Puyo Puyo Tetris Ruined Puyo Puyo

Missingno.
32 min readOct 25, 2021

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When people ask me why I hate Puyo Puyo Tetris so much, I like to joke, “Do you want the long rant or the really long rant?” In honor of Puyo Puyo’s 30th anniversary, and the fact that we still have no word on a proper main series game ever happening, let alone a big Anniversary game like previous milestones, I think it’s time for me to finally unseal The Really Long Rant™.

Puyo Puyo Tetris was a massive commercial success, selling record numbers both in Japan and overseas as the first game localized since Puyo Pop Fever in 2004. This should’ve been an opportunity to help push the franchise into the mainstream, but seven years later, Puyo Puyo is back on life support with no sign of a main series title, and a competitive scene that is struggling to gain traction in the west. What happened?

I know that arguments over Puyo Puyo Tetris have long been a sore subject in the community, and if you’re feeling defensive that I’m about to once again criticize a game you liked, I ask that you please just hear me out first and keep an open mind rather than take this personally. Before I get into what I think went wrong with PPT, let me first clarify what this essay is not.

This essay is not an attack on Tetris or its fans, in fact I will not be talking about Tetris at all except to explain the problems with mixed versus. My frustration is with Puyo Puyo Tetris specifically, not Tetris in general. This essay is not an attack on people who enjoyed Puyo Puyo Tetris either. I know it was most players’ first exposure to the series, obviously it had to be considering no other games had been released overseas since 2004. If PPT is what got you into Puyo Puyo, I’m happy for you. I can’t deny that the crossover at least helped bring the game to a wider audience, and if the series had been able to move forward afterwards I would’ve accepted it as a necessary evil and wouldn’t be writing this essay today.

This essay is about why I feel Puyo Puyo Tetris is such a step backwards compared to previous games, one that does not give new players the best first impression of the series it could and make them want to stick around for future installments. This essay is about why I believe the crossover hurts the franchise in the long-term by keeping it trapped in the shadow of a much more popular IP. And most importantly, this essay is about my frustration with how Sega has handled the series ever since, over seven years since the initial release of PPT1.

Anime Tetris (and some other game you don’t care about)

There are a lot of problems with Puyo Puyo Tetris, and I intend to thoroughly nitpick at as many issues as I can. But before I get too bogged down in 20 pages of complaining about framedata, let me stress that the single most important problem with the game is really just the crossover itself. Juxtaposing a game as difficult to learn as Puyo Puyo Tsu next to a familiar and popular game that everyone already knows how to play is a recipe for failure. In some ways the game almost seems like it doesn’t want you to even bother trying to learn Puyo Puyo at all, as long as they still get your $30 for Tetris that’s fine by Sega.

Even Sega’s marketing sets Puyo Puyo up for failure by asking players to pick a side with #TeamPuyoPuyo and #TeamTetris. You’re either a Puyo Puyo main or a Tetris main, and you shouldn’t dare risk your precious rank online ever practicing the other game. If that’s how the game is framed, which side do you think 95% of players are going to pick? People go into PPT with their mind already made up that they’re only here for Tetris, and the other game is the enemy to be defeated, not something new to try out and learn.

#TeamPuyoPuyo never even got a shirt.

Puyo Puyo Tsu is hard. It’s really damn hard. I’ve witnessed many new players struggle with even basic 3- and 4-chains, nevermind making the real big chains the game mode demands of you. And unlike Tetris where casual players do not need to know fancy T-Spin setups just to get started and play (and indeed, the game was a smash hit long before these advanced tricks were ever introduced), you really can’t get far at all in Puyo Puyo Tsu without at least some understanding of chaining fundamentals.

I would go as far as to say the problem isn’t just that Puyo Puyo Tsu is hard, it’s that it isn’t fun until you’ve put a lot of practice into learning chains. But if you’re not having fun right off the bat, why would you ever stick around long enough to learn this? Especially when there’s another game you already know and have fun with sitting right next to it? It’s really not surprising to me how many players try Puyo Puyo once, don’t really get it, and forget about it forever because they’d rather just play Tetris.

Note though that I specifically said Puyo Puyo Tsu is hard, not necessarily Puyo Puyo in general. The best thing the Anniversary games ever did for the series is offer a variety of more accessible game modes alongside the classic competitive ruleset. I truly believe this is an important step for the series to give new players something more immediately fun for them. First impressions are everything, and if you can get them hooked on an easy game mode first they’ll be more likely to stick around and try to learn the intricacies of Tsu later. Sadly, none of the Anniversary games ever got released outside of Japan, so Puyo Puyo Tetris is the only first impression players get over here, and it fails them hard.

I’m sure some of you are about to stop me and say, “But wait, Puyo Puyo Tetris does have other game modes in it, doesn’t it?” Well, yes, there’s a few, but none of these modes succeed in doing what Anniversary did. The best modes in Anniversary are the ones that are easy and fun for a beginner to pick up and play even with no knowledge of chaining, and I don’t think anything in Puyo Puyo Tetris meets this bar — other than just playing Tetris instead.

