How do you follow up ‘The Perfect Game’? Why Lumines Arise could yet top Tetris Effect
Enhance discusses its latest music puzzler, and explains why it’s not Tetris Effect 2
For many, Tetris Effect felt like the culmination of a journey: the timeless, ‘Perfect Game’ infused with Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s seminal synaesthesia style, honed across a long line of transcendent, cult music games, like Rez, Every Extend Extra, Gunpey, and Lumines.
With its ethereal soundtrack, mesmerizing particle effects, and uplifting iconography, you’d be forgiven, at first glance, to have mistaken Enhance’s recent State of Play reveal trailer for a sequel. The same director, Takashi Ishihara, and composers, Hydelic, are here, after all.
But this isn’t Tetris Effect 2: it’s Lumines Arise, the first all-new entry in Enhance’s original take on the block-dropping genre in well over a decade. So why is the Japanese studio returning to Lumines? And more importantly, why is it seemingly stepping away from Tetris, the eternal franchise that powered arguably its most successful ever game?
“Tetris Effect was all about timing and opportunity,” explains Ishihara, speaking to VGC at a recent press event in Los Angeles. “It wasn’t exactly calculated for it to happen at that time, but it did, and of course, we’re very proud, and all the learnings and experiences we gained from that are a huge deal.
“But Mizuguchi and I never forgot about Lumines. We’ve always been talking about wanting to bring Lumines back in some form. So, after Tetris Effect: Connected released, it was only natural and didn’t take us very long to start thinking about bringing Lumines back.”
Ishihara says that the prospect of being able to use the knowledge it gained working with The Tetris Company is what ultimately convinced it to return to Lumines, but admits the challenge of following up the title is still a daunting one.
“It’s not that easy, I will admit! Even I would give Tetris Effect a 100% score! But the challenge now is to earn ourselves 100% for Lumines,” he says. “With Lumines Arise, that’s our goal. There are clear differences between the two games in terms of design, so we’re not necessarily trying to compete with Tetris Effect and what we did before, but we think there’s room to improve, and what we’re working on right now for Luminous Arise is to aim for that perfection.”
For the uninitiated, Lumines is a Tetris-like game played across a 16×10 grid. A succession of 2×2 blocks made up of two different colors fall from the top of the grid. The aim is to create a 2×2 block of the same color, allowing them to clear.
Unlike the Russian classic, blocks that only partially hit an obstruction will see their remaining parts continue to fall. Another big difference is the ‘Time Line’, a continuous sweeping line that performs the job of clearing the completed squares, forcing players to time their combinations, lest it arrive at the wrong moment and only clear a partial 2×2 block.
“There are clear differences between the two games in terms of design, so we’re not necessarily trying to compete with Tetris Effect and what we did before”
Unsurprisingly for a Mizuguchi game, music is an integral part of the Lumines experience, and the tempo of the Time Line and look of the blocks will change along with the game’s soundtrack, which covers an eclectic range of music genres.
Playing Lumines Arise on a standard PlayStation 5, the muscle memory returns, and I’m instantly transported to 2004, gripping my PlayStation Portable on the London Underground. The visuals and audio here are far beyond what was capable in those days, of course, with each block dynamically reacting to others and, in some cases, forming with them as combined watery blobs.
From a presentation standpoint, Arise really does feel like a follow-up to Tetris Effect, and an album-like Journey mode is promised, along with a similar mechanic to Zone called Burst, which players can trigger once a meter is filled, allowing them to freeze the Time Line and quickly chain up combos.
Soon, absorbed in the block-clearing beats and memorizing particle dance, I realise why returning to Lumines isn’t necessarily a step back from Tetris after all. The former, though birthed from Mizuguchi’s failure to secure the Tetris license the first time around, was designed from the ground up for a synaesthesia experience, whereas Effect had to be retroactively adapted, as much as is possible within The Tetris Company’s strict guidelines, at least.
Q&A: Lumines Arise director, Takashi Ishihara
What did you learn from Tetris Effect?
We learned that just by the simple control and motion, and adapting the sound to react to that, it’s a bit more, I would say, mechanical than just a listening and a flow experience. Your input really matters, and now that we’ve arrived at Lumines Arise.
I feel like those learnings, we’re meticulously applying those details so that you will hear, hopefully, just by rotating a block once or twice or three times that you’re starting to feel like you are actually making the music along with what’s going in the background.
What can you tell us about the soundtrack?
All the songs are going to be composed by Hydelic, the same as Tetris Effect Connected. Previous Lumines games has had licensed tracks, and it was kind of like an album of all these different genres and artists contributing to one album.
In this case, similar to Tetris Effect Connected, because it’s composed by just one composer and sound unit, yes, there’s a wide range of tracks from different genres, but in order for the experience to be this one very complete story, I think Hydelic is bringing music integrated into the storyline.
