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Puyo Pop Fever

Today I'm going to talk to you as if I've known you my whole life. The other day I wandered into popular gaming retailer Electronic Boutique and asked for a copy of the latest Puyo Pop Fever game to grace American shores. I had been waiting for it since it was first announced for the DS, being entirely familiar with the glory that is both the Gamecube and Dreamcast versions. Those two being nearly identical, save a few knick-knacks and what-have-yous, I wanted to see what Nintendo's self-proclaimed "innovation" to the gaming world would bring me in terms of something different. My main drive, and my back-up plan in case of any disappointment, would be the simple fact that I would own my absolute favorite puzzle game since the last Puyo Pop game I bought in handheld form. Little did I know that the best puzzle game on the market just got better.

For those of us living under a rock on the moon for the past dozen years, the concept of Puyo Pop is a simple one. Gather four of the same-colored Puyos in one area, have them disappear, repeat. You can link Puyos together to clear away chains of them, which in turn would send a fury of neutral Puyos down on your opponent's playing field for them to deal with. Both of you launch attacks back and forth until one screen is filled up to the point where no more Puyos can drop. In Puyo Pop Fever the mechanics are a bit different, which I've mentioned so many times before that it's just getting redundant, but here we go. You have a meter that you can fill up by countering your opponent's attack. When the meter is full, you go into "Fever mode" where you can clear preset chains to launch an attack of Nuclear Holocaust proportions on your opponent.

I'm writing this review as the seasoned Puyo Pop fanatic on N-Philes. I still have a hard time on the HaraHara Course even after over ten years of this formula, and I still play it with a smile wrapped around my face. If you go down to Chinatown in lovely Manhattan, you can step into an arcade with a bunch of sweaty Asian kids crowding around a Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 machine whipping each other unmercifully back and forth with Akuma. You see people tripping over each other to get a Triple A score on Holic on the latest Dance Dance Revolution machine. I play people in Puyo Pop. This is a game that doesn't quite draw crowds like someone pulling off sweet drifts in Initial D Arcade Stage Version 3, but you'll always find people that will play you, loser pays all. When you run out of people who will play you because they don't like giving you their money anymore, just go for the high score in Story mode. All of the arcades that I once knew to have a Puyo Pop machine have either gotten rid of them or have gone under, and it pains me to realize that Sega Amusements USA never brought Puyo Pop Fever to America despite the fact that they basically launch Ghost Squad machines into every arcade they can find. So, now I'm stuck here with my console version of Puyo Pop, games in which no one will ever play me because they can't seem to ever win, and when they do they never let me live it down. Although I do wish I could once again hit up the arcades for some of this action, I guess I really am doomed to sticking with my three home versions of the game.

I'm OK with that, especially now that I can take it on the bus with me.

Anyway, back to the subject at hand - the reason as to why this version of the game is so superior to the others isn't just the fact that it's portable. Sonic Team threw in a number of modes and quirks to make not only the Puyo fans happy, but puzzle fans in general. Perhaps the biggest inclusion I could touch upon here would be the eight-player matches. Here, one player can have the game and seven others can download it to their DSes. In addition, you can choose any character you want and can have any rule set in the game, all off of one pack. These are things I never would have dreamed of with my Game Boy Advance. I remember the sheer frustration of playing F-Zero: Maximum Velocity with one generic vehicle, on one awful map, with no music. On the DS all you're sacrificing is a few sound effects. Don't have seven other people to play with? It doesn't matter, because the computers fill their spaces and they're just as smart as any fairly-seasoned Puyo player, except for a few notables who are significantly better at the game than normal players. If you've got a weak heart, you can do the same for four-player matches and classic one-on-one.

The game's cheery disposition could possibly turn people off who are used to darker puzzle games, such as the SNES cult-classic Tetris Attack. It's no secret that Sonic Team's incarnation of this franchise is too colorful and bouncy for its own good, but after playing this for over a year I've come to associate the style with all Puyo games. The entire feel to the game is so happy you'll either want to laugh, vomit, or do a weird combination of both. It really grows on you, though. There are tons of characters, each with their own personalities and voice-overs. The main character, Amitie, can be found yelling "Puyo Pop... Fever!" right in the beginning of the game. She also has hilarious pre-90s valley girl quips such as "Wicked!" and "Get really real...", which I say in real life. OK, I don't, but I'm probably going to start after this review. I do say "wicked", though.

In terms of its successfulness as an addictive puzzle title, let's just say it's one of the few games that I can still see after closing my eyes. Very few games before this have been able to do that, although previously Sonic Team's Phantasy Star Online and Chu Chu Rocket have given me similar experiences. It's probably because of their graphical styles that just ingrain themselves into your mind. There has to be a scientific explanation for this. Puyo Pop Fever offers classic high-score tables for each round as well as Endless Mode, which includes the Original "play-for-twenty-minutes-and-not-realize-you-just-wasted-twenty-minutes" Endless Puyo. Classic Puyo rulesets also present themselves in multiplayer mode for those of us frustrated with the human mind's capability to correctly counter our every move, or if you're just sick of getting completely destroyed by a single player in eight-player Puyo Pop. With some of the AI programmed into this game you're going to get destroyed either way, so you might as well blame it on something other than your own shoddy skills, right?

The music is by Wavemaster's Hideki Abe, who is not one of the world's more popular composers. I'd like to comment on this, because I actually feel the arrangements in the DS version of the game are superior to the console versions. The compositions are cleaner and Abe somehow figured out how to not only throw electric guitars into the mix, but make it sound absolutely amazing. Get to Popoi's stage in the Intermediate single-player course and you'll know what I mean. Oh, and that sound test you needed to unlock in the original, song by song? Entirely unlocked from the start here.

Speaking of unlockables, there aren't many. A game like Puyo Pop relies on its fantastic replay value for people that have a love for the game, but after you've completed the WakuWaku (Intermediate) and HaraHara Courses (Advanced), you've pretty much unlocked all there is to unlock - cutscenes and two characters in multiplayer.

This game gets an N-Philes score of A.

Listen, there's a reason as to why I'm biased towards Puyo Pop. Atlus isn't giving me any money, or anything free for that matter to say this, and since it doesn't even really matter to anyone outside of myself here I go: Puyo Pop Fever is the best puzzle game to hit the DS, the best multiplayer game so far, and one of the best puzzle games to grace any handheld. Tetris is there, but it ain't got nothin' on this slice! That's me, I'm straight off the streets, and I like to thug it out with Puyo Pop Fever. My homeboys would agree, but they're out of quarters and want to go home. Get really real...

Posted in: Reviews