherwise really enjoy it too, which is why the circumstances around Tales of Luminaria are to me, more sad than anything else.
A fantastic follow up to your Crestoria video. I also forced myself to not get into this game due to being burned so bad before. So it’s really interesting to see some coverage on it after it inevitably shut down.
i never even new this game existed and now that i do its gone lol. ive heard of the previous tales mobile games and seen trailers for them beforehand but for whatever reason this one went under the radar.
I have a feeling that they burned money and didnt make it back quick enough, I loved this game it was the most un mobile mobile game And man I'm so sad the story didn't get told
As someone who played it when it announced EoS because of FOMO I think it really also suffered from the camera (its too zoomed in), poor controls and very poor monetization that discouraged people from spending money. As well as the story moving too slow. Crestoria worked because it hit the ground running and got things up and going after only a few hours. Luminaria had episodes for every single character and planned to do 8 of them for each one and crossroad episodes when each batch was finished. But each episode lasts like 1-2 hours and its laboriously slow to go through 30 hours of just an introduction to each character with little movement in the plot.
I only really played it for about a day until it kind sat on my phone for weeks on end. Just didn’t vibe with it. I remember there was a gel collecting mini game where it turned into literally PAC-MAN, w/ the music, sfx and everything.
I was honestly thinking of your crestoria video when I saw this was closing down. I was enjoying the story but i agree (like most) the combat and portrait only mode needed work. But there is a youtuber named time factor that has the stories on their Playlist if interested. I found out because I was gonna do the same at first. Btw this is the only tales game I ever "played" so I can't fully to the veterans.
Luminaria was pretty fun when I played it, as far as I was aware, it had a couple big missteps at the start that it never really recovered from. the portrait mode was definitely a huge turn-off for some. The content was also fairly stale in a few ways, there was the main story which you'd do once and never again, and the only "repeatable" content was a raid boss you'd fight with 4 people, but they would have people keep refighting the same boss for 4-5 weeks in a row, with the only variation being an incentive to fight it with a different set of characters. I remember a lot of people were pretty upset about the snake boss since it was the longest boss fight by a mile, and that was the only boss you'd fight for 5 weeks straight. The way the game was played and even with a large cast, a lot of the characters felt really unique and good to play, so still disappointing to see it go.
I played the game for two days ever since it's arrival in Play Store, and i have to say, it wasn't a good ride for this, but it wasn't bad either. The characters are unique, the story divided between all of them is quite a creative touch, gameplay is somewhat viable (except for the fact i couldn't find the button to use artes lol), music is fantastic, fits just fine with each area, the anime styled gameplay is good, the content used here doesn't fail in many parts of the game. Still, i have to remember this guy is miles away from being a Genshin, Fire Emblem or Tales game, where you have different characters, each with their own attributes and stories being revealed as you play. Everything (if not all of it)that the game offers comes to you all of a sudden in the very first 1-10 minutes, which makes you quite overloaded, making you play every story one by one, and being overloaded of content is quite a problem, even for an advanced device. Bandai put a lot of effort into this game, from the epic commercials in the official tales channel to gameplay, they have done what they could to make this game an excellent gacha, and all was flushed away in less than a month. Yet we should give some credit for their efforts, they made a game worthy of attention. If it didn't fell for the same fate as the previous two, this was still worth a try, but being so sudden in content was the problem that made it fall.
I've played maybe two chapters and liked the characters a lot. The UI was ok, the concept interesting, and the music was amazing. I would've liked knowing the cast more but I had little to no free time at the moment, and seeing how long it was taking to go through a chapter and then having no clear guidance as to what to do after to progress the story, I had to uninstall.
it really would have ben better off marketed as a fire emblem-like new IP than as a tales game. For series vets, it really did feel like just taking the name.
I did try Luminaria at launch...but honestly knowing it was a "Tales" game did as you say, hurt it more than anything for me. It was nice it had English dubbing which was cool, but cheesy writing made me turn off voices completely. The portrait view of the game sucked to try and actually play. My major issue was this game barely ran on any device I had. I had to use the final generation iPod touch...which...is tiny as hell, for a person like myself with big hands trying to hit tiny buttons and move along a very small forward path. I was also roadblocked within the 1st 20 min of gameplay. There was a side mission I found, it was to beat these wolves without getting hit. Basically to teach you to avoid. Problem: I was being attacked by foes from the side, that I could not see. Making doing this, impossible for me. At that point I was already so disinterested I deleted it, and went back to Crestoria... Saying that last bit now, feels like stockhelm. I feel like the anime OVA blew their budget, and they were just too hyped to have big names rather than a competent design team...
