"Comical and fun, but it can't hold a candle to games like Lumines."

I have a few rules when I decide to keep and play a game, or to toss it out the window. The game has to be fun, it has to be diverse enough not to be repettative, it has to entertain with more than just playing, and it has to be as fun a year from now as it was when I first played it.

If you have read my review for Lumines, you will have noted that I am not a puzzle fan. That said, I had always found myself pausing to consider Super Puzzle Fighter II at my local retailer. For almost a year and a half, the box sat on the self, seemingly only viewed by me. Finally, after the blissful time spend with Lumines, I decided to get the guts to pick the cart up. Well, that and I had a discount for the box's quality.

Why I bought it aside, let me explain the odd title. If you have ever looked at Capcom's famous fighting series Street Fighter, you will have noticed that Puzzle Fighter's title seems to be a joke on it. This is deliberate, and is also a bit ironic; this cart is basically the original version, which had used the same name as a joke on the Street Fighter franchise.

Why would they do that? The fact that while you are figuring out your strategy and removing blocks, the middle of the screen sports one of six initially-available characters of your choice against another, with the second representing your foe. Depending on how you play, these characters will "fight" with special moves from their movelists from their respective series, taunt, and other goofy things.

Yes, there are fighters in here from more than just the Street Fighter series. From the Street Figter franchise we have Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Sakura, Akuma (unlockable), and Dan (Unlockable). From the less-famous Darkstalker series, we have Morrigan, Felicia, Hsien Ko, Donovan, and Devilot (unlockable). Each character has a special "counter gem" pattern, which is dropped when set requirements are met.

Now to the game itself, and one of the reason's I did not give it as high a rating as Lumines. See, games like Lumines and Tetris can be picked up easily without reading instruction manuals, even from the first play-through. When you first see the menu screen, you might notice a "Training Demo" option. When selected, you will be presented with a presentation from hidden fighter Dan on how to play the game. While a nice feature, and a helpful way to recall things, sadly the demo is almost required when picking the game up after a long time away, as the puzzle tricks might be forgotten once in a while. Not a massive flaw, but enough to keep it from being one of the greatest puzzles of all time.

The controls are very basic, with the A and B buttons allowing you to rotate the twin-blocks that fall down. The D-pad moves the peces, and all is good. When you get a 2X2 square of four blocks of the same coloration, they fuse together. You can only enlarge these shapes only when an entire neighboring side share a color. For instance, if you have a 4X5 blue gem, you can make it grow a bit by placing five gems on one side of the same color on one side, making it 5X5.

Confused?

Believe it or not, but watching the demo makes more sense than my pathetic attempt to explain it. You do need to attempt to make these big gems, though, as they help you when you remove the blocks. How do you remove the blocks? Specially colored sparkly balls fall in place of blocks on occasion, and touching another object, be it another sparkly or a simple block of the same color, you can cause all adjacent blocks of the same shade to vanish. Then all blocks able to will fall down, and if you played your blocks right, you could start a chain reaction. Every so often a diamind will fall down with your blocks, and touching an object of any color below it will remove all objects with that color from your screen.

Be warned, though, that while you dish out damage to your foe, your foe will be fighting back. Their removal efforts will dumb blocks onto your side with colored numbers. When you drop as many blocks as is the number on the opponent's block, you will turn it into a normal block of whatever color it's number was. The ammount of blocks the opponent sends at you is relative to how powerful their attack against you is.

This is just a "basic" explination, though the demo covers it much more fluently. Do note that, while it can be simplistic, I have found that it is rather easy to forget certain parts of the rules. However, there is a remedy if you are still learning.

See, as most home versions of the series the title pokes at, Super Puzzle Fighter II sports a full options menu, almost like any stock menu from almost any given Street Fighter game. There are eight difficulty settings, a meter to control the damage delt by the blocks, a speed gague, how many rounds you "fight" (one round, best of three, or best of five) in either VS or single vs CPU, a volume control for the SFX and Music, and ::gasp!:: an exit button. These allow you to customize the game as you will, allowing the game to be continually challenging.

But there is more, more than a normal puzzler. Here is one reason why I gave this cart so high a score: there are unlockable bonuses, and not just extra characters to watch. Well, ok, there are tons of character pallate changes to unlock, sound effects to find, characters to win, galleries to view (not that good), an unlockable menu to watch the Intermissions (^_^), and even full vocal musicals by the voice actor of the character who is connected to the song. While these have become typical unlockables, they are worth noting, but still nice to fiddle aroudn with.

The Arcade mode has three settings on top of whatever settings you choose in the Options screen, with Easy, Normal, and Hard. A "Master" mode is unlockable in the "Street Puzzle" mode, and all of these modes mean that anyone can pick up and learn without complications. There is a VS mode, which allows the player to play against another with ONE GBA/SP/DS (!), though I strongly advise you using the Normal mode, as the controls are simplified and don't allow you to drop the blocks as fast. This CAN be played WITHOUT another cart, though for full controls, another player needs a cart and another GBA/SP to play; this mode is unavailable on the DS, though the VS mode is still useable.

All in all, this is a nice package. The learning curve is enough to annoy, though the amusement factor and extra unlockables more than make up for it. Capcom needs to make a few changes, such as more characters or more unlockables in the future, but the game is still one of the better puzzlers for the GBA/SP/DS. Not quite Tetris or Lumines or Colums in addictiveness, but still one of the better puzzlers out there.

Final Word: Puzzle/Capcom nuts, get this. Everyone else, try it first.

Score: 8 of 10
*Best Feature: Amusing parody of Capcom's two bigger series, cute chibi-characters.
*Worst Feature: Limited character list (total of 11 in all), slight learning curve.
*If you liked: Lumines (PSP), Colums (Game Gear, GBA), Tetris (there should be one on virtually every Nintendo system)
*Guilty Pleasure: Continuously watching the Intermission clips and loving every second of chibi-fun.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 05/16/05