Every game mode is terrible

Big Bang — While Big Bang is at least easy for a beginner to play, I don’t think just matching the round peg to the round hole over and over is fun. Just identify the right color and drop it, that’s it that’s the whole game mode that’s all you do.

Well, okay, it’s not the whole game mode, as any Fever veteran knows there is plenty of hidden depth in building extensions instead of just popping the chain as-is. But this isn’t Fever, and there’s a problem with Big Bang’s chains compared to Fever.

Left: A 5-chain from Puyo Puyo Fever. Adding greens to columns 1 and 2 instead of just popping the red trigger will upgrade this to a 6-chain, while the useless yellows in column 6 make All Clearing rarely viable. / Right: The equivalent 5-chain in Big Bang. The green extension no longer works, but the chain can trivially All Clear with a Red-Red, Red-Green, Red-Blue, or Red-Yellow piece.

Instead of the classic set of Fever Mode chains, Big Bang uses the chains from Endless Fever. In Fever Mode, chains contain a few extra Puyos meant to prevent the chain from automatically All Clearing, but these extra Puyos can often be utilized to set up extensions. Endless Fever has no stray Puyos, which makes extensions less practical — not just because you don’t have additional material to work with, but because it’s not worth doing if you can just take an All Clear instead. If RNG gives you the right piece to All Clear with, which it often will since many pieces can work, do the All Clear. And now the mode largely just comes down to how many All Clears RNG gives you.

Also, since it’s purely a score attack mode with no garbage, there is zero interaction with the other player. It can hardly be called a multiplayer game at all.

Party — I do not know where game developers get the idea that a ‘party game’ is when you just take a normal game and add a bunch of random items to it with the most annoying effects you can come up with. Does anyone actually like this kind of thing? Is having your rotation buttons disabled supposed to be fun? Is Garbage Reflector good design, or have we learned nothing from Yon? Score Vacuum??? Someone please tell me if you actually like this, because I just don’t get it.

Even underneath all the nonsense, it’s ultimately still Tsu. Still gotta know how to chain — and how to do it with dropsets, which is arguably harder. Surely a party mode should be easier to pick up and play than this.

Fusion — I was tempted to just write ‘no’ here and move on to the next mode. But since the goal of this essay is to be as thorough as possible about everything wrong with PPT, let’s actually go over what the hell this mode is and why no one likes it.

The obvious problem with Fusion is that it’s just way too convoluted to make sense of, too many moving parts. You have Puyos, Tetriminos, line clears, chains, active combos, mix chains, dropsets, hard drop crushing, soft drop crushing, and those changing Puyo/Tetrimino pieces. It’s too much.

But what I think really hurts Fusion the most is the fact that Tetriminos are stable but Puyos are unstable. Since Tetriminos can pass through Puyos, every Tetrimino drop will move your Puyos around, making it impossible to plan out any sort of chain build. The Tetris part of the mode still feels like Tetris thanks to this, but Puyo Puyo has to become something totally different. Put a pin in that point, because it’s going to be important again later.

Fusion is just Underwater II

Sega did take this into account though, as their solution is a mechanic that disincentivizes chaining anyway: Active combos. Rather than clearing out a full chain with a single piece, any clear starts a combo timer. Clearing again quickly keeps the combo going. Even if you can build a proper chain, doing so is suboptimal compared to rapid 1-chains in succession. A full chain is limited by board space/4, but a combo can be much, much, much longer since every piece dropped refills some material.

Anyone who’s played a lot of Fever Mode already knows why this sucks. Fatty dropsets are top tier, can nearly go infinite, and are just obnoxiously brain-dead to play. It’s worse than Fever even, because dropping a piece that doesn’t clear anything doesn’t break the combo immediately, you can still keep going as long as you quickly get one within the next 2 pieces or so. At least Carbuncle isn’t in this game (yet), but the next biggest dropsets are still ridiculous enough.

Oh, and if the stalling wasn’t bad enough already, there’s that thing where you can just destroy garbage for free to shrug off most attacks. Seriously, why does this exist?

Swap — Alright, I see you sharpening your pitchforks. Hold on a sec and don’t kill me just yet. Swap is… it’s alright. It’s definitely a step up from the other game modes, and presents some cool ideas with having to time your Swap Combos or use one board to defend the other.

But there is one big problem that tears this game mode apart: 4wide. It’s already considered broken enough in standard Tetris, but Swap’s mechanics indirectly buff it even further.

It’s baaaaaaaaaack.

