LumenTale: Memories of Trey

Same song and dance as most other negative reviews here. Wanted to like the game, but holy ♥♥♥♥ is there so many problems. From the overly large maps, a whack combat system that lets my friends take down over half my team with a single attack, exploration mechanics that I'm convinced were added at the last minute, and a non-existent story that repeats for EVERY ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ TOWN. There are just so many things, questions, I thought of during gameplay that never got an answer even after credits. "When do I unlock status effects and what are they?" "Is there a way for me to change weather in combat for those buffs mentioned in the loading screen tips?" "What the ♥♥♥♥ does the dex mean by Special+ as an evolution method?". OK general rant done. the Cherry picked Cons -Evolution methods. so yeah that "Special+" can mean, Item based Evo, Needs a specific mon in the party... "be level 30+ while your system time is between ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ MIDNIGHT and 1am", take to a specific zone, etc. -Emotions and their balance. cause why would I EVER use Joy that heals for about 5% HP over Fear that pierces type resists or Calm that ups my Crit rate/damage -Speed going the Gen 1 pokemon route being a catch all for Turn Order, Accuracy, Evasion & Crit rate meaning using any Animon with a low speed is a handicap -the TP system in general. Landing an AoE move and getting a free action because 1 foe was weak to the type and Calm landed 3 crits is fair from bosses I'm trying to scan and in PvP. -type/Emotion distribution. You want a Fire type? there's 3. you want a Rock type? well because you didn't pick the Calm starter, best i can do is Molapom until you get the gimmick mon that needs FOUR of them on the field to not be trash. You want to run a Chakra mon? well there's 5 of those... 3 are Sad and the other 2 are Joy no calm chakra's in this home, tranquility is a myth -Weather as touched on above, has buffs for certain types and moves... but only for main story as there is no way to change it for battles. -the Holokin and it's whole type embody thing are bad, oops you don't have the type needed on your team to solve this puzzle but we can remove that limitation in the final dungeon as a little treat. -the cake is a lie -my pockets still have 40-ish servings of lasagna because the button under the amount to buy in shops is not to buy the number selected, but rather a "have all my money and give me all you have" buy all... the NUMBER is also the buy button. ok, the little good that I liked -Music was good in more than a few places, and I did add some to my playlist -Animon designs have some misses but overall nice (Firtrich my beloved) -uhhhhhhhhh overall a sad 3/10 save yourself money and go play the team's old Pokemon fangames instead with your time

What a waste of time. Don't bother playing this game that doesn't value or respect the players time. A lot of people will tell you how buggy the map is and how lacking some of the Animon are and how many 2-stage evolutions, and the lack of sprites for "lost" variant Animon, which is something the devs got too lazy or ran out of time to finish and would rather have you pay upfront for somethings that should've been in game on release. My biggest problem with this game was the story; quite frankly it sucks. The issue is this game tries to make you think there is a story and plot and character weight. It starts off promising, but once you leave the Islet the game just goes downhill, Each town is the same loop- Trey gets in trouble or someone gets in trouble we have to help them, then we fight a boss Animon, then Captain battle (What is the point of the Vice-captains?). Then you repeat this in the route you didn't go for a second time, with no meaningful changes to dialogue on how you just conquered one of the regions of Talia, everyone treats you like a newbie. Ultimately following this loop you end up at the end of the game, where it all just falls apart. The ending really made me come to dislike this game, It just kind of ends abruptly with zero closure. Just hero saves the world and FIN. Nothing to make you feel the weight of the final battle and the conclusion of the story.

