If you bought Lumines: Electronic Symphony at retail and was presuming there would be a platinum trophy to award you for your prolonged play, you'd have been wrong. The game is one of the few to be released physically and yet without a platinum, others being things like the god-awful Truth and Lies. There's a reason behind this odd omission though, and James Mielke, producer on Lumines, took to Neogaf to explain.
"When we were formulating the full trophy list, we actually had a *massive* list of possible trophies. There are two trophy types: small scale, and large scale. The scale doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the scale or scope of the game (i.e. puzzle game vs. an MMO), it’s all down to what the developer chooses to do. Personally I wanted to go large scale, to give people lots of things to try and achieve, from simple score-based achievements, to how many times you could loop the Voyage mode, to countless other variations ranging from simple for newcomers to insane for veterans.
"However, after retooling the concept internally, by the time we put our foot on the gas and went into full production, we actually had less than 6 months to complete the game, which despite Lumines being ‘just a puzzle game’ was actually a tremendous amount of work, because we weren’t just dealing with regular milestones, but also various other internal milestones, in which our team was putting in massive amounts of overtime. As I learned during the process, the QA testing period was incredibly detailed –as any tester can attest to– and the decision was made to go ‘small scale’ for trophies, because not only would they all need to be individually tested, the more we added, the more things would need to be translated into EFIGS languages, and the more potentially game-breaking bugs could surface; which wasn’t worth the risk of missing our ultimate deadline — Vita launch.
"The director of the game –and I’m not trying to assign any sort of blame here– having looked at the trophy ‘rules’ for PlayStation 3 games, and saw that Platinums were automatically unlocked by obtaining the rest of the trophies in the game, assumed that it would also be the same with Vita. As our first Vita title, we were learning a lot of things on the fly, and saw no reason to assume there would be any change for Vita trophies (for the record, I haven’t checked if automatic Platinums are indeed unlocked on PS3 by this method; it’s just the understanding we had at the time). So when people began asking if LES would feature a Platinum trophy, and I asked our director who told me “Yes, we have a Platinum, but it’s unlocked automatically once people obtain the rest,” and so I answered in kind on the PS Blog where the soundtrack was announced.
"As I have since discovered, our information was inaccurate, and I apologize to people who thought they would receive a Platinum. There is no reason we would exclude it, but just didn’t realize it wouldn’t unlock. The reason I hadn’t explicitly said ‘you obtain it by unlocking the rest of the trophies’ was because we thought people would unlock it automatically, and wanted to retain a small element of pleasant surprise.
"I realize that a Platinum is desirable by a lot of game players, and am looking into whether we can add one, and how much work it would take. These things are never as simple as you might think, due to submission, testing, and certification processes, but I am checking into it. I would hope that you enjoy the game regardless, but I regret this oversight. If we are able to add a Platinum, I’ll be sure to update things here, on our Facebook page, and via Twitter. Thanks for understanding."
So there you have it: Lumines might be the first game in a long, long while to get a trophy patch. It isn't Metal Gear Solid 4, but it'll do.
