Melty Blood/MBTL/Getting Started

The purpose of this page is to provide a quick-start written guide to Melty Blood: Type Lumina, emphasizing conciseness. It should be read in combination with the Glossary and FAQ pages.

Getting The Game

Melty Blood: Type Lumina (or MBTL for short) is available on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Steam, and Xbox One. Once you start the game you may wish to start the tutorial mode, which goes over the basics of the game and progresses to more advanced topics as you complete it.

The Tutorial

Type Lumina comes with an extensive tutorial out of the box, with individual lessons ranging from basic terminology to more advanced technique demonstrations. The tutorial is more hands-on than any written guide can be, so use it when you don't understand something and need to see a clear-cut example. That said there will be many lessons that gloss over the nuances of mechanics as players develop strategies around them. As a newcomer you may feel tempted to work through most if not all of the tutorials, but you won't retain much information simply by doing a motion once or twice once and moving on to other lessons. Consider getting a basic understanding of the content in this guide and answering lingering questions through the tutorial, system pages, or training mode practice.

Some terms in this guide may be notated with the relevant lesson number from the tutorial as (X-Y).

Mission Mode

Mission mode is a series of combo challenges for each character. The intention of these challenges is to show you some key aspect of how the character's combo theory operates, so try to complete them over time but more importantly consider what pieces of the combo you can take apart. How do you get your opponent in the air? How do you combo into a particular special move? What is a good option to end a combo? These are questions you can answer just by looking at pieces of the challenges.

Basic actions

See the Controls page.

Learning Effectively

Training Mode and Replays

Playing online or locally is easy in MBTL and that's a good thing, however you cannot learn and improve purely through back to back matches. You can adapt your gameplay on the fly while playing over a long period of time but many situations may seem impossible to counter act and adaptation becomes impossible without greater understanding. When you encounter a situation you can't figure out an answer to you have two essential tools: Training Mode and replays.

Training Mode

Training Mode is a very useful space where you can freely practice many things, including but not limited to combos, setups, okizeme, blockstrings, blocking, movement, mixups, and more. There are a variety of useful tools such as dummy recording and playback with five recording slots and a random playback option, the ability to make the dummy perform a specific action on block, the ability to alter the dummy's recovery options, and quick and easy character/stage/BGM swapping without having to go back to the Character Select screen, among other things. Training Mode has everything you need to improve and get good at Type Lumina, outside of experience.

Replays

Replay is a mode where you can watch recordings of your matches. You can save a replay after you finish an online match (you can set replays to save automatically from the Options menu). From the Replays menu you can filter replays by character, mark replays as favorites, and see who won and lost.

Although it might be harmful to one's pride, watching replays of your losses can help you understand *how* you lost. You can recreate the situations you struggle with in Training Mode. Combining both Replays and Training Mode is the fastest way to improve in MBTL, and most other fighting games as well.