I think tales of the rays is still the best "tales of" gacha game, even tho it's japanese only. I guess it was a big mistake to start the global Version with weapons/artes only. Right now you can summon different mystic artes, which is a much better idea.
I played luminariia for about.... 2 days, it was ok guess, the main reason droped it was bcs didn't felt like doing the gacha part, i know i barely played it but in that time i never did a sinigle summon
I played for the first month. The problem for me is that there's no fun game mode outside of story. The multi-player is just repeating the same boss 100 times to get the best reward for it. What's baffling is that half of the gacha was costumes that you can't use on your first playthrough of the story chapter. So what is the point of pulling for costumes if I can't enjoy them playing through the story?
I liked the character design, but honestly, when I first saw this game I thought it was a knockoff Tales title. Like another company was trying to pass it off as being in the Tales series when it actually wasn't. Only found out recently it was an actual Tales game, and I missed out on it. I've honestly lost alot of interest in Tales series after Zestiria. I honestly got tired of Japan getting all the titles and the west missing out on important games to the series.
I' going to miss the game though. It actually had a very interesting plot about the war and the mystery of the primordial beasts. But EoS meant the whole story can never be told.
I like games on my consoles, or PC. I do not play mobile games. I don't own mobile "consoles" like the PSP or Gameboys. Yes, this means I missed out on some entries in the Tales series. For reference, I bought the first two games off a shelf in the store(Best Buy) when they released. Still have Destiny. I have never understood the desire to play a game on a 3" wide screen when you can play a game on a 5 foot wide TV with surround sound. Games like this are a non-event for me. I hope bandai doesn't spend much money making these. I hope they learn lessons from spending on these and shuttering them a year in. Add the developers to the mainline entries to get them done 6 months sooner instead.
I agree. Might seem overwhelming 21 characters. But, I must say as I did play every chapter available, every character has a great and memorable personality and takes part in a greater story plot we might never know what it was meant to be. Every character had a slightly different way of gameplay and attacks. I loved it so much! Intro and outro songs 😍😍😍 still a great addition to the Tales of franchise!
Bamco isn’t at fault on this one. Luminaria was entirely Colopl’s fault. They’re too far up their own asses to acknowledge their crappy “one handed gameplay” formula just doesn’t work. It didn’t work on Shironeko global, or on Battle School Girls, or on that mecha musume flying game, and it was not going to work on Luminaria either. There’s a reason why action games in mobile use landscape mode and multiple buttons on the screen, yet they refuse to accept that fact. Also, you can’t convince me that this project didn’t start as an original IP that got renamed into a Tales spinoff after they got the license from Bandai, because they didn’t use artes, spells or even items from the main series.
The gameplay was meh at best but the Story was actually really interesting if you gave it a chance. It was done in a way you only need to follow the characters you like, so you werent forced to do everything. The gacha wasnt needed at all for the Story so almost nobody had motivation to give money (is a good Thing but probably another reason on why it failed) I get the cutstences dont look the best in that format but im serius when i say that the game had one of the most interesting stories in tales, at least i found it more interesting that destiny eternia and even vesperia. So is a same it wont come to an end since it doesnt seem a manga will Be made like the one for crestoria I just hope the people who worked on it dont get their carrer ruined by this at this point 😔
Honestly I loved the game but was skeptical from the start. The management, the bulwark, the graphics, considering other mobile tales history I knew it wouldn't last on a budget
My opinion summed up: Tales of Luminaria was a fantastic game the character and the plot really had me going and I was sad it was shutdown. Bandai if your gonna make a game only to shut it down then what’s the point in making it? I would have rather Bandai make it a game for a console or heck a LN I would have paid either way :(
While the plot was nice.. there were many characters I didn't like the playstyle yet was forced to play with. I rather be allowed to play with w/e character I want, even if it makes it "less immersive"....a lot of gatcha games do this, they have a story, but your team can be who ever you want. Also, I know people love to praise the VA's... but to me it was a waste of money. Not because they didn't do their job right...but because money is limited...and had they invested the money in things like skins or character you could gatcha for it would end up better. Also, the tales name made no sense...it was even less "Tales" than arise.