4wide can play into Swap Combos to jack up the multiplier considerably when going from Puyo Puyo -> Tetris. Just set off your 4wide while the Puyo chain is going, and you’ll massively boost your Puyo chain’s damage on top of 4wide’s own big damage. It’s less useful in Tetris -> Puyo Puyo since you can never get more than a 1 combo going the other way, but that’s still not any worse than usual, and still has some value in being able to guarantee a combo with nearly any piece, while having a giant nuke ready and waiting on your board when you get back.

What really pushes it over the line is the Continuous Offset rule. First introduced in Puyo Puyo Fever, modes with Continuous Offset allow any clear to delay garbage so you can drop another piece, even if you still have more garbage in your tray. And if that next drop also clears something, you can drop another piece, and another, and another, for as long as it takes to either run out of valid moves or get the garbage out of your tray.

Since Puyo Puyo’s damage formula scales so sharply, the Continuous Offset rule is normally only featured in modes where stalling can actually accomplish something — you won’t find it in Tsu because 1-chains do nothing but delay the inevitable. The reason it’s here in Swap is to let you stall out garbage that you can’t afford to take on one board so you can buy time, wait for the swap, and deal with it on the other. Sometimes Swap’s garbage conversion formula can kinda just deal with it for you, a Star that would kill Puyo Puyo many times over suddenly becomes survivable once you get to Tetris (seriously wtf Sega?). On paper, it seems like a good fit for the mode that adds some new tactics to manage your boards together and offer some defensive control.

But once 4wide enters the equation, all hell breaks loose. If 4wide has any weakness at all, it’s that side 4wide is vulnerable to a quick spike, while center 4wide is harder and often slower to build. Continuous Offset removes those weaknesses and makes side 4wide truly unstoppable, as well as leveraging the intended utility of stalling in this mode. It even covers the usual weakness of stalling itself, as you would normally have to slow down your play to wait out the timer, but now you can just do your entire 4wide.

A few Tetris games have experimented with this kind of Continuous Offset mechanic in the past, but it was typically frowned upon due to how much more powerful it makes 4wide. Alas, Sega did not learn from the past and was doomed to repeat it.

The only thing keeping 4wide in check is that most of the Tetris community refuses to use it out of pride. But the exploit is there, and at the top of ranked or in a major tournament nothing is stopping anyone from doing it. It only takes one person to ruin the game for everyone else.

That just leaves one last game mode to cover.

Mixed versus is the worst thing ever

The big gimmick of Puyo Puyo Tetris is that the two games can play against each other using their own standard versus mechanics. How does this work, you might ask?

It doesn’t.

The two games are too different to ever make sense against each other. They are fundamentally incompatible in every way.

  • Puyo Puyo is a slow-paced game, limited by soft drop speed, splits, chain animations, and garbage animations.
    Tetris is all about speed, you can play as fast as your fingers can Hard Drop.
  • Puyo Puyo puts garbage on top. Even a small attack can completely disrupt and seal the player off with the right timing.
    Tetris puts garbage on the bottom. Garbage doesn’t affect your stack, and isn’t much of a threat as long as it doesn’t kill you yet.
  • Puyo Puyo attacks scale up to huge amounts of damage, but take a long time to build, and a long time to resolve. The opponent has plenty of time to prepare to counter with an equal or greater chain, and must do so or else they face certain death.
    Tetris attacks don’t hit very hard, but are fast enough to hit over and over and over. You won’t easily be able to time an offset, nor can you build something big to counter with, but you can just tank most hits anyway.
  • Puyo Puyo places a heavy emphasis on screenwatching at high levels of play, as you must keep tabs on your opponent’s build to know if you need to get ready to defend, or spot a vulnerability that you can attack.
    Tetris generally doesn’t care too much what the opponent is doing, since garbage cannot disrupt your build.
  • Puyo Puyo garbage only hinders the player.
    Tetris garbage can be converted into additional attacks.
  • Puyo Puyo openers create a foundation for a chain, but do nothing by themselves, and the randomizer makes no guarantees that you can always build an exact pattern.
    Tetris openers can send lots of garbage very early in the round, and are guaranteed by the 7-bag randomizer.
  • Puyo Puyo is about building up to win in a single decisive blow.
    Tetris is about maintaining steady DPS throughout the round with many small attacks.

The real root of the problem lies in garbage being both fast and on top, two things that can’t mix. An important part of high level Puyo Puyo play lies in using small attacks to disrupt the opponent. A well-timed 3-chain can potentially be more devastating than a full 12-chain if the opponent isn’t ready for it, but that’s a big if.

When you’re facing a constant barrage of Back-to-Back T-Spins, there’s just no way you can hope to defend against all of it. Even if you’re ready to defend against one, another followup is coming right afterwards, and again and again. You can’t offset them all, and the animations alone will slow you down considerably. Puyo Puyo was never designed to handle this kind of sustained DPS. As long as the Tetris player is fast enough, Puyo Puyo is ultimately suffocated before it even gets a chance to play.