Review by [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/34633003-Gaming-Masterpieces/lists/] [u] Gaming Masterpieces [/u] [/url] - The greatest games of all time on Steam. Is this game a masterpiece? No. But since I don't like Pokémon, you should probably ask someone else. I can describe how the game plays, though. The story follows Trey, a cyborg searching for his lost memories. He awakens with amnesia and has no idea who he is. In the world of Talea—divided between the traditional southern region of Mythos and the technologically advanced northern region of Logos—Pokémon-like creatures are called Animon. You capture them, tame them, evolve them, and let them fight on your behalf. And, of course, you collect them—the more, the better. Visually, the Animon are just as unusual as classic Pokémon, though with less of a distinctly Japanese aesthetic. You control the pixelated Trey (along with a cast of equally pixelated characters) through a much higher-resolution world. Talea is populated by both humans and the mysterious Animon. No one truly knows where the Animon originated, but they are creatures capable of forming powerful emotional bonds with humans. Once tamed, they are essentially pets. In the wild, however, they are considerably less friendly and may attack people on sight. Only certain individuals can tame and train Animon. These people are known as Lumen. Trey possesses a Holoken, a device used to tame Animon. Unfortunately, he still has no memory of who he is or where he came from, so he now lives with the friendly inventor Kapan and his niece Ales, who have taken him in. Before long, you'll also gain access to the Anispace, a strange realm where captured Animon are stored—a place that both exists and doesn't exist at the same time. Normally, nobody can enter it, but Kapan's latest invention changes that. Within the Anispace, you can create a home for your Animon and strengthen your bond with them. Back in the real world, Trey explores Talea from an isometric perspective, talks to townsfolk, gathers resources, smashes crates in search of materials, and rests at fountains. The resources you collect can be used to prepare meals. Following recipes makes cooking easier, but Trey is also free to experiment. The meals you create can then be fed to your Animon to improve their stats. Talea is a rather strange place. Players willing to embrace the quirky setting will discover that the game is, at its heart, a traditional Japanese role-playing game. Guide Trey and his companions through the world, hunt down Animon, and engage in turn-based battles against wild and enemy creatures. Select from various attacks and abilities to defeat your opponents, exactly as you would in a classic JRPG. The game features more than 140 different Animon, encouraging players to catch them all. Before long, Trey and Ales embark on a journey across the country with the goal of winning the prestigious Animon tournament held in the capital city. Online features allow players to challenge opponents and their Animon teams over the internet. Both 1v1 and 4v4 battles are supported. It is also possible to trade both monsters and collectible cards with other players online. The game does not include voice acting, but it fully supports gamepad controls. [u][b] Conclusion:[/b][/u] LumenTale: Memories of Trey is primarily designed to appeal to fans of creature collectors. Catch and tame every Animon, gather every available card, and build the ultimate collection. Alongside the collecting gameplay, players will find a charming yet surprisingly deep JRPG filled with quests, conversations, character development, and the gradual uncovering of Trey's mysterious past. Fans of games such as Pokémon, Coromon, or Cassette Beasts will likely feel right at home with it.

Very sad, game has potential but its a buggy mess full of crashes and QOL nightmares. Devs promised a fix would be released in July for a lot of the exact issues I had with the game so I had hope, but here we are in late August and the patch is nowhere to be found. Checked the Devs discord to see if there were any updates and the first thing I see is them announcing an xbox/ps5 port of the game while the steam version people already payed for is still broken. Its a small indie team so I can look past the awful launch, but now we're 3 months in and the game still broken, PLUS the devs are prioritizing selling their broken game to a new audience instead of fixing it for their current one first, I can safely say the hope is dead...

I wanted to enjoy this game so badly. I played the demo and loved it so much. I was excited for the 1.0 and even retroactively purchased the Deluxe Edition as a way of showing love to the devs for what I thought would be a game I could enjoy. The demo worked perfectly fine, but ever since 1.0 the game hard crashes the instant I try to open it. I was able to launch it exactly *once* on release day. Loaded my old save from the demo, and have not been able to launch the game since then. No title screen, no nothing. Just instantly crashes. Was hoping for updates or hotfixes to come, but nothing has arrived and I'm losing faith that anything will be fixed. Which is a shame because I was really looking forward to this.

Finally finished the game and caught all creatures. They took the worst features of both Pokemon and Digimon and added them all together.