3 core point why its fails 1 gacha got no gurrantte which make gacha pulls full of luck 2 the community multiplayer divided by 2 hard mode /extreme x nightmare which newer player cant join in 3 game monotonouse cause only story which 1 per week while you have to grind multi so much daily and fight same boss again and again
I liked the game and played it for the story, even though their release schedule felt very ambitious...it was fun. But it's sad they closed it. I mean from their point of view they would want people to keep spending money on gacha games, but in my experience gacha is just evil so I refuse to spend money on it.
I did play the game since launch, and while it was less buggy than Crestoria, the first impression was BAD, and it matters way too much. There were too many questionable designs, half were fixed in a few days, and the rest just stayed and aged HORRIBLY. There were plenty of quality of life changes, but the game pretty much stayed the same. No new modes other than the level up camp The game has its Thumbs Up counter for each episode, so checking to see that the game retained 10% of the players since week 1 is depressing to look at. For gameplay details, the subreddit pretty much listed them to death, so you can check them out there. In short, this should not have been a live service game. I, along most of the players who stayed, LOVE the story, characters, and soundtrack, but they're not enough to keep the players in.
I played it once-didn’t like it too much and never played it again. Too many characters and I don’t like Gacha shit too much. I can barely stand Genshin for that but the world of Genshin Impact is what’ll get me to play it every blue moon. Luminaria like the rest of their mobile games was doomed from the start. They need to just come on out and do a console/PC Tales fighting game developed by ArcSys to celebrate the series
I played it after the closure of creatoria, yes I was playing expecting the worst but I saw a gem on those 21 characters, everyone were protagonist of their own stories and all were getting involved in one bigger plot, characters portrait as heroes hide something dark meanwhile the villain a character showed us it's past and understand his goal that wasn't that evil anymore, look like a hero in disguise, the travelers team was the key, they were unfolding the main and bigger plot and every character was well written imo. looks and feels out a tales of game, I'm sure it was not meant to be a tales game and it hurts a lot how an other big potential story is discarded by bamco. recently I heard that tales of arise started as an other IP before being a tales of, imagine after berseria how many years would have pass to get a new tales not counting the mobile. BS bamco BS. about tales of Luminaria I miss a lot the characters, I'll recommend you look up for the playthrough of the game and figure out the story a little, was fasinating.
I'm sorry I got to this video a little late but I have played the game right when it was finishing I love the art style I love the music, game play was smooth and not that difficult for a person who play it often, and as an expiring writer myself it inspired a lot of my future endeavors however when it comes down to any type of mobile game it's always going to be about cash and the end and never really about anything else in my own personal opinion. I think that in my own personal opinion this game was the Pinnacle of mobile games that I was searching for next to when dragon Ball z released Legends and should any of my future endeavors be converted it will be in the same vein as this game or dragon Ball z Legends.
I'm gonna be that unpopular opinion guy, this game had no idea had it wanted to be via gameplay , you had on ralis paths and then musou combat. Neither work for this series. And those mystic artes are NOT mystic artes you'd have a better chance of telling Me this was a fire emblem spin off game. The story taken place between 21 different characters is uncessary its just 2 waring factions and a neutral. The gacha aspect was ok but the there was no way of telling when you got a featured item because you only had the dull stones and shiny stones but there was no way of saying oh! I got this item for this character. It was a surprise it failed as quick as it did but that's bamco for you mis management at its finest
For me Tales of Luminaria looks more like a Fire Emblem game. Bandai Namco should stop making new mobile games and focus on making console games. In MY Opinion I dislike Tales of Arise as it had many cliches and I HATE that purple hair jerk who was named "Law".