Conversely, Puyo Puyo doesn’t get to do these kinds of small harassment attacks back to Tetris. Although many small attacks are supposed to add up to a kill in Tetris vs. Tetris, Puyo Puyo cannot do many small attacks, just one or two. If your attack doesn’t kill, then by the time you build another, the Tetris player will have dug it all out. The Puyo Puyo player’s only real chance to win is in one shot on a big main chain, but has little hope of building that main chain through the constant hailstorm being thrown at them.

One look at the leaderboards (well, before the inflationary rating system allowed everyone to eventually max out and thus defeat the point of having a leaderboard) proves just how broken the balance is. The top is nothing but Tetris players, Puyo Puyo has no chance to compete.

However, I feel that only framing the problem in terms of balance is missing the forest for the trees. Just talking about how high level Tetris players can crush Puyo Puyo is hard for lower level players to relate to, and invites them to write this off with “Well I always just lose in one hit to a really big chain, how’s that fair to me? Maybe you’re the OP one!” or “Tetris is only broken at high levels, at low levels Puyo Puyo wins.”

The real problem with mixed versus isn’t just that Puyo Puyo is at a Slight Disadvantage™, it’s that the game becomes utterly warped and unrecognizable from how Puyo Puyo is normally played. It can hardly be called Puyo Puyo anymore, and definitely isn’t Tsu.

To even attempt to stand any chance at all, the Puyo Puyo player must forego all standard chaining techniques and focus on a purely vertical freestyle build that can afford to tank a few hits in column 3. Although we talk about mixed versus being broken at the highest level, I think this can arguably be even more frustrating for low and intermediate level players that rely on structured builds, and it can be very tempting to just give up and Frogstack instead of trying to figure out a proper freestyle. As mentioned earlier, harassment isn’t an option either, your vertical chain must be big enough to win in one shot. Even though this mode is framed as if it was standard Tsu versus, you almost have to unlearn everything you know about Puyo Puyo Tsu!

Basically the mixed versus experience

But on the flipside, the Tetris player mostly gets to keep doing what they always do, no real change in strategy is necessary to fight Puyo Puyo. Just start with a strong opener and keep up the pressure as fast as you can, like usual. Ironically, the only thing the Tetris player shouldn’t do here is 4wide, but again most Tetris players don’t like to anyway. So really, nothing has changed on the Tetris end. Remember what I said about Fusion earlier?

When we only talk about mixed versus as a balance problem, the usual reaction is to look for buffs or nerfs. Some of the most common ideas I hear thrown about are to just give Puyo Puyo Hard Drop or even a Hold piece (???), but I feel that trying to change Puyo Puyo even further just makes the real problem worse. And no, I’m not going to suggest messing with Tetris either, then we’re just both miserable. There are no changes you can make that would fix this game mode, because the problem runs much deeper than just balance. As far as I’m concerned, mixed versus is utterly irredeemable, and should never have happened to begin with. The only thing I want is to never ever ever play it again.

Unfortunately, Sega made sure not to give anyone a choice in the matter.

An utterly miserable online experience

Puyo Puyo Tetris has one ranked queue for both Puyo Puyo players and Tetris players. No filters either. Everyone is forced together whether they like it or not, they must play against each other. And with one shared rating, you must commit to maining the game you’re better at or else risk your precious points.

Naturally, 95% of the playerbase chose Tetris. Which means that as a Puyo Puyo player, that’s all you’re going to run into. If you were hoping to just play a normal match of Puyo Puyo Tsu against other Puyo Puyo players, you won’t find it here. Instead, you are constantly subjected to an unplayable broken game mode that falsely calls itself standard versus.

And remember, for a time this was the only official way to even play Puyo Puyo in the west, since previous titles were not released here (the 2004 release of Puyo Pop Fever did not have online multiplayer). Many Japanese players just went back to 20th Anniversary or Chronicle, but we didn’t get that luxury here.

The one saving grace is that you can just cancel out of matchmaking if you see a Tetris player. You’ll just have to do this over and over and over and over and over and over as it takes a very long time to find the rare few Puyo Puyo players. Being able to pick and choose your opponents really isn’t something that should ever be allowed in a ranked competitive ladder as it leads to easy rating manipulation, but hey, I’d rather break ranked than have to put up with mixed versus, it’s the lesser evil. It’s not like ratings had any integrity to begin with since the algorithm was broken anyway — you gain more points for winning than you lose for losing, leading to runaway inflation that measures grinding rather than skill.

Even if you do find a Puyo Puyo player to play a game of good old fashioned Tsu with, Puyo Puyo Tetris even manages to break Tsu too! Garbage and splitting animations are sped up compared to classic Tsu, and this does affect high-level strategy a bit. Avoiding splits to build faster is an essential skill at the topmost levels of play, but becomes less important if splits aren’t as bad. Quick harassments are indirectly nerfed as it’s slightly easier to split and still find the piece you need to defend, and getting hit doesn’t lose as much time.

