While the original Puyo Puyo's festive brand of falling-block puzzle-action is a known quantity, M2's tireless determination to blend accuracy with accessibility persists as the best way to enjoy a classic game in 2019. The SEGA AGES line continues to be the Switch's secret-best asset.
In a perfect world, Puyo Puyo would share the Falling Block Game throne with Tetris. Compile’s 1991 MSX2 original quickly found popularity in Japan with its eventual arcade release. Puyo Puyo’s console iterations eventually made it to North America under the guise of Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine and Kirby’s Avalanche. Rule adjustments shuffled through persistent iterations, including Sega’s hysterical Puyo Puyo Tetris mash-up in 2017, but Puyo Puyo largely occupies the same brain space as Columns, Bust-a-Move, and Puzzle Fighter. It’s always the other 90’s falling-block puzzle game.
None of this information prevents Puyo Puyo’s admission to M2’s current line of SEGA AGES re-releases. A commitment to accurate emulation is a badge of honor M2 has worn for almost three decades. Most recently, their work with Sega has been showcased on the Switch with Wonder Boy in Monster Land, Virtua Racing, and Out Run. Together with Space Harrier, Puyo Puyo was chosen as the next-in-line for SEGA AGES’ North American rollout.
If you have never played Puyo Puyo, it follows a digestible model of similar games. A pair of colored globules fall from the top of the screen into a six-tile-wide, twelve-tile-deep well. Sometimes the pair has matching colors, but most times the pair is two of five (or fewer) different colors. The pair can be oriented vertically or horizontally as it falls. The core objective is to match four like-colored globules at the bottom of the well, thus eliminating them from the well and creating room for successive globules. Like Tetris, it’s the battle of easy an efficient evacuation against the risk of managing giant stacks. It’s all in pursuit of better combos and bigger scores.
Combo creation is a more arcane process. If one set of four or more colors evaporates, all of the blocks above will naturally fall down. If those blocks connect with like-colored blocks, they evaporate too and build into a combo. This will also increase the amount of garbage blocks dumped on your opponent’s side of the screen. I do not personally possess the level of foresight necessary to plan this out with any kind of consistency, although this video did help me to understand the concept better. A skilled practitioner of Puyo Puyo benefits significantly from experience and planning, two virtues that are impossible to achieve during your first five minutes with Puyo Puyo.
I find Puyo Puyo, in all of its iterations, to be one of the more aesthetically pleasing falling-block games. I’m kind of a sucker for googly-eyed creatures, even presumably sentient block things, and the permanent face of fear and anxiety worn by Puyo Puyo pustules remains appealing. Their pupils will even look in the direction on their nearest like-colored neighbor, suggesting a form of hand-holding before they jump off the cliff/evaporate due to my skilled play. Is it genocide or liberation? Tough to say.
All of the ephemera surrounding Puyo Puyo’s arcade release remains in place. The One Player Game, credit-fueled arcade mode still shuffles characters and creatures from Madou Monogatari through a series of one-on-one battles. A bit of dialogue is always exchanged before the inevitable showdown with an escalating series of bizarre and colorful characters. Thirteen levels compose this mode. You can even fill the screen to your liking or shuffle through a series of contextually appropriate wallpapers.
The Two Player option remains available, but this release of Puyo Puyo also includes an online versus mode. Players can create private rooms, choose random online battles, or directly face off against people on their friend list. Online rankings are also available. As far as modifying the original game, the player can also choose to enable options to reduce the number of available colors of blocks, enable the rotate-left shift mod, adjust the difficulty, and toggle between Japanese and North American versions of Puyo Puyo. These options represent the M2 standard of tweaks and adjustments without compromising the original experience.
Admittedly, Puyo Puyo wouldn’t be a first-ballot Hall of Famer for many people. Count me among the crowd that desperately wishes Sega would allow and pay M2 to cease porting 80’s arcade and 16-bit classics to modern hardware and start resurrecting long neglected Model 2, Saturn, and Dreamcast titles. With that being said, preservation is an under-appreciated facet of the gaming industry and M2’s work, however repetitive, remains valuable. On the scale of positive and negative contributions to the medium, I can’t imagine anyone placing SEGA AGES: Puyo Puyo in the latter.
While the original Puyo Puyo’s festive brand of falling-block puzzle-action is a known quantity, M2’s tireless determination to blend accuracy with accessibility persists as the best way to enjoy a classic game in 2019. The SEGA AGES line continues to be the Switch’s secret-best asset.