Great characters. Good character development. Some filler episodes. Each episode were an average of 60-90 minutes long. Auto-saved constantly, so easy to pick up where you left off. All characters were distinct and memorable. Great intro and outro songs. Good voice over. Easy gameplay. Amazing graphics. Intriguing storyline. Upon launch, Leo was the first protagonist you play and sets up his faction. Then there’s the bad guys and the in-between side characters. Each week was a new episode and new character. Side quests were fun and helped to acquire more skills and items. Overall, I loved it, even though I never got to finish about 8 of the episodes, including the final episode before shut down.
same T_T
They make it to 8 eps/char? I saw it on tweet they acctualy make it to hugo eps2 and final eps
As someone who's been into the game since day one and has played it daily, I can only say I'm incredibly sad to see it gone, and while I understand the reasons why it got taken down and how it was pretty much predestined to fail, I can only say it had amazing characters and a great story progression. I'm sad we'll never get a conclusion to the story but I have zero regrets about getting into the game, and it'll always have a special place in my heart.
There was this movie in the 2000's called Vantage Point, it basically tells a single story but in the perspective of multiple characters, and that's what I felt like Luminaria did, there's this story going on and as players we would see all sides of the main story in the point of view of multiple characters + some of their own unique stories.
That concept was wild for a gacha game story telling, I think if only Bamco was not responsible for Luminaria and the game lasted longer, they could have probably had one of the best story telling in gacha games
It was a free to play mobile game where the only gacha was for equipment rather than characters, which was always going to be less incentivizing for the majority of players to actually spend money. The game was also a fairly high-budget project for a mobile game, with 3D character models, hour+ long story chapters dropping every week, and a full English dub (featuring some pretty well-known VAs). On top of this, it’s from an IP that’s fairly niche in the west and has a history of failed mobile games.
I loved what I played of Luminaria, but I’m absolutely convinced that the game was some kind of money-laundering scheme because I don’t know how anybody could have looked at it and expected it to make money.
I really liked Crestoria and Luminaria. I liked all the perspectives and stories. I have learned to not expect for tales mobile games to stay open long sadly.
looking into each person's perspective, from both sides of the spectrum and everyone in the middle of the wars, was something unheard of to me at the time, and with the bite sized, "anime episode" type of layout the game had made me fall in love with it at the time. I still don't believe the game had shut down. I knew the complains about it would naturally give it a short lifespan, but I wasn't expecting less than a year, let alone barely 8 months! Still, with what the game had to offer, my only hope is that some unknown indie developer picks up the style of it and makes something unique with it.
I had it pre-downloaded before it had even launched and by the time I decided to play it the first thing that popped up on screen was the end of life announcement...
To be honest I still hope for a 2.0 relaunch with Two-Hand-Mode and more content.
The story, writing, music were top notch!
Speaking as someone who played it, Outside of the marketing which could've been better, the game had good story and characters. The story mode was decently well enough balanced, some of the secret missions were aggravating, and then there was the gacha and raids... Gacha had no pity, and you needed to constantly pull to get your characters strong enough to do the raids in a reasonable amount of time... in many ways.
Raids were grindy as hell. It took hours of doing the same stuff over and over again to get the 5* upgrade ticket which was basically the only thing of real worth in the raid rewards. The big issue was that instead of the bosses over time being side-grades where different characters may be better... It was basically always a harder boss than the last which I can only imagine made it harder for new players to really get into raiding as if you weren't doing the hardest difficulty you weren't getting anywhere fast.
For the combat each character has a decently different combat style. Although they weren't really balanced very well. Gaspard was always decent as he had a CC that could hold the boss down and let everyone else do damage, but if you just wanted straight dps you may as well just go for August who just did a ton of damage and also had a shield. Also near the end raid combat was more about putting out as many damaging status effects as possible as they'd take off percents of a giant health bar.
If there was one change I'd make to the combat it'd be to make skills flowed with your normal attacks more easily. Essentially skills and mystic artes worked similarly. You charged up a meter, stood still to activate them, and a thing would happen (usually a lot of damage one way or another). The biggest difference outside of the amount of animations and power level is that if you got hit while using a skill you'd get staggered out of using it. One part of Tales of combat is that skills tend to be woven into combos, meanwhile Mystic artes are little breaks where you get rewarded with a little break and animation of your character doing a lot of damage. Luminaria skills were just mini-mystic artes that made you stationary and gave an abrupt halt to combat.