These changes may not seem particularly significant and many players might not even notice them, but it’s a matter of principle that they shouldn’t be there. Sega has maintained a consistent competitive standard for Tsu in every other installment, and there’s just no good reason to suddenly break from that here. Presumably this was meant as a buff for mixed versus, and I don’t really care about it there since that’s not Tsu anyway, but why does it apply to Puyo Puyo matches as well? It makes the game completely unsuitable for competitive play.

So that’s Puyo Puyo Tetris. It’s a terrible game and I hate it. But one bad game didn’t have to be the end of the world. The fact that it got localized and sold well seemed like a good sign for the future. We even got a full dub for Puyo Puyo Champions (which I’ll get to later) despite being a quick and dirty budget title, as well as remasters of the first two arcade games on Sega AGES, so Sega must have a lot of faith if they’re trying this hard to push the series in the west now.

Whenever we finally get a main series game, that will surely get localized too, and it’ll be the best thing that ever happened to the Puyo Puyo community. The 30th anniversary of the series is coming up soon, and based on past trends it seems like a safe assumption that that’s when they’ll do it. And that means I can move on from Puyo Puyo Tetris and not have to write a 20 page essay on how much I hate it!

But instead of that 30th Anniversary game, the unthinkable happened.

They made a sequel

Puyo Puyo Tetris 2. A game that just didn’t need to exist. The first thing that stands out about this game is that… it’s literally the same game. Rather than actually do anything new to push the game forward, let alone learn from past mistakes, they just copy-pasted everything from PPT1 and called it a day. They didn’t even take the time to playtest anything considering how buggy the game was at launch — how does a 2D puzzle game have this much slowdown?

Even the dub makes it super obvious how many corners were cut. Half the lines were recycled from the first game and half were rerecorded. They sound jarringly different hearing these voice clips alternate, especially on certain alt voices which are meant to be a new and different take on those characters. It’s genuinely painful to listen to and I do not know how Sega didn’t see a problem.

I put about as much effort into this edit as Sega put into the game.

The only thing that’s ‘new’ to Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 is Skill Battle. This isn’t actually new though, it’s taken from Puyo Puyo Chronicle… and butchered. Skill Battle was designed for Chronicle’s JRPG story mode, and doesn’t make sense outside of that context.

Skill Battle is supposed to be an RPG. You build a team, then grind XP to level it up and find new equipment to boost your stats. This works for Chronicle because Skill Battle is used for the entire story mode, and is accompanied with dungeons, random encounters, recruitable monsters — a full game built around it. It’s genuinely fantastic, and it’s a tragedy that Chronicle never got localized so the west could see this.

Not only is none of this present in Puyo Puyo Tetris 2, there’s only like four or five stages in the story that even use this game mode at all. But you’re still expected to grind those few stages over and over to get to an appropriate level for the last ones, and it’s a lot of grinding. I hope you weren’t thinking of playing online either, since you’re going to have to get all the way to level 99 for that. What’s the point of this much grinding without an RPG to grind in?

If they didn’t want to make an RPG to accompany the RPG mode, they could’ve just taken levels and equipment out, the mode could still stand alone without them. The fact that they didn’t just seems like they didn’t think this through at all, it’s a lazy copy-paste from Chronicle without considering what actually made it work in Chronicle.

They didn’t even include funny Fortle!

The other problem with Skill Battle is that the mode wasn’t designed for Tetris, and it shows. Sega never had Tetris in mind when they made Puyo Puyo Chronicle, and trying to put Tetris in it now feels like forcing a square peg into a round hole.

Skill Battle features a health bar, and any garbage that lands on your field will deal damage to your HP. You can die by running out of health even if your board isn’t full, and filling your board will simply lose a portion of your max HP but allow you to respawn if you still have health remaining.

As I said earlier, attacks in Puyo Puyo are strong but slow, and you are given ample time to defend against them. The way to protect your health bar is to offset the garbage before it falls, and this is very doable with perfect play. Besides just reading your opponent’s board to outchain them in versus, monsters in the story mode that do not have a board will still telegraph their attacks every few seconds with a flashing warning indicator. Even with low stats you can potentially plan for and play around anything — try a solo challenge run!

Whereas in Tetris, attacks are too fast to consistently defend against. Your health bar will face death by a thousand cuts no matter what you do. You’re on an even stricter time limit than usual, and depending on your stats you may just die immediately. All the usual problems with mixed versus just got 100x worse.

Oh, and the Tetris skills are just completely broken.

They never did patch this.

