Meh… one more review before this shitty year is over.
Panel De Pon is awesome. One of the most awesome Arcade Puzzle games ever made. I feel the need to distinguish Puzzles by Arcade and Computer Centric definitions because then, people will try to use that as a means of labeling me a hypocrite.
Anywho, I’m not exactly a huge fan of Arcade Puzzle games aside from the aforementioned Panel De Pon. AKA Tetris Attack, AKA Pokemon Puzzle League. The problem with Panel De Pon is that it is a Nintendo property and thus, has no place outside of Nintendo consoles. And because it’s Nintendo, they also neglect the shit out of this series in favor of pornographic Fire Emblem and dog shit like Animal Crossing. Indeed I have a soft spot for Bust a Move and Magical Drop 3, but these types of games are few and far between, and the mobile puzzlers are just variations of tired ass Candy Crush.So what’s a fan of Panel De Pon to do when the one Arcade Puzzler you actually like is in the hands of a company that has gone full shitlord? I suppose Puzzle and Dragon would be fine if it wasn’t so grindy OR if my 2DS didn’t die on me. Or I can just fuck off to my Wii and continue playing Tetris Party or play emulators for Tetris Attack and Pokemon Puzzle League.
Tetris is one of those games that no one is going to let you shit talk. Because it’s the first Arcade puzzler ever made (to my knowledge), and it was hyper successful, and… well… yeah, it’s fine. It’s simple, it’s basic, many of it’s iterations don’t bother to innovate because there’s no need to fix what isn’t broken. The problem with that is that Tetris has never evolved to a point where it could work as some sort of crossover with any other puzzle game. Then again, why the fuck would anyone care about crossing over 2 puzzle games!? Especially since one of them has world wide recognition… and the other is niche incarnate because… Sega of Japan.
The very concept of crossing over 2 different puzzle games is unworkable (and frankly stupid) because puzzle games are exclusively focused on gameplay. They exist, you might use them to pass the time, but to take them seriously in any shape or form is inherently stupid. All this game does is marry 2 different forms of gameplay to each other, and acting like that is a big fucking deal. It might be for Sega because it’s just their way of latching on to a more well-known property to dig their franchise out of the void of absolute obscurity without having to use a certain mad scientist from a really bad adaptation to do the deed. I can already hear the cries of Puyo fans who will scream about their tournament and ultra competitive scenes that literally no one could give 2 shits about. Puyo Puyo absolutely sucks. It sucked when it was called “Mean Bean Machine”, and it still sucks now even when Sega tried to make Puyo Puyo more powerful than Tetris.
PPT is a perfect example of what happens when you blend together 2 completely incompatible games, and in the process completely ruins what fun you could have in one of them over the other. You wanna have fun? Play Tetris. You want to actually win? Play Puyo. There is no concept of balance between the 2. Considering I have no internet nor anyone outside of my annoying sister who would want to play this game, it’s fun factor is nonexistent until you completely drop playing Tetris altogether. Playing Tetris is not fun in this game. Tetris was, is, and forever will be built as a single player experience. While Tetris Party worked fine as a multiplayer experience, there’s a reason why it does vs PPT. In TP, garbage (shit you use to harrass other players in puzzle vs games in case you didn’t know for w/e reason) is randomly distributed between all players. This means that should one asshole constantly do successive chains of line clears, no one person will get overwhelmed. That, and TP’s modes focus on outperforming your opponents through various challenges. Not successive combos and chains. The developers of Tetris Party understood that Tetris was not built to be a competitive puzzle game, thus the emphasis on attacking other players was simply not there.
On the other hand, Sega treated Tetris and Puyo as one and the same, and it completely fucks up the Tetris side of things. Lets get one thing clear. Tetris is a survival game first and foremost. The goal is to clear lines and make sure you don’t top out. That’s it. The game was built to challenge how well you can manage randomly generated shapes into certain confines so that you don’t lose too soon. It’s old school that way. So because of that, there’s no guaranteed function in which any piece you get is guaranteed to help you attack other players. Yet, for some stupid reason, Sega expects you to play Tetris like Puyo Puyo. Puyo Puyo is a game of meticulous color placement where you can fire off continuous chains so that you completely destroy your opponent. You have 4-5 colors, you can place them anywhere, but most importantly, you have to set them up in a way that allows you to get combos. Combos and shit allow you to dump garbage onto your opponent and completely interrupt their flow of color management. The game was deliberately built (or evolved) with competition in mind.
These are incompatible puzzle games for this exact reason. If you’re a Tetris Player, and you get into some shit with Puyo Players, you are going to be raped to crumbs and there’s not a damn thing you can do to stop it. Puyo is built for garbage dumping madness. Tetris is not. Thus Tetris loses 5-10 most of the time. It is that slanted. It’s like playing Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition, but your opponent is playing Streets of Rage 3. The SOR3 player has a significant advantage because they have access to moves like sidestepping, weapons, and a special move with invincibility frames. Puyo players can force Tetris players into a top out if they’re really fucking good. But at best, Tetris cannot respond in kind. You can’t set up a Tetris for multiple chains. And even if you do manage to fire off multiple Tetris chains, lets be real. That Puyo player won’t break a sweat for 2 reasons.
1. Tetris’s Garbage amount for successive chains is piss weak while Puyo’s Garbage amount is shit strong.
2. Puyo players have a much easier and more effective means of countering. IE clearing colors and garbage out before garbage is dumped on them, completely negating garbage altogether.
