I’ve used the rom named SLPS01080.BIN on DuckStation 0.1-6456-gde1338cb (dev)
The game always shows you the long splash screen advertising aids. Then it goes into the intro again. Winning a match kicks you back to aids screen again. And it is always Now loading…
The main menu is pretty bad. It is already all in nihonese, but then it’s not even in real language. You can get hitori and futari, but then it is all made up names. め and ぬ look nearly identical with this font. Every selection is a separate screen with nondescript generic graphics. They could’ve added art illustrating the options, or they could put everything on one screen. There’s no way to know what is behind these made up names unless you are professor puyo. And as it’s a japanese game circle is a vector towards you and up means “accept”, while x is a vector from you and down means “back/cancel”.
So, kachinuki is a tournament mode for two players with bots. Or something.
Tokoton naze puyo is naze (puzzle) mode with 99 levels of repeat after me giant combo setups.
Tokoton puyo is the endless. But it doesn’t deserve to be called that. If you set the difficulty to silver (easiest) and set the game to very easy non-spicy curry, the endless mode goes into the warp speed after just one good combo. That’s not fun at all, you barely can get a couple of minutes out of it. You can open the current Tetris today and it has a very good pacing. It lets you to accumulate your mistakes and to cash them out, instead of just jumping to speeds where adult humans can not even comprehend what is happening just after the first thirty seconds.
So the hitori mode is a comedy VN with mini cutscenes. Or at least they all act as if it’s a comedy. How should i know, if the VN goes so fast i could barely manage to read only a couple of words. It has no pause, it doesn’t wait for your input. There’s no time to even get your phone out and wait for Google translate to read your camera. Which barely works anyway. For better results the manual drawing is more reliable, but there’s no time for that anyway.
It offers three stories.
The short 3-round story with the green hair devil girl.
The full game with Aruru.
And a half a map with some chongyun-guy.
Despite being a home release that gets all your cash the second you buy it, instead of milking you with each death — this is still balanced to be an utter unfinishable scam. On the silver easy difficulty. And it is very unsatisfactory to play. There’s no competition, the AI is superhuman, it can both react and think at the same time, while at these speeds you have no time for either. And then you win not because you are good, but because the entire game is built around getting a couple of good combos first, to nuke the opponent so it won’t recover in the last remaining seconds. That’s not a victory. That’s luck. I really got stuck in the middle of Aruru’s campaign, yet i wiped four last opponents in a row in second by accident. This is actively unfun.
The super last boss, the pikachu after the Satan is unbeatable. (And i’m still on silver / easy.)
The new mechanic with suns, i think, is supposed to be a weapon. But mostly they just ruin your combos making the game harder.
The AI not just cheats, it taunts you. If you are doing great it starts spamming you each second out of nowhere. But if you suck from the start it will slow down and will wait for you to suffer.
Unfun game.
Inside my shell i milk and hate 