Puyo Pop

"Lump 'em and like it!"

As surely as companies will always want low overhead, there will always be games with stuff dropping from the top of the screen that you have to make disappear, the sort hoping to achieve a deceptive simplicity intertwined with subtle nuances available to those who would master it. You know what's on the table: there's no real animation beyond rotating something or speeding it on its way down, and it forces the player to think by default. Everything's on a stiff grid, but hopefully if the designers stumbled on something clever, the variations in difficulty rely more on gameplay tweaks than on the game speeding up to an impossible speed.

In Puyo Pop, which makes out pretty well in all this, there are five different sorts of beans that fall down in pairs in a six-wide well, and the way to survival(i.e. don't fill the screen) is to link four or more together so they will vanish. This causes everything above to collapse(and beans always fall even if they are lumped,) and chain reactions are possible and necessary to get past the basic levels. It doesn't sound that hard, and indeed in the training mode when you have no opponent on the right, it isn't. But in computer story mode, which is generous enough to reward concentrated persistence through infinite continues, making several bean-clumps with one drop causes clear bubbles to drop on the other side, impeding your opponent's bean sorting efforts. So there is a clear trade-off between trying to build up a Rube Goldberg contraption of several clumps and just making a steady nuisance. Often you'll have to resist the temptation to create a chain while at the same time stifling the urge to annex one more level to your proposed house of cards.

This seems quite clever with opportunities for the dynamic balance of a chess position where one player has sacrificed material. Sadly it's over much sooner; usually the first person to score a major chain wipes the second out immediately. Unlike Bubble Bobble, which has some back-and-forthing, Puyo Pop dumps bubbles everywhere on the afflicted player's screen, and it's all hasty enough to drop you down roughly after the pleasure of liquidating most or all of your beans.

Even though most bubbles pop when an adjacent bean goes poof, some of the higher-level matches can end within seconds, especially when you have not adjusted to how to control very fast-dropping beans or how to refer to the 'next' panel(next two bean-pairs,) or when you can't quite discern between blue and green, or red and purple. Fortunately in this case the different faces and shapes for each bean color are easy to memorize, and you can base your plans on that. In general the game always provides a way out and even gives a good small hint as adjacent and same-colored beans osmose.

Fortunately it's not just about beans and bubbles. Story mode mixes several difficulty variables well: you have six chapters of a sort, and you always start with four bean colors. Things get faster as you gain passage to the next level, but you also get an additional color dropped in as well as bubbles on each side--that the bubbles can vanish will destroy some of your previous favorite initial setups. Then there's a let-down at the next chapter, but then the bubbles come a bit early and some even need to be hit twice before popping! By the time the beans drop very fast, you fortunately have a pause before each one falls, and with the restricted size of your well you have time to pre-empt your next move and make it just in time. There's even a pause before you land, where you can flip a bean 180 degrees even if it's wedged before two others.

But the mild pleasure of vaporizing beans would wear down if it weren't offset by some of the oddest dialogue you can expect from a puzzle game. Star Sweep holds a special place in my heart for the most incomprehensible breaks, but here we have several characters that combine two different mythological creatures or just two concepts you didn't suspect could cohabitate reasonably: along with Arle, your main character and Carbuncle, her pet animated two-fingered glove who bounces around the screen middle to show who's got the momentum, there is a tea-drinking skeleton, demons and witches and a harpy that, being anime, utterly fail to scare(one seems just like a cleaning lady only her hair is longer and her broom thicker,) and a psychedelic distant relation of Babar.

Of course it would be a shame if creatures this odd threw around standard taunts, and there's a good deal of humor here above the usual mutations in meaning that occur when a game comes west across the Pacific. It doesn't add up to a very logical story but after the flurries of evasive-action planning in the later levels you probably need a break. Arle suffers through some terrible come-ons(informative as well as I was unsure of many opponents' genders,) suffers through the purtiest li'l harpy ever's attempts at singing, and reassures mythical creatures she doesn't want to eat/capture them but just drop beans into place a bit better. Plus those little anime kiddies are so cute using American colloquialisms and taunts even when they use them right.

I've touched on why I like the graphics--commendably functional to the point of having a grid for your well's background--although having an option for a different color scheme might be even nicer. Sadly in the cut scenes you don't get the full view of the bizarre characters the manual describes. The bottom half of the screen is filled with their zany dialogue. It's the only downer in a puzzle game otherwise very well suited for the extra-small screen.

The lack of a really compelling single-player mode hurts Puyo Pop, but there's something to be said for a simple, slick game you can get through in a few hours and that you'll want to replay to find the hidden level and cards(see hard mode.) Linking beans is easy enough that the game is immediately involving, and although some degree of luck is involved later on, bad luck only involves a slight delay in things. I suppose not all games can be so obliging and even funny. Given its simplicity it's hard to imagine how stores could charge too much for this game, but at a bargain price it's an excellent wedge between longer and more exhausting games.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 06/03/03, Updated 06/03/03