Tetris players don’t have this luxury because the RNG for them is an even greater foe the the person they’re actually playing with. Everyone knows that Tetris often screws their players by giving them pieces that are useless and can’t be placed anywhere in a way that isn’t obstructive, so they end up placing it as out of the way as they hopefully can. This can lead to obstructions either way, so the Tetris player has to deal with it. It is not helpful in the slightest. There are far more Tetris shapes than there are Puyo colors, meaning the Puyo players already have a greater advantage by having less shit to manage. The only strategy that Tetris has to combat this is simply to play as fast as possible… which goes against everything Tetris is even about, and is practically useless with all the advantages that general Puyo play has.
Puyo also works better for the various modes the game has in store. Especially for Party Mode, a game mode where you can utilize randomly generated powerups on the field. Thing is in order to use them, you have to clear colors or lines that are adjacent to the item. Again, the Puyo players have the advantage because they can basically wrap the damn items up in anyway they can, and they’ll be able to fire off any powers they can muster. Tetris players are screwed by RNG again as they have to clear a line where the items appear, meaning they are more dependant on what pieces fall vs the Puyo players. And if you so happen to accidentally block yourself off from the item, then you have to make a mad dash to clear out the blockage which, again, is easier said than done because the RNG has a greater effect on your victory.
In other words, Puyo players have far more control over a match than do Tetris players. All Tetris can really do is downstack as much as possible, and do so as fast as possible. Far be it from me to chalk this up to good ol fashion ethnocentrism on Sega’s part. More so, I see this as sheer incompetence. There is no concept of balance here, and I doubt Sega had the foresight to see the inherent incomparability between the 2 games. Otherwise, they would’ve never developed the game in the first place, and might’ve settled for a crossover with Panel de Pon instead, which would’ve been far more logical (and fun imo). Instead, you have this frankenstein monster of a game that thinks it’s amazing because reasons.
Oh and to pour more salt on, if you wanted to make either the Puyo or Tetris games easier or harder to play, well fuck you too! Puyo has more settings than Tetris. You can set up Garbage margins (w/e the fuck that means) chains needed for a garbage dump, and even the amount of puyos needed to be popped. Tetris only has the options to put on quick drops and Hold mechanics. That’s it. Tetris is so simple and basic that it is even impossible to customize! The best you can do is set the handicaps to the easiest possible setting, but a lot of fucking good that’ll do when the Puyo players literally have more options available to them. Also when the CPU is rape happy.
Honestly, a lot of my personal issues with this game could’ve been fixed with a simple, good ol’ fashioned difficulty slider, but nope! Now you have to sit here and guess which characters are better than others. Generally speaking, if you’re playing Tetris, you’re already fucked, but if you want a moderately easy time (if possible), you just set Ringo and Tee to Tetris settings, and go nuts. And those better be the only opponents you choose because if you choose anyone else, they’ll see that as “bitch raping time” because they will never lose. ESPECIALLY that fucking Bear! Idk why Sega set the CPU difficulty to the highest of heavens, but they’ve made it to where playing against the CPU in any mode outside of story to be thoroughly unpleasant, cheap, and infuriating. You have an entire army of rapists to contend with. Some even literally. You have no way of offsetting the game’s difficulty outside of cheating, and often by having a CPU partner that you can coast off of. Otherwise, you have to be playing the Puyo side if you want to win at anything.
Talking about the story is equally as painful… because it’s honestly the only enjoyable part in the game. It’s as silly and as childish as you can imagine, but w/e. At the very least, there ARE some funny moments that gets an occasional laugh or 2, but it’s largely forgettable. How sad that they had to make up Tetris characters for the game to be considered anything resembling a meaningful match up. And oh of course there’s a goddamn animu school involved with the casual trope of “Power of Friendship”. It is the epitome of excuse plot, and only seems to exist to make Sega’s little characters feel like more than cheap avatars. This also translates to their gameplay. Some of these characters have preset patterns to their color/piece drops. I noticed this when I was trying to play Sig (the guy with the masturbation hand) on Tetris, and I would constantly get the same pieces over and over which weren’t helpful at all, but if I played Ai (the dog scientist), I would get much better pieces. Vice versa for Puyo, but because Puyo has actual options, it’s barely noticable. Also, the game’s “Fusion Mode” (Playing both games at the same time), actually lists out each character’s specific drop patterns. Good luck translating that shit, though. This also factored into Party Mode, but I noticed nothing of difference.
And that’s really it for PPT as far as replay value goes. It’s an arcade game, and it’s replay value is centered on Party style Gameplay. And it utterly fails to captivate. How it got a sequel is anyone’s guess, though seeing that the game is… I guess digital only, and lacks in content and is considered more of the same as the first, it seems unnecessary. That’s resources they could’ve devoted to a Shinobi sequel, but I guess this was cheaper to make.
…… Yeah I know, this isn’t the kind of game I’d review because it’s a bare bones puzzle game, but eh. Kinda hard to review anything now with America’s delivery services getting raped by everything from privatization attempts and people making mass orders. It’s so bad, you can’t even get BILLS paid! Can you believe these assholes literally sat on one of my bills for OVER A MONTH without notification, then I get a late fee attached to this month’s bill, and only after I put a stop payment on that bitch did the post office send me the damn check back! Assholes! All of em!
….Sorry, rambling, but dammit!
Conflicting Views 