i used to play the demo of this a lot on Switch when it came out. i never ended up buying it because the demo let me play a round of Puyo, it let me play a round of Tetris, i was content. the only other Puyo game i've played is Eggman's Big Egg Bag (and a thing in Sega Superstars i guess), and i'm no good at it. i'm no good at Tetris either but i made peace with that back on Game Boy, with Puyo i fumble so badly i feel the little faces on them judge me

i would've bought Tetris Effect but this was on sale for cheap, and also Tetris Effect isn't cute. also i know there's a sequel to this that's probably improved in every way (it has Sonic in it) but i wanted to play the story mode, and i didn't want to miss any crucial Puyo Tetris lore. really i just wanted to see a Tetris game with a story, not that i thought it'd actually be any good. because so far it's not

but there's a lot of it. i actually gotta commend them for deciding to put so much dialogue between levels, especially when the writing is as bad as it is. but i enjoy the novelty of it anyway. i don't know how heavy the Puyo side usually gets on story, all i know about is that one game where a guy gets beheaded and it's super bloody. i'm expecting something like that to happen here, like a long tetromino lands on a character's neck. i don't care which one they're all pretty annoying

changing the voice language would help in that regard, which i assumed would be possible but apparently not. there is a section of the in-game shop for buying "alternate voices" for characters which i thought maybe that's it? would be weird to have to unlock another language through gameplay but whatever, especially since they're kind of expensive. turns out all it does is make characters sound slightly more excited

quickly learning how much reading up on Puyo i'm gonna need to do.. when the story challenges were just Tetris i was getting the highest ranks no problem, but as soon as someone in a cutscene said "i'm gonna have to show this guy some Puyo Power!" or whatever i started having trouble getting much more than the bare minimum. it like, immediately demands big combo action from me and my brain is nowhere near squishy enough. i hit up the tutorial section and the techniques seem simple in theory, but then i get in a game and off the bat i am faced with the unexpected problem of not having the choice of what colors i get

game has become strange

i'm focusing a lot on the cutscenes but what else is there to say. it's Tetris, and i'm not very good at it. it's also Puyo and i'm even not very gooder at that. plus i should reiterate: there's really a lot of cutscene!! eventually i stopped trying to get all stars on each stage and just played through the campaign. one thing i learned is i had to intentionally play poorly to complete some of them, or else my opponent would go down before i had the chance to get enough points

even the Tetris stages started to get a little tricky towards the end. then it'd start hitting me with the Puyo Tetris stages, which i was dreading having to figure out until i realized they kinda play independently of each other. unless you wanna get crazy that is, but i don't know whose brain is working fast enough to take full advantage of it. think i remember reading the consensus was that all the combined Puyo/Tetris stuff is whatever and this game's real value is in letting you play both without switching games i guess

i finished the story mode. i can't believe i want to play the second game now, truly what could be so different about it gameplay-wise. i just enjoy the fun colorful characters. i learned they just announced a new Madou Monogatari with these guys for the first time in 25 years or something so maybe i should play those. there were definitely points in cutscenes where someone would be like "oh boy...i think i know who you're talking about" and i did not know who they were talking about. i wasn't expecting to feel so out of the loop

the last three chapters apparently were DLC that got merged into the base game when it came out in english. it's weird because the first was a whole lot of very japanese humor that didn't translate well, yet the second was almost translated too well, because it's just double entendres, and they're like, not super lazy. turns out the character who's constantly making accidental innuendos is the guy who got decapitated before so that's good. this is definitely the only Tetris game with jokes about cum

i was gonna play some more of this for completion stuff but turns out it's a major grind on the Puyo side of things, so i may as well move onto the second game for the extra features. just checking in to say that i'm done, and also because i didn't want the last word of this journal to be "cum". whoops wait. ok we're good