Let's start with a premise: all things considered, I liked the game just enough (helped by its reasonable price) to be able to recommend it. However, I've decided not to. I've decided not to recommend it (and to advise against it) because I consider Lumentale a tremendously and inexcusably PRESUMPTUOUS and CLUELESS game. First, a small digression on the positives — the game does have some, not many, but some: Trey is not an exceptional protagonist, but he's definitely "alive" enough to stand out among the typical MCs of these games, who are usually lobotomized, chaste, squeaky-clean drones. The Animon (aka this game's Pokémon) are genuinely gorgeous. And this is something that truly infuriates me, because creating a pool of beautiful monsters (and here we're well beyond "beautiful") is, in my opinion, the hardest part. Seeing that they succeeded at the hardest part but failed spectacularly at the "easier" one was truly demoralizing. I don't want to dwell on the bug situation, though. Let's be clear: the issue itself is absolutely unacceptable, but in my playthrough I didn't encounter enough of them to cry scandal. Besides, I believe the truly interesting questions about Lumentale's failure — in my very humble opinion — run deeper; they're questions of identity. Lumentale's art direction is undoubtedly exceptional and undoubtedly its greatest strength. However, it's also its worst weakness. The impression that lingers from beginning to end is that Lumentale is a game made by artists, for artists. To be clear, that sentence is not meant as a criticism of the category. However, it's obvious that extreme importance was given to the artistic side, while programming and game design were left to fend for themselves. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially for a small studio that has to ration its resources and therefore has to make choices. However, allow me to say that having more people dedicated to music composition than to programming (this information is easily found on the studio's website) is a suicidal choice. More broadly, the industry is no stranger to products with a strong identity component that subvert the classic conventions of their genre (the Souls games or the Death Stranding saga are examples, although in those cases the identity component has a strong grip on the game design, not just the art). This stance toward the industry — which, to be clear, I've never fully appreciated, whether the product comes from a small Italian studio or from the brilliant mind of Hideo Kojima — comes with both honors and burdens. And on this point, the game fails miserably. The implicit premise of every "Pokémon-like" is always the same: to deliver a Pokémon-style experience (without, obviously, the extremely heavy Pokémon brand on the little monsters) but without its downsides — which, given the sales volumes Pokémon keeps posting, show no sign of ever being fixed. Lumentale objectively tries to offer some QoL elements, but ultimately it trips over its own feet: The game maps are deliberately chaotic and tedious, and more than once, in favor of some insane game design choice, the confusion and frustration reach mind-boggling peaks. Some dungeons, deliberately labyrinthine, lack a local map. You're often forced to traverse the same map multiple times to access a previously blocked area. On top of this, Animon have a sort of PP system determined by type rather than by specific move. Utterly useless and unbelievably annoying. The result is that exploration, which in theory should be free and rewarding, is often pointless and demotivating. This brings me to another important point: Whoever handled the game's design wanted to make a Pokémon-like with RPG elements. But this suggests, in my very humble opinion, that the design team may not have fully grasped that Pokémon is, in its purest essence, already an RPG — nor what makes a well-crafted RPG work. The consequence is that, in addition to the absolutely terrible world-exploration experience, the combat system is also riddled with flaws that undermine the game. Pokémon has a combat system that looks trivial on the surface but which, as its long-lived competitive scene demonstrates, actually has non-trivial complexity and balance. In Lumentale, instead, the combat system tries to keep the typical Pokémon formula while saturating it with 4 controllable Animon, and despite some more or less valid ideas and various patches, it collapses ruinously under its own weight. Initially, I had high expectations for the combat system. And I admit without shame that, together with the incredible charm of the Animon, it was one of the things that pulled me through to finishing the game. However, the combat system never fully develops, and once the power level rises, it ends up caving in on itself. I'd also like to digress on two things that left me particularly dumbfounded: Dialogues cannot be skipped: this is a choice I find truly incomprehensible, and one that reveals a great deal of presumption and cluelessness on the part of whoever handled the game design. It's presumptuous because whoever decided to make dialogues unskippable evidently believes their story is too good to be skipped (spoiler: it's a very mid story, verging on banal), and it's clueless — or willfully so — because it negatively affects the game design. What if I didn't care about the story at all and just wanted my Animon to fight? What if I'd loved the game so much I wanted to replay it, but was forced to sit through every dialogue all over again? The UI is confusing and unhelpful: here too, nothing scandalous (I've read some truly exaggerated reviews on this front), but it would have taken very little to make something more functional. In conclusion, the game has (or perhaps it's better to say had) great potential, but due to more or less debatable choices, it can't bear the weight of its expectations and comes crashing down — loudly.

As a fellow Italian, I cannot recommend this game. I have several nitpicks with it and one big turn-off. Let's start with the big one: this game feels culturally offensive. Having grown up in southern Italy I have seen with my own two eyes the disdain of the North towards the South. My mother, who moved to the North in her formative years, was denied work, sometimes even a roof, because of her being southern. And let me be EXTREMELY clear, this was (and still somewhat is) a SYSTEMIC issue that lasted decades upon decades. Why am I bringing this up? Because the game slapped me in the face with a distinction between North and South, describing the North as a technological rich marvel and the South as a tribal, technologically set-back steppa. SInce the developers are Italian, I find it hard to believe that this wasn't intentional and there wasn't some malice behind it. Even if not done on purpose, it shows just how deep this **** runs. I do not recommend the game based solely on this fact. Now, for the nitpicks, I'm sure you've heard most of them already - buggy and slow at launch, obscure mechanics and evolution trees, and (this is my opinion) terribly designed human characters. The music isn't very engaging either, I found myself muting the game and listening to my own playlist instead. Overall, the game got stale quickly and I frankly did not find any compelling reason to come back to it. These are all my opinions, but I suppose that's the point of the review.

It is just really clunky with little explaintions. There are hidden types for everything that the game just doesnt tell you exist and some guys only evole if you have that type. I hate how the dex is, it tell is supposed to tell you how something can evolve but it only says level+, so you need level and something else, it doesnt say what that something is. It could be a hidden type, move, item whatever but there is no hint towards it. You also fight second stage animon long before you can evolve your own. Layout and menu are just annoying. I really wanted to like the game but it just isnt fun.