Having played the whole game, I genuinely did love a lot about it. Aside from the typical compliments to its amazing story, character design, and especially its music (which, aside from banger OSTs, also featured original songs by frederic and Keina Suda!), it felt like its developers had put a lot of effort into listening to player feedback. In only the first couple weeks the devs had already gotten back with bug fixes and QoL improvements based around the current complaints in the community which felt really promising.
The only flaws I found with its story were that some characters felt too tropey, and that their role in the story was mostly filler. Each faction had its central characters who were really interesting and further complicated the mystery behind the war the game revolved around, but it felt like these factions had just as many filler characters as they did key characters. I still loved them the same, but it made the pacing feel very slow, with many early chapters focused on setting up these side characters in more lighthearted ways before we could really start to appreciate them in a more serious story context. Even the small amount of story events were just filler. I can only remember one about some Valentine's Day gag.
The fact that the one-hour story chapters were released weekly made it hard to stay up to date after a while, but the idea of presenting the game like a weekly anime was a pretty cool experience. It was even cooler in the sense that there was no defined order; it was more about piecing the story together than about experiencing it in the most optimal order. For most people who played in release order though, it meant you'd get to see what people were saying about each newly aired episode, which you could find in comments that were built into the game itself. This system's problem though was that eventually, most people got burnt out, and if you were unwilling to catch back up afterwards, then usually you'd quit for good, which is a shame considering the story really did start to pick up towards the end of the game's life.
But, and understandably so, the game's identity as a portrait-only experience was very controversial, and deterred many from getting the chance to even see how cool the story was in the first place. Even still though, I did appreciate their attempt at trying something new. You could play it in public without looking too out of place, and it autosaved frequently so that you could put it down and not worry about starting too far back. It really felt like a story-oriented game that could actually be played anywhere. I took advantage of that as I was able to play small portions of it in my free time on the bus or during lunchbreaks. The main menu was even organized like a social media app, which really helped to make the game feel casual, which although cool, I suppose it only hurts the game if the goal is to make money.
Add that to how its monetization strategy was focused on pulling for character gear instead of actual characters, there was no real incentive to spend any money on the game, though most people in general were hesitant to spend from the start anyway having known about how Crestoria went. Outside of story content, its co-op boss events were tiring and overly-grindy for... cooking ingredients mostly? There was some limited gear and cosmetics, but the only real incentive to work on improving your characters was so you could complete these same boss raids faster and join lobbies with stronger people. The story difficulty was adjusted to your characters level anyway, so if you didn't care for events then the gacha and events practically meant nothing to you.
Tl;dr it's no surprise that the game shut down. The thing that made it such a memorable game was its story, which was unfortunately brought down by the amount of filler due to some characters being less important in the central conflict from the get-go, which affected the story's pacing. The rest of the game was honestly just not worth the time. My hope is that the game lives on in a manga release, because although it perhaps wasn't the most original story, it was still very interesting and enjoyable, and full of lovable characters to boot. I really do think that the game itself had ruined its story by repelling a lot of people who would otherwise really enjoy it too, which is why the circumstances around Tales of Luminaria are to me, more sad than anything else.
A fantastic follow up to your Crestoria video. I also forced myself to not get into this game due to being burned so bad before. So it’s really interesting to see some coverage on it after it inevitably shut down.
As someone with horizontally arranged eyes, I too have trouble with portrait mode.
i never even new this game existed and now that i do its gone lol. ive heard of the previous tales mobile games and seen trailers for them beforehand but for whatever reason this one went under the radar.
I have a feeling that they burned money and didnt make it back quick enough, I loved this game it was the most un mobile mobile game
And man I'm so sad the story didn't get told
As someone who played it when it announced EoS because of FOMO I think it really also suffered from the camera (its too zoomed in), poor controls and very poor monetization that discouraged people from spending money. As well as the story moving too slow. Crestoria worked because it hit the ground running and got things up and going after only a few hours. Luminaria had episodes for every single character and planned to do 8 of them for each one and crossroad episodes when each batch was finished. But each episode lasts like 1-2 hours and its laboriously slow to go through 30 hours of just an introduction to each character with little movement in the plot.
I only really played it for about a day until it kind sat on my phone for weeks on end. Just didn’t vibe with it. I remember there was a gel collecting mini game where it turned into literally PAC-MAN, w/ the music, sfx and everything.
