YMMV / Lumines

• Breather Level: In the original challenge mode, from levels 36 to 60 each new skin has a faster timeline and block drop speed than the last, until Holiday in Summer switches in, dropping both timeline speed and block drop speed by more than half. Steel drums and earth-tone blocks set the mood for a long awaited chance to refocus and clean up your screen.
• Contested Sequel: Lumines II adds difficulty levels, a playlist mode, and a "make your own music" mode, but part of the criticism stems from the less varied skins, as all skins' designs are standardized now. The addition of popular songs did not please the It's Popular, Now It Sucks! crowd.
• First Installment Wins: The first game is the best-known in the series, especially due to its first stage music, "Shinin'". It's rather telling that it's gotten not one but two ports: A port on PlayStation 2 and a remake on eighth-generation consoles and on Steam.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The game is much more popular in North America (it sold 300,000 units there) than in Japan (70,000 units), so much so that the sequel featured mainstream American music.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Remastered gets a fair share of criticism for basically being just a remake of the first game with some tweaks from later games, not bothering to include any skins from those later games or new ones.
• Level One Music Represents: "Shinin'" from the first game, not helped by being an ear worm with repetitive lyrics.
• Memetic Mutation: SHININ' SHININ' SHININ' SHININ'^Explanation "Shinin'" infamously has the titular word repeat ad nauseam at some points, made even worse during segments where the current pair of measures loops until the player erases blocks. It doesn't help that it's the very first skin in the original game.
• That One Level:
  • Any skin with a high drop speed and a slow timeline. It means your playfield will get pretty filled up before the timeline can pass by to erase the blocks. This is most evident in "Lights," which has the slowest timeline in the game and is the last stage in Challenge Mode, so the blocks fall at maximum speed. "Fly Into The Sky" is another notable mention, as its timeline matches the track's tempo in the first game and its remakes, but is halved for II where it reprises its role as a late-game skin.
  • Any skin whose block designs look similar to each other (like "Meguro") or blend in with the background (like "Working in the Hole"), because that means it'll be hard to see what you're doing.
• That One Sidequest: In the original game, "45 Degrees" and "Rodent" are unlocked by, respectively, completing a fraction of Puzzle Mode (the first 26 puzzles, specifically) and playing for 10 hours. However, Remastered makes these skins far more difficult to obtain, as they require completing all of Puzzle Mode (100 puzzles) and Mission Mode (50 missions), respectively. And much longer too, as all of the other skins can be obtained in about an hour if one clears Challenge Mode and VS CPU in one shot, while Puzzle and Mission Modes will take a few hours for each of these modes.