zephie's game journals
PuyoTet 1 was just da warmup...yea PuyoTet that's what we in the Puyo community call it, into which i am now fully integrated due to my newfound skills. i've become fully versed in all the most advanced techniques such as the "flubble trouble", "murderstacking", the "stairway to hell", and "sitting on my balls". check out what i can do on purpose
i can change the voice language in this one! apparently could in the PC version of the first game. i thought it'd be an easy choice but i actually found myself going back and forth between english and japanese...maybe i just got attached to the english voices. but some characters who sounded terrible in english sound a lot better in japanese, and vice versa. also in japanese everyone sounds more childlike which especially makes all the weird sex jokes even weirder
everyone amnesia'd the story of the first game away so immediately cutscenes are hitting a lot of the same beats, which, for a sequel that's otherwise almost identical i'd think would be a big focus in differentiating it. pretty sure one cutscene or two had identical dialogue to the first game upon characters (re-)meeting each other. again i'm fixating on the cutscenes but i'm giving them as much emphasis as the game itself does compared to everything else. there's a lot of them!!!
the biggest difference is probably the weird RPG battle mechanics. i never bother figuring out what anything does because to change up my team in a story mission i for some reason have to back out like, four times to the settings in the main menu. however well- or poorly-designed it ends up showing itself to be come endgame (i'm gonna bet on poorly-) i'm sure it's the most whatever system in this game that no one really cares about. especially not a hardcore longtime puyo-er of three days such as myself
speaking of UX nightmares, behold the most unnecessarily confusing mission map i've seen in a game. learning to navigate this thing is turning out to be a bigger challenge than learning to play Puyo. then there's the profile customization with maybe a hundred-plus options i have to scroll through one-by-one to see what's available. being aggressively reminded that this is a game made by Sonic Team
since i am now a seasoned Puyo expert i decided to try playing someone online, at Tetris. i wasn't expecting to get anyone since i figured all the Tetrisheads are playing Tetris Effect and all the Puyoheads are playing Champions. and anyone still playing this online would likely be japanese, and they probably wouldn't be playing the PC version. nevertheless
i went down pretty quick. almost immediately i was hearing the sounds of T-spins from the other side and that threw me off my game. plus i was seeing a lot of new animations of Sonic whenever i cleared lines which was something i wanted to be looking at. plus i'm bad at Tetris, so really just not a good time for me all around
i should have expected that in them making this game more of a JRPG it would eventually lead towards killing god, at Tetris. it's a funny game because the plot is about how the regular characters from the Puyo Dimension were such good friends with those from the Tetris Dimension in the first game, that even after forgetting each other deep down they were still tetris effect all connected in this, and this made the Tetris God very murderful. but even he cannot shatter dimension-spanning bonds that legally can't persist in future Puyo games
every cutscene has to be accompanied by a battle, and as a result these people settle more situations with Puyo/Tetris than i do stimuli with responses. as soon as the plot started getting slightly involved with maybe a paragraph of exposition, they had to break it up with a character engaging in some wacky cartoon sexual assault out of boredom, triggering a battle against him. things are just overall a lot less bearable this time around. maybe if they put the bear guy in more cutscenes
i'm at the end of the game now, and wouldn't you know it the weird RPG battle system is bad after all. for one thing the only way to level up and collect skills and cards and things is by playing the Skill Battles in the story mode, which are the only places any of those systems even come into play. problem is only a small fraction of story missions are Skill Battles. there's very little opportunity to feel the need to care about anything going on here, that is up until the final boss i am currently stuck on
i have to grind at Tetris. you might hear that and think of grinding something like an achievement for clearing a total amount of blocks. but no, i'm grinding so that i can get stronger, at Tetris. there are dozens of characters, all with their own stats and abilities, and each Skill Battle stage has a "default" team depending on the characters involved. but the default team is always way buffed, so if i want to use a slightly different team composition (because i can't win with the default) i have to grind those other characters (or the same characters with different abilities/gear) an absurd amount to get them to comparable stats
alright i did it with the default team. all i had to do was get drunk and play Puyo instead of Tetris. i always heard that playing this game online was annoying because you can't strictly decide to play Puyo vs Puyo for some reason, and there were balance issues between Puyo and Tetris, so i figured Tetris was generally the way to go with Skill Battles. anyway story mode complete everyone go home and forget each other again until the third game in 2026, which i predict will have new features such as: 1. being able to raise puyos and tetrominos as pets (but only for one mission) and 2. marginally different character art
i discovered something!! this one has additional playable tutorials!!! the first game just had three short videos labeled Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced, which were pasted into this game as well. but there's now another "difficulty" after Advanced called Problem, which?? does NOT at all get across that it's actually a hundred playable mini-challenges. i assumed "Problem" meant something like, now you're in expertworld and you're gonna have problems, or here are some common problems you might run into and how to solve them. game's so weird
i went through most of them and i am left still wondering how people are able to not just remember all these setups, but also be constantly changing up strategies on the fly when they don't get the colors they need, which i always do in these challenges, dishonestly. the levels themselves also aren't that helpful - the descriptions of objectives are grammatical messes of attempts to explain what to do in words, and it's either going by that or being told exactly where to put things. tried out a few of the Tetris ones as well and they very quickly went from "place down a single piece here where it's marked", to "place the first 10 pieces so that the 11th piece gives a perfect Tetris"
i've found some super in-depth guides online that look a lot more helpful than what this game offers. i don't know if i'll bother trying to get good at Puyo, it does interest me but so do a lot of things i lose interest in within a couple weeks. makes me a little less interested that apparently the only viable way to play Puyo online is Champions, and specifically the version for Switch (which i don't have), because the PC version lets you just Cheat Engine your online rank, so no one plays it. funny that they sold a whole separate stripped down game instead of adding Puyo vs Puyo to this game, and they still messed it up. so now instead of one broken Puyo experience there are two