I really, really loved the game. I played everyday and it was sad for it to close
I was honestly thinking of your crestoria video when I saw this was closing down. I was enjoying the story but i agree (like most) the combat and portrait only mode needed work. But there is a youtuber named time factor that has the stories on their Playlist if interested. I found out because I was gonna do the same at first. Btw this is the only tales game I ever "played" so I can't fully to the veterans.
Luminaria was pretty fun when I played it, as far as I was aware, it had a couple big missteps at the start that it never really recovered from. the portrait mode was definitely a huge turn-off for some. The content was also fairly stale in a few ways, there was the main story which you'd do once and never again, and the only "repeatable" content was a raid boss you'd fight with 4 people, but they would have people keep refighting the same boss for 4-5 weeks in a row, with the only variation being an incentive to fight it with a different set of characters. I remember a lot of people were pretty upset about the snake boss since it was the longest boss fight by a mile, and that was the only boss you'd fight for 5 weeks straight.
The way the game was played and even with a large cast, a lot of the characters felt really unique and good to play, so still disappointing to see it go.
They are killing Blue Protocol recently with their communication.
I played the game for two days ever since it's arrival in Play Store, and i have to say, it wasn't a good ride for this, but it wasn't bad either. The characters are unique, the story divided between all of them is quite a creative touch, gameplay is somewhat viable (except for the fact i couldn't find the button to use artes lol), music is fantastic, fits just fine with each area, the anime styled gameplay is good, the content used here doesn't fail in many parts of the game. Still, i have to remember this guy is miles away from being a Genshin, Fire Emblem or Tales game, where you have different characters, each with their own attributes and stories being revealed as you play. Everything (if not all of it)that the game offers comes to you all of a sudden in the very first 1-10 minutes, which makes you quite overloaded, making you play every story one by one, and being overloaded of content is quite a problem, even for an advanced device. Bandai put a lot of effort into this game, from the epic commercials in the official tales channel to gameplay, they have done what they could to make this game an excellent gacha, and all was flushed away in less than a month. Yet we should give some credit for their efforts, they made a game worthy of attention. If it didn't fell for the same fate as the previous two, this was still worth a try, but being so sudden in content was the problem that made it fall.
I've played maybe two chapters and liked the characters a lot. The UI was ok, the concept interesting, and the music was amazing. I would've liked knowing the cast more but I had little to no free time at the moment, and seeing how long it was taking to go through a chapter and then having no clear guidance as to what to do after to progress the story, I had to uninstall.
it really would have ben better off marketed as a fire emblem-like new IP than as a tales game. For series vets, it really did feel like just taking the name.
I loved Crestoria amazing story
To be fair, you have to play the game. Then you can follow who is who.
I did try Luminaria at launch...but honestly knowing it was a "Tales" game did as you say, hurt it more than anything for me.
It was nice it had English dubbing which was cool, but cheesy writing made me turn off voices completely. The portrait view of the game sucked to try and actually play. My major issue was this game barely ran on any device I had. I had to use the final generation iPod touch...which...is tiny as hell, for a person like myself with big hands trying to hit tiny buttons and move along a very small forward path.
I was also roadblocked within the 1st 20 min of gameplay. There was a side mission I found, it was to beat these wolves without getting hit. Basically to teach you to avoid. Problem: I was being attacked by foes from the side, that I could not see. Making doing this, impossible for me. At that point I was already so disinterested I deleted it, and went back to Crestoria...
Saying that last bit now, feels like stockhelm.
I feel like the anime OVA blew their budget, and they were just too hyped to have big names rather than a competent design team...
I think tales of the rays is still the best "tales of" gacha game, even tho it's japanese only. I guess it was a big mistake to start the global Version with weapons/artes only.
Right now you can summon different mystic artes, which is a much better idea.
Luminaria should get an updated release with a twohanded landscape option next to the portrait mode. Or it would be nice to get a game like it
Not gonna happen
I played luminariia for about.... 2 days, it was ok guess, the main reason droped it was bcs didn't felt like doing the gacha part, i know i barely played it but in that time i never did a sinigle summon
I would really love to take a look at Blue Protocol, they are doing the same, look like the future failure.
i wish there was at very least more variety in the movesets of the characters.
I played for the first month. The problem for me is that there's no fun game mode outside of story. The multi-player is just repeating the same boss 100 times to get the best reward for it.
