Melty Blood: History

We at DashFight are always happy to have a new fighting game on our platform — with every experience around it, casual and competitive. Melty Blood: Type Lumina is our latest addition, and that certainly means you’ll find lots of helpful guides, news, and interesting articles here.

Sure, the fighting games community is significantly bigger than this specific title. So, we want many DashFight users to get to know this game and the whole series. Let’s fasten the belts and drive through the history of Melty Blood.

Save Humanity!

The very tradition of story modes in fighting games is… not straightforward. Quite often, it feels like those events are just vague excuses to introduce the characters and give us some basic reasoning for joining the fights. Distinguishing a clear plot line and describing it might be quite a difficult task. 

With anime fighters, the situation gets an additional layer of complexity — dictated by the traditions of this specific sub-genre. You certainly should understand this before trying to make sense of the Melty Blood story.

The series was born from the visual novel Tsukihime. It’s about a boy, Shiki Tohno, who can see death lines. Everything has such a line (from humans to ideas), and death comes when the connection is broken. Shiki Tohno suffers from the consequences of a severe injury, and it strongly affects his abilities and life. He becomes involved in a series of tragic murders and discovers the existence of vampires in our world. The first visual novel gave birth to many new creative products, including the Melty Blood games.

The story continues in the world of Tsukihime with a new series of murders. It turns out that some alchemists have predicted the end of humanity and are trying to avoid this dreadful scenario. 

Shiki Tohno meets a girl, Sion Eltnam Atlasia, who looks for Arcueid Brunestud, calling her True Ancestor. Her motivation is to find a cure for vampirism and thus save people. Shiki Tohno joins this adventure — to meet some unusual creatures and face many dangerous tasks.

The story is told through the tree of fights. Their results determine what path you take and what happens next. To get a true ending, you have to win all the fights but also visit every other possible line in the web of events.

That was the story of the very first game of the series in a nutshell. The following installments are whirling around the same world. They introduce new heroes, offer a new look at the same events, and take the players deeper into the character relationships.

Melty Blood: Type Lumina has a more character-centered approach, where the events and the perspective depend on who you choose to play as.

It’s obviously better to play the game to feel the story. Yes, the word “feel” describes the process better as trying to comprehend everything that is happening with the heroes, vampires, and the humanity rescuing mission — that’s an almost impossible idea. Sometimes the episodes in those story modes complement each other, but sometimes they kind of confuse. Remember the part about this series being an anime fighter? You have rather an emotional experience here than a flow of events. 

Melty Blood Games

The main games of the Melty Blood series are created by Type-Moon, the authors of the visual novel Tsukihime, in collaboration with the Japanese development studio French-Bread.

• Melty Blood — the original game was released in 2002 for PC.
• Melty Blood Re-ACT — this is rather an expansion for the first game. It features an Arcade Mode and brings many significant changes to the fighting balance. It’s a PC from 2004. An enhanced version is called Melty Blood Re-ACT Final Tuned. 
• Melty Blood Act Cadenza — this is an arcade game from 2005,. Around a year later, it was ported to PlayStation 2 (first Melty Blood on consoles). A PC game was released in 2007. Act Cadenza is also kind of an expansion, despite being listed as a separate release. It continues the tradition of focusing on the Arcade Mode and brings even more changes to the character balance. 
• Melty Blood: Actress Again — in a way, this is the first proper sequel, not an expansion of the first Melty Blood. The game was released in 2008 for arcades and then ported to PS2 in 2009. The main changes here are whirling around the gameplay mechanics. There also is an updated version, named Melty Blood Actress Again Current Code. It was released in 2011 for arcades and PC.

• Melty Blood: Type Lumina — we can call this game a reboot of the whole series. The game was planned as a Melty Blood HD Remake back in 2010, but then the developers from French Bread got busy with their other title, Under Night In-Birth. Only in September 2021 we got Type Lumina — on PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.

Guys, this list of all the games in the Melty Blood series doesn’t play a too practical role. It sure can satisfy your slight curiosity. But you certainly may just dive into Type Lumina and enjoy everything the game has to offer without any reference to the previous installments.

Melty Blood: Type Lumina is a full-fledged gaming experience, whether you are more focused on the visual-novel part or on bare fighting matches.

Melty Blood: Type Lumina — Reboot and Upgrade

So, with all that “heavy” heritage, full of vampires, noble ideas, mystical powers, murders, and complicated relationships — how does the latest game stand out in comparison to the whole series?

Well, first of all, let us emphasize this once again. Melty Blood: Type Lumina is an experience on its own. 

• The story has been told once again, with some changes and updates. You don’t need to know the previous games щк the visual novel.
• The gameplay mechanics are refreshed, so the fights feel better balanced, with fewer to no issues (like endless combos). No prior experience is needed to have fun playing.

MBTL was launched with 14 characters, and then 8 more were added as DLC. It’s a pretty decent roster, don’t you think?

And if we talk about the biggest difference in comparison to the older games (without delving too much into the mechanics), it’s hard not to notice the visual improvements. Instead of the traditional pixelish style, the developers use sleek anime art. Type Lumina looks just awesome!

After getting familiar with the history of this series (and a bit with the story of the Melty Blood world), you might be interested in the actual game features. Our MBTL Beginner’s Guide is a great source of information for taking your first steps in these fighting matches.