Online somehow got worse

Puyo Puyo Tetris 2’s online play almost makes baby steps forward, but the things that are supposed to be improvements are pretty much canceled out by bigger problems. The first is that we finally got separate ranked queues for Puyo Puyo, Tetris, Mixed, and Skill Battle, exactly what everyone wanted back in the first game. The problem? Let’s count how many distinct queues an already small playerbase is now divided into:

  1. Puyo Puyo Tetris 2, Puyo Puyo, Switch
  2. Puyo Puyo Tetris 2, Tetris, Switch
  3. Puyo Puyo Tetris 2, Mixed, Switch
  4. Puyo Puyo Tetris 2, Skill Battle, Switch
  5. Puyo Puyo Tetris 2, Puyo Puyo, PS4/PS5*
  6. Puyo Puyo Tetris 2, Tetris, PS4/PS5*
  7. Puyo Puyo Tetris 2, Mixed, PS4/PS5*
  8. Puyo Puyo Tetris 2, Skill Battle, PS4/PS5*
  9. Puyo Puyo Tetris 2, Puyo Puyo, Xbox One/Series
  10. Puyo Puyo Tetris 2, Tetris, Xbox One/Series
  11. Puyo Puyo Tetris 2, Mixed, Xbox One/Series
  12. Puyo Puyo Tetris 2, Skill Battle, Xbox One/Series
  13. Puyo Puyo Tetris 2, Puyo Puyo, Steam
  14. Puyo Puyo Tetris 2, Tetris, Steam
  15. Puyo Puyo Tetris 2, Mixed, Steam
  16. Puyo Puyo Tetris 2, Skill Battle, Steam
  17. Puyo Puyo Champions, Tsu, Switch
  18. Puyo Puyo Champions, Fever, Switch
  19. Puyo Puyo Champions, Tsu, PS4
  20. Puyo Puyo Champions, Fever, PS4
  21. Puyo Puyo Champions, Tsu, Xbox One
  22. Puyo Puyo Champions, Fever, Xbox One
  23. Puyo Puyo Champions, Tsu, Steam
  24. Puyo Puyo Champions, Fever, Steam

Funny meme number aside, this is absolute insanity, and I’m not even counting the fact that PS4 and PS5 initially had separate queues at launch, or that a number of Tetris players actually went back to PPT1 due to the sequel also having problems on that end too. Obviously crossplay would’ve helped a lot here, but so would a proper 30th Anniversary game that obsoletes Champions rather than a divisive game that makes most of the community go back to it (remember the framedata issue? It’s still there, so we have to use PPC for competitive play). Even just letting players wait in multiple queues at once would’ve helped, so that it’s not a waste of time to even try a less populated queue. The end result is that there are only three real active queues:

  1. Puyo Puyo Tetris 2, Tetris, Switch
  2. Puyo Puyo Champions, Tsu, Switch
  3. Puyo Puyo Champions, Fever, Switch

Everything else is completely dead, don’t bother.

They also replaced PPT1’s inflationary rating system with the proper zero-sum one from Puyo Puyo Champions, but with one very destructive change. The first time you enter ranked, you will be asked to self-report an initial rating of 1000, 1500, or 2000. I understand what Sega wanted to do here, the game has such a high skill curve and they wanted beginners to not get matched against experts right away, but self-reporting is the worst possible way to do this, and the playerbase is spread too thin to offer tight matchmaking anyway.

Because new players take points out of the system rather than put them in, it’s actually difficult for even very strong players to maintain a rating above 2000 — unless you just abuse the ability to dodge players you know you can’t beat, still present even with separate queues now. Someone can just seed themselves at 2000, never play, and sit above most active players on the global leaderboard. This is likely the reason why regional leaderboards were removed! Instead of reinventing the wheel and breaking it in the process, Sega could’ve just used a tried-and-true algorithm like Glicko2, which offers a built-in mechanism for placement matches. No homebrew rating system will ever outdo this, and I don’t know why game developers can’t just use what’s already proven to work.

With ranked being a complete garbage fire (by which I mean even moreso than before), you might try to just make an unranked lobby instead. But while we finally got separate queues for ranked, Sega simultaneously decided to remove the filters from lobbies! The setting to restrict a lobby to Puyo Puyo-only or Tetris-only still exists… but it doesn’t actually work. If you make a Puyo Puyo-only lobby, you will get gatecrashed by Tetris players anyway — and remember, they vastly outnumber you.

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Many players have tried to raise complaints about this, only to be met with Sega’s PR insisting it’s broken on purpose and will not be fixed. Yeah, sure, makes sense to have a setting that very clearly says it does something but does not actually do that thing, that’s totally not a bug. Even if they really just wanted cosmetic flavor text, we already have a separate flavor text option as lobbies can also be tagged with “Puyo Puyo Lovers” or “Tetris Lovers”. The filter did not need to be destroyed for something completely redundant. This really feels to me like pure disrespect to anyone who just wants to play a normal Puyo Puyo match.

The workaround the community came up with is to change the Tetris settings to make the game unplayable by removing Hard Drop and Hold. But if players aren’t reading the lobby settings to notice you tagged it as Puyo Puyo-only, they won’t notice the troll settings either and will continue to pick Tetris anyway. You get to waste their time back for wasting yours, but your time is still wasted playing a non-match. You don’t actually get to play the Puyo Puyo match you wanted.