What's baffling is that half of the gacha was costumes that you can't use on your first playthrough of the story chapter. So what is the point of pulling for costumes if I can't enjoy them playing through the story?
I liked the character design, but honestly, when I first saw this game I thought it was a knockoff Tales title. Like another company was trying to pass it off as being in the Tales series when it actually wasn't. Only found out recently it was an actual Tales game, and I missed out on it. I've honestly lost alot of interest in Tales series after Zestiria. I honestly got tired of Japan getting all the titles and the west missing out on important games to the series.
I' going to miss the game though. It actually had a very interesting plot about the war and the mystery of the primordial beasts. But EoS meant the whole story can never be told.
I like games on my consoles, or PC.
I do not play mobile games. I don't own mobile "consoles" like the PSP or Gameboys. Yes, this means I missed out on some entries in the Tales series.
For reference, I bought the first two games off a shelf in the store(Best Buy) when they released. Still have Destiny.
I have never understood the desire to play a game on a 3" wide screen when you can play a game on a 5 foot wide TV with surround sound.
Games like this are a non-event for me. I hope bandai doesn't spend much money making these. I hope they learn lessons from spending on these and shuttering them a year in. Add the developers to the mainline entries to get them done 6 months sooner instead.
You me DYING this whole video lmaoooooo
I legitimately didn't know Luminaria was already dead. I just thought the hype died down. We traded Crestoria for this?
I will never understand why Bamco tries to make more tales gacha games when Rays is still going strong five years in
In where? In Japanese, yes. Its still going strong. But Global version already shutting down a long time ago.
Here we go again...
I agree. Might seem overwhelming 21 characters. But, I must say as I did play every chapter available, every character has a great and memorable personality and takes part in a greater story plot we might never know what it was meant to be. Every character had a slightly different way of gameplay and attacks. I loved it so much! Intro and outro songs 😍😍😍 still a great addition to the Tales of franchise!
Bamco isn’t at fault on this one. Luminaria was entirely Colopl’s fault. They’re too far up their own asses to acknowledge their crappy “one handed gameplay” formula just doesn’t work. It didn’t work on Shironeko global, or on Battle School Girls, or on that mecha musume flying game, and it was not going to work on Luminaria either.
There’s a reason why action games in mobile use landscape mode and multiple buttons on the screen, yet they refuse to accept that fact.
Also, you can’t convince me that this project didn’t start as an original IP that got renamed into a Tales spinoff after they got the license from Bandai, because they didn’t use artes, spells or even items from the main series.
The gameplay was meh at best but the Story was actually really interesting if you gave it a chance. It was done in a way you only need to follow the characters you like, so you werent forced to do everything.
The gacha wasnt needed at all for the Story so almost nobody had motivation to give money (is a good Thing but probably another reason on why it failed)
I get the cutstences dont look the best in that format but im serius when i say that the game had one of the most interesting stories in tales, at least i found it more interesting that destiny eternia and even vesperia. So is a same it wont come to an end since it doesnt seem a manga will Be made like the one for crestoria
I just hope the people who worked on it dont get their carrer ruined by this at this point 😔
Honestly I loved the game but was skeptical from the start. The management, the bulwark, the graphics, considering other mobile tales history I knew it wouldn't last on a budget
I was waiting for this video. Great job 👍👌
Too sad I actually enjoyed it.. the story is actually good..
My opinion summed up: Tales of Luminaria was a fantastic game the character and the plot really had me going and I was sad it was shutdown. Bandai if your gonna make a game only to shut it down then what’s the point in making it? I would have rather Bandai make it a game for a console or heck a LN I would have paid either way :(
While the plot was nice.. there were many characters I didn't like the playstyle yet was forced to play with. I rather be allowed to play with w/e character I want, even if it makes it "less immersive"....a lot of gatcha games do this, they have a story, but your team can be who ever you want.
Also, I know people love to praise the VA's... but to me it was a waste of money. Not because they didn't do their job right...but because money is limited...and had they invested the money in things like skins or character you could gatcha for it would end up better.
Also, the tales name made no sense...it was even less "Tales" than arise.
I thought it was an anime, i watch until episode 2
Question: If Tales of Luminaria was a non - Gatcha game what would you say?
