Luminous Plume

Hack n slash / RPG + techs + skills = Warp through stages of mobs to reach the bosses. Use various techs and skills to overpower the enemies and survive. Customize and equip optimal setup for areas. [h1]Follow our curator for similar games[/h1] https://store.steampowered.com/curator/35180752-3-point-play/

Luminous plume is very fun. I haven't played any of the "tales" games before, but Luminous plume offers a fun and engaging combat system with a large skill cap and a large amount of depth and variety. I've enjoyed going through the various options and learning how to optimally use systems in order to overcome tough opponents, which the game has in spades. I would recommend it to other people looking for this sort of thing.

Very in-depth combat system that's enjoyable Relatively short to a single playthrough, makes it a nice game to play through on a weekend or something Good story, interesting world

Better combat than Tales of Arise.

Notice: Luminous Plume requires a controller in order to play. Playing with a keyboard and mouse isn't supported. I play with keyboard anyway I get hand cramps It's on nightmare mode

Luminous Plume is quite possibly one of my favourite action games to date. Mixing the classic art based combat of Tales with something faster and more fluid in the vein of Ys, the game delivers fast, satisfying, responsive combat which makes it an absolute joy to hack and slash through. With challenging boss fights and a fairly brutal difficulty, which may start to relent near the end, the game offers players a chance to test their skills, especially on the nightmare mode. It also features beautiful art and environments that make the game just as good to watch as play, and an electrifying and unforgettable soundtrack by Aoki Katsumata, Luminous Plume delivers an outstanding experience, and is well worth it's price. I'd put it at an 8.75/10, but considering my scale is considered a bit harsh, that may be closer to a 9.5/10 for most people.

It's hard to add to what other reviewers have written, but it's simply a great game. With deep, engaging gameplay, outstanding music, lovely art, a unique world and a really interesting story, it has pretty much everything you'd want from a game. The pacing is tight too, with no filler whatsoever. Though slightly (and understandably) rough around the edges, this game was obviously a labour of love and certainly gets things right where it counts. I eagerly await future titles from XenoHorizon, and encourage anyone who is interested in fun action RPGs to give this a shot.

A very enjoyable game with engaging combat, fans of Tales of series can feel right at home. Love the chest messages as well, i feel like it's a nod to Trails series.

[h1]Smug Aura Mocks Me[/h1] [h2]Story[/h2] The plot is more about the main character's personal growth than any grand adventure about saving the world. In fact, the protagonist already technically got involved in saving the country, but couldn't handle the mistakes he made in the process and basically stagnated. The concept is nice, but I feel like there's not enough closure for the main antagonist or late game interactions with the only village. Instead, the postgame is mainly closure for the secondary antagonist, who turns out to be similar to Raven in many ways. [h2]Gameplay[/h2] The game tries to combine elements of the Ys and Tales series while making the experience harder in some ways, at least in the beginning. Defending is more akin to Ys, due to the Flash Guard mechanic, but it can't be abused as much because you can't cancel attack animations into guarding. To make up for this, the player gets Shield, which gives Raven an aura that weakens his attack, but negates damage in exchange for massive chunks of his AP. It can save the player's current attempt of a round, but using it too much will result in the player having no AP to use techs or defend another attack. The skill activation system is more akin to Tales, but I feel that it's unwieldy in some ways. Simultaneous button and direction inputs feel like they have different or tighter timing compared to Tales of Vesperia (PC), making it easy to activate the wrong tech. For some reason, I felt like it was easier to activate up and down techs than side direction techs. Additionally, a lot of enemies and bosses don't stagger well and the player doesn't start with a lot of AP, so it can be hard to actually pull off a proper combo until Raven gets higher stats and learns techs that have higher chances of hitstun. As for the difficulty curve, the player has no real healing options at the start of the game other than getting enemies to drop HP orbs, standing still for long enough to regen, or leveling up. Of all the dungeon, the Arctic Lake is probably the hardest due to the abundance of spellcasting enemies that are hard to stagger without the Field technique. However, once the player gets regen equipment and a passive skill that causes Auradrive to regen, they have more room for error for taking damage. Combined with the powerful lategame crowd control skills, the standard mobs eventually cease to be a challenge. I read on discord that there was a patch to strengthen lategame enemies, but even a stat boost won't make much of a difference if the player has access to mechanically powerful techs and passives. This may explain why the optional volcano boss drops a piece of gear that makes Raven take more damage, as a sort of unofficial difficulty setting that goes beyond Nightmare mode. All stages except for the postgame stage are one-time only and lock the player in. This is normally fine on its own, but some rounds of a stage also have bonus objectives that hide treasure chests, some of which contain permanent upgrades to Shield, Wield, and Field. IMO, it's kind of harsh to make such upgrades missable forever if the player fails an bonus condition. Since the player will likely receive more MP than they know what to do with, it would have been nice to be able to spend high amounts of MP to buy the contents of missed chests. Though to be fair, it's probably possible to beat the game even without all the permanent upgrades, especially with all the OP techs and passive skills Raven can learn. The game has many events that cannot be revisited, but I feel that the save/load system isn't adequate for handling that. There aren't that many slots and as of writing this, there is no save/load cursor memory. For the most part, I sucked at playing the game and made it through with inefficient hit-and-run tactics for the early stages before spamming OP techs in the later stages. My two main artifacts were Coward's Belt because I don't have the motor skills to use diverse techs and Farulian Cloak because I needed extra regen. [h2]Verdict[/h2] 7/10 The worldbuilding is a bit vague and the game follows the trend of many other games in having a reverse difficulty slope. I think the game still makes a decent attempt at combining the mechanics of Ys and Tales while adding its own risk-reward mechanics.