As mentioned earlier, the game was also incredibly buggy at launch, with chain animations causing severe slowdowns if either player has them enabled. 1.0 was borderline unplayable, and it’s baffling that Sega could release the game in this broken state. It took a long time for patches to mostly alleviate this, but certain animations do still cause small hitches, and for whatever reason Swap still has heavy slowdown. Nothing about this game works right!

In all honesty, a small part of me is secretly relieved that the game is broken enough that the community was almost unanimously willing to all just go back to Puyo Puyo Champions instead. If PPT2 was even just barely functional it would’ve further split an already small playerbase, and that could’ve been its own problem.

About Puyo Puyo Champions

When I talk about my frustrations with the lack of a proper main series game, one response I hear a lot is “What about Champions, didn’t you just get one?” Look, I do like Champions a lot, but it’s no substitute. It’s a budget title also made from recycled content, not a full mainline game.

I really like Champions

Puyo Puyo Champions is kind of an odd game, and to explain how it fits in here I first need to explain the context leading up to its release.

In early 2018, Puyo Puyo was formally recognized as an eSport by the Japan eSports Union. Under Japanese law, tournaments with cash prizes are classified as gambling, and can only be held if they get an official license from JeSU. Now that Sega had gotten this license, they started running official tournaments, but had a bit of a dilemma.

At the time, Puyo Puyo Tetris was the only game on modern consoles. Puyo Puyo Chronicle was stuck on the 3DS, which is hard to run a tournament on and very ugly to stream, and no one wants to dig out a Wii and CRTs for 20th Anniversary. But using Puyo Puyo Tetris required Sega to pay additional licensing fees to The Tetris Company, which they did for a few months but didn’t want to have to keep doing forever.

The solution was to rush out a quick and dirty edit, with all Tetris content removed. I’ve heard Puyo Puyo Champions was supposedly developed in about three months, and I can believe that based on the fact that it’s 100% recycled content — it’s just PPT’s engine with assets ripped from Puyo Puyo Quest, the mobile game.

But hey, considering how horrendously painful Puyo Puyo Tetris’s online is, at the time I was happy to get a quick rush job so I wouldn’t have to ever touch PPT again. The sooner Sega sets me free, the better! Really, Champions is an incredible breath of fresh air for all its quality of life fixes. No more mixed versus, game speed is back to normal, netcode feels smoother, ranked uses a proper zero-sum rating system and dodging players is no longer allowed, Fever Mode is finally back, and a later update patched in the spectator mode the competitive community has been begging Sega for so that we can finally stream online tournaments. Champions really was almost everything I could ask for.

Almost everything. Earlier I said that Puyo Puyo Tetris’s true biggest failure is that it is a terrible entry point for new players, and I certainly can’t say that Champions is any better in that regard. It only has two game modes, both of which are very hard for beginners, and there is no story mode or other single-player content at all. In Japan, the game is called Puyo Puyo eSports to reflect that this is strictly for competitive players. It’s a budget multiplayer client that does one thing very well, but still only does one thing.

Puyo Puyo Champions is a great game for hardcore players, but it’s a very difficult sell for new and casual players. Any time someone asks how to get started in Puyo Puyo, I tell them that Champions is where the community is, so if you want to play online at all you gotta play Champions. No one is ever satisfied with this answer, and, well, even though I like the game myself I can’t really blame them. In the long-term, we need more than just this to successfully bring new blood in, Champions is only turning them away.

But knowing why the game was developed and rushed to begin with, I really thought it was just a short-term stopgap to give competitive players something to do while they work on a bigger game later, presumably for the 30th Anniversary. That’s fine, I can wait. The fact that Sega was even willing to do a full dub for this quick budget title seemed like a very promising sign for the future, they looked pretty committed to pushing Puyo Puyo here. So a main series game is gonna get localized next, right? Right?

The fact that this didn’t happen has me looking back on Champions in a very different light. If it’s not just a stopgap, what is it? Is this really all we’re going to get? Is this the direction for the series from now on? Is it just something Sega can point to and say “Here’s your Puyo Puyo game, now we don’t have to make anything else”?

So what happened?

Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 is a bafflingly unnecessary game. It really is just PPT1.01, Sega didn’t have any real ideas for anything new to put in it. But if they didn’t have any ideas, why did they make the game at all? Why did 30th Anniversary die for this?

I’m afraid I might know the answer. It’s an open secret that the last main series game, Puyo Puyo Chronicle, sold very poorly. Sega went all out in developing an entire JRPG, and saw no return for their investment. Really, the decision to make a 3DS exclusive so late in the system’s lifespan doomed it from the start, they made a fatal mistake there, and porting wasn’t even an option since the models and textures honestly look terrible on anything bigger than 240p. But I’m not sure Sega sees that this was the real problem, they just see that a main series game flopped while a crossover set a new record for sales numbers.