I actually enjoyed it for a while and the characters have interesting stories but it gets boring pretty fast
3 core point why its fails
1 gacha got no gurrantte which make gacha pulls full of luck
2 the community multiplayer divided by 2 hard mode /extreme x nightmare
which newer player cant join in
3 game monotonouse cause only story which 1 per week while you have to grind multi so much daily and fight same boss again and again
I liked the game and played it for the story, even though their release schedule felt very ambitious...it was fun. But it's sad they closed it. I mean from their point of view they would want people to keep spending money on gacha games, but in my experience gacha is just evil so I refuse to spend money on it.
I did play the game since launch, and while it was less buggy than Crestoria, the first impression was BAD, and it matters way too much. There were too many questionable designs, half were fixed in a few days, and the rest just stayed and aged HORRIBLY. There were plenty of quality of life changes, but the game pretty much stayed the same. No new modes other than the level up camp
The game has its Thumbs Up counter for each episode, so checking to see that the game retained 10% of the players since week 1 is depressing to look at.
For gameplay details, the subreddit pretty much listed them to death, so you can check them out there.
In short, this should not have been a live service game. I, along most of the players who stayed, LOVE the story, characters, and soundtrack, but they're not enough to keep the players in.
I played it once-didn’t like it too much and never played it again. Too many characters and I don’t like Gacha shit too much. I can barely stand Genshin for that but the world of Genshin Impact is what’ll get me to play it every blue moon. Luminaria like the rest of their mobile games was doomed from the start. They need to just come on out and do a console/PC Tales fighting game developed by ArcSys to celebrate the series
I played it after the closure of creatoria, yes I was playing expecting the worst but I saw a gem on those 21 characters, everyone were protagonist of their own stories and all were getting involved in one bigger plot, characters portrait as heroes hide something dark meanwhile the villain a character showed us it's past and understand his goal that wasn't that evil anymore, look like a hero in disguise, the travelers team was the key, they were unfolding the main and bigger plot and every character was well written imo.
looks and feels out a tales of game, I'm sure it was not meant to be a tales game and it hurts a lot how an other big potential story is discarded by bamco.
recently I heard that tales of arise started as an other IP before being a tales of, imagine after berseria how many years would have pass to get a new tales not counting the mobile.
BS bamco BS.
about tales of Luminaria I miss a lot the characters, I'll recommend you look up for the playthrough of the game and figure out the story a little, was fasinating.
How about Bandai Namco take the initiative and just quit making mobile gacha games!
I'm sorry I got to this video a little late but I have played the game right when it was finishing I love the art style I love the music, game play was smooth and not that difficult for a person who play it often, and as an expiring writer myself it inspired a lot of my future endeavors however when it comes down to any type of mobile game it's always going to be about cash and the end and never really about anything else in my own personal opinion. I think that in my own personal opinion this game was the Pinnacle of mobile games that I was searching for next to when dragon Ball z released Legends and should any of my future endeavors be converted it will be in the same vein as this game or dragon Ball z Legends.
all i remenber from this gam eis the bow girl having garbage gameplay adn i dropped it because of her
The tales games do not do well on mobile and never will.
They need to be on consoles only, just like they always used to be.
You think the game would have worked better on console then mobile
Namco hates the Tales series and takes it for granted
RIP Tales of Luminaria
2021-2022
Gone and Forgotten
I'm gonna be that unpopular opinion guy, this game had no idea had it wanted to be via gameplay , you had on ralis paths and then musou combat. Neither work for this series. And those mystic artes are NOT mystic artes you'd have a better chance of telling Me this was a fire emblem spin off game. The story taken place between 21 different characters is uncessary its just 2 waring factions and a neutral. The gacha aspect was ok but the there was no way of telling when you got a featured item because you only had the dull stones and shiny stones but there was no way of saying oh! I got this item for this character. It was a surprise it failed as quick as it did but that's bamco for you mis management at its finest
For me Tales of Luminaria looks more like a Fire Emblem game. Bandai Namco should stop making new mobile games and focus on making console games.
In MY Opinion I dislike Tales of Arise as it had many cliches and I HATE that purple hair jerk who was named "Law".
Im glad the tales series is going down fast. I dont enjoy the characters or the storyof the franchise.