What have you been able to do visually this time?
For me, I’d like to aim for a game where the connecting blocks, or the particles that come out of the blocks are made physically. The first stage is a good example of this, which is how organic the blocks are, and how they congeal to each other in these weird ways.
So one of the big things with this game is like, let’s make the blocks as cool and fun and interesting and reactive as everything as the backgrounds are, and I think a couple of the stages in Tetris Effect got this way, but I think not to the extent that we’ve been able to do with this one.
By design, Lumines is a much more relaxing experience than Tetris, allowing players to become engrossed in the synaesthesia experience. There are fewer block types to deal with, less steps ahead to anticipate, a wider field and simpler clear state demands. The Time Line makes a huge difference to immersion too, with players enticed to sync their gameplay to its tempo, like a musical conductor, or a BPM counter on a set of DJ decks.
I thought Tetris Effect was the ideal culmination of 20 years of synaesthesia knowledge, but maybe it’s not: maybe Lumines Arise offers a more suited experience.
“I think objectively, Tetris is a more cerebral thing because you have to line up more pieces, you have to think further ahead, there’s more variation in the amount of pieces and how they have to fit together,” says Enhance’s SVP of production, Mark Macdonald.
“Lumines is more instinctual… And so, for a person that is more comfortable with that, I think it can be more relaxing and somebody could be more in the moment if they’re more comfortable with the thinking side of thing.”
He added: “And I do think that that kind of instinctual moment-to-moment thing does lend itself really well to music. This game was designed from the ground up to interact with music and to be one with music. There’s this thing about the PSP being a new Walkman, a visual Walkman. It was designed from the ground up and had the CD, you know, music for the first time and portable.
“And with Tetris Effect, we really wanted to bring it to that. But it was something where, you know, music was an important part of Tetris, but it was a background thing, it wasn’t an integrated thing. We’re really proud of what we did with that. But I do think it’s kind of in the DNA of Lumines to begin with, how integrated it is with the music.”
Now, with the freedom of working under its own franchise, and armed with all the knowledge honed from working under the genre titans at The Tetris Company, Enhance says its takeaway is, surprisingly, to become more serious about authentically recreating what it’s already done before.
The Tetris Company famously stewards the iconic puzzle game, licensing its crown jewel to partners around the world, but with strict rules around what can and can’t be changed to its core gameplay. This ensures that the game rules are standardised across all titles, and that Tetris feels like Tetris, whether it’s Tetris Effect, Tetris 99, or Puyo Puyo Tetris.
According to Macdonald, these restrictions, rather than leaving it yearning for the freedom of its own IP, inspired it to pay more attention to the intricate design details that made past Lumines games so great to play in the first place – something it hadn’t paid much attention to before.
“Tetris is a more cerebral thing because you have to line up more pieces, you have to think further ahead, there’s more variation in the amount of pieces and how they have to fit together”
“It’s true that we [have more freedom with Lumines], because we can do whatever the hell we want with the license, but one of the experiences we had with The Tetris Company which was great, was that they were masters at the feel of the game, and they noticed every little thing that felt off,” he explains.
“The Tetris Company has the Tetris Guideline, and it’s very specific. Like, ‘this number of frames, if you’re on a wall and you spin it this way, it kicks it off this many, this can appear this amount of time’ etc. A lot of the feel of Tetris is because they want it to feel somewhat the same, across the different games.
“We didn’t have anything like that at Enhance. So, one of the things that we did was, this project’s been going on a long time at Enhance, but more recently, maybe in like the last six months or so, we started involving our publishing team who played Lumines.”
One of Enhance’s hires from the Tetris community, community developer Austin Bennett, proved particularly useful, Macdonald says. “He’s very in tune with these kinds of things, like how many frames things are and whatever. He quickly noticed a couple of things, like how the next block did not appear as quickly as it did in the original Lumines. It was a matter of frames, like not even a second, but the team looked at it and was like, ‘oh, actually, you’re right’. And so they tuned it.
“One of the other things we noticed is it was difficult… how many squares you’re getting,” he continued. “At first it was hard to tell that was there in older Lumines. A lot of it is not codified in a big document like it is in the Tetris Company. But what we learned is, oh, that’s actually important. And there’s value in that, in looking back at your old ones.
“And there have been many different Lumines, but really, the one that the team looked at the most was the OG PSP Lumines and that kind of tuning and like the look and feel and stuff like that. So that’s not to say like we’re going to match it exactly. That’s an old game, there might be things we want to improve.
“But I think we learned from Tetris Company to actually sweat those kinds of details in the gameplay: the feel of how many frames things take to spin and drop and all of that stuff is like really important. So yeah, we’re like, we’re sweating that.”