In a way, I think Puyo Puyo Tetris is a victim of its own success. It sold amazingly well because it had Tetris in it, but it failed to actually get new audiences interested in Puyo Puyo itself, which puts Sega in a difficult spot. When a game sells this much better than anything else you’ve tried to do with the series, of course you make a sequel, even if you have no ideas you do it anyway. Sega even thinks they can just copy-paste the first game and likely sell better than an actual 30th Anniversary game ever would.

Honestly, my biggest fear… is that they might be right. PPT2 didn’t even sell that well, considerably worse than the first game since anyone who already owns it has no good reason to buy this, but even that’s much better than Chronicle. And if Tetris really is still all anyone cares about, then I don’t know if 30th even would have sold well enough either. Puyo Puyo is now stuck shackled to a bigger IP in order to carry it, and after seven years it may be too late to separate them now. At this rate, are we just going to go right on to PPT3?

What’s especially concerning is that we’re looking at two games in a row with no new content. I thought Puyo Puyo Champions had a valid excuse to do this just once, but twice is beginning to look like a trend. It seems Sega simply does not want to give this series a real budget anymore.

Why this matters

Maybe some of you are wondering why this is a big enough deal that I had to write over 20 pages about being mad at a video game taking a few steps backwards. Could be a lot worse honestly, there are a lot of other franchises that have been totally dead for far longer. At least Puyo Puyo finally did make it to the west, and we even got a game perfectly built for tournament play. So can’t we just be happy playing that?

I really don’t think we can, because the state of the western competitive scene is dire. Maybe Sega doesn’t see this since official tournaments are going very strong in Japan, but over here the story is very different. Community-run tournaments and leagues have been struggling with low turnout. A lot of old players are burning out, and we aren’t bringing in new players to take their place. We even try to hold beginner brackets, and no one shows up. I get the general vibe that morale is at an all time low in the community, which further contributes to burnout, and there have been some discussions about how we can try to reenergize the scene. But it seems like no one is willing to address the elephant in the room, the real reason why Puyo Puyo is dying.

A lack of new blood will kill this community. If we want to attract new players to Puyo Puyo, we need a game that is actually a good introduction for them, we need a unified playerbase on that game, and we need a sign that the series has a healthy enough future to be worth getting into today.

On that last point, I truly believe that the most important thing is to let Puyo Puyo stand on its own two feet, rather than keeping it stuck in another IP’s shadow. Sega doesn’t seem to have faith in this, and sometimes I’m not sure if the community does either. We can’t even run Puyo Puyo on its own at offline tournaments, all we get are Swap brackets. How can we expect to grow this game if we won’t even play the real thing?

I think what frustrates me the most about this whole situation is that Puyo Puyo is more or less the last surviving major puzzle game IP. Puzzle Fighter and Dr. Mario both got turned into mobile gacha games and then shut down. Panel de Pon isn’t coming back unless Intelligent Systems can figure out how to put a dating sim in it. I guess Tetris will always be around, but the way I see it, Tetris is so big that it practically exists in its own bubble removed from other puzzle games — it already couldn’t save Puyo Puyo, it won’t save the rest of the Puzzle Game Community either.

At least we are getting some great things out of the indie scene, I could write another 20 pages about how wonderful Petal Crash is please play Petal Crash it’s soooo good. FightCade has brought new life into countless forgotten classics, see me in Soldam and Cleopatra’s Fortune Plus. But indies and retro emulation by their nature aren’t likely to reach outside a tiny niche of existing puzzle game diehards — we still won’t recruit new blood this way.

I worry that if Puyo Puyo dies, do puzzle games die with it?

The future

In an interview earlier this year, series producer Mizuki Hosoyamada confirmed they have nothing else in development now and are only working on the mobile game. So that really is it, if they have no other plans then Puyo Puyo is done for. (There has been some confusion on this point since the interviewer asked about a numbered Puyo Puyo 8, leading some to interpret Hosoyamada’s answer as simply meaning they could still be working on something not called 8. But he very clearly said that they are not working on anything at all.)

A few years ago, it really seemed like Puyo Puyo was poised to finally hit it big. For all of my complaints with Puyo Puyo Tetris as a game, I do think it had a chance to at least get a foot in the door and set the stage for a main series followup afterwards, and I wouldn’t be complaining today if it had. For a while it really looked like that’s what Sega was planning to do. And yet here we are on the 30th anniversary of the series, with no actual 30th Anniversary, and maybe nothing ever at this rate. Puyo Puyo is dead, and Puyo Puyo Tetris killed it.

If you care about Puyo Puyo even a fraction as much as I do, please share this essay, and tell Sega not to give up on it yet. Make sure they know that the fans are here and ready to buy a full game if only they’ll sell one to us. And most importantly, keep playing Puyo Puyo!

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