Exploring a new version of Tetris

A review of Puyo Puyo Tetris 2

Like everyone who grew up in the 90s, I had a Gameboy with Tetris on it and until Pokemon Red came along, Tetris was probably my most played Gameboy game. For me though, that’s pretty much where my knowledge about Tetris started and ended. I’d played Tetris on 3DS and even Switch but each time I was just playing the Gameboy version ported over to these consoles either through Virtual Console or Nintendo Switch Online.

Puyo Puyo Tetris 2

Original Release: 2020 (PS5); Played Release: 2020 (PS5)
Time Played: 59 hours; Time in Backlog: N/A

The main reason for getting Tetris on the PS5 was to be able to play multiplayer. However, upon installing Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 I saw this wasn’t just a split-screen version of Tetris with some party modes, there was a whole Adventure Mode where you could play a campaign and get story cutscenes between Tetris games. Curious what the Adventure mode was like I decided to check it out and see what it offered.

Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 is obviously a sequel. I hadn’t much cared about that because, just like Mario Kart 8 is a sequel, I figured I didn’t really need to have played the earlier games. While that is strictly true, I do feel I would have gotten a bit more out of the Adventure Mode had I been familiar with the characters involved. Nonetheless the game got me caught up to speed relatively quickly with what was going on, helped by the fact that the story is rather thin.

You start as Amitie and you are in the world of Puyo Puyos. You almost immediately learn that your universe is currently colliding with the world of Tetrominoes and it’s causing all sorts of trouble that can only be fixed by playing Tetris and Puyo Puyo battles. As the story unfolds you discover why the worlds are being merged and it's up to your motley gang of characters to stop it from happening.

Despite the barebones nature of the story, it introduces the characters quickly and immediately gets you to understand their quirks and I wasn't at all confused by what was happening. The story would have been forgettable except for the fact that the characters are just so over the top and ridiculous. They are constantly bickering with each other and despite how two dimensional they all are they did grow on me by the end.

As you progress through the game you will go from just having mundane Puyo Puyo Battles to Puyo Puyo Tetris battles where the player plays Puyo Puyo9 while the opponent plays Tetris and then even more complex game modes are introduced which change the standard rules in one way or another. The rate at which the new game modes are introduced is good and stops the game from being overwhelming, although as someone who mainly chose this game for Tetris, I did find the early emphasis on Puyo Puyo battles to be a bit frustrating initially.

The vanilla Puyo Puyo battles game mode turned out to be a lot of fun. Unlike Tetris I don’t think Puyo Puyo was designed as a single player experience and it is at its best when played against an opponent, even if that opponent is just the computer AI. It did take me a long time though to understand how to setup combos with Puyo Puyo and how to manage your opponents dropping garbage on you. It felt like the instincts I would have in a Tetris game were the opposite of what I should do in a Puyo Puyo game. However, after many hours of playing Puyo Puyo I have to say it’s actually a very fun game mode and I did get quite good at it by the end.

The amount of content in the Adventure Mode is incredible. There is a significant number of optional battles you can skip over which I did in my initial playthrough and then went back and did after I finished the game. The boss battle game modes I found the most frustrating as your characters will gain experience as you work through the campaign and your level impacts the boss battles quite significantly. As a result of this I’d often get stuck at the boss battles and need to just do some grinding. Grinding in a Tetris game isn’t really what I was looking for, fortunately the boss battles were the only time this became an issue.

Another downside to the Adventure Mode is that it will scale the difficulty by default based on how well you’re playing. I found this would often scale up quite high and then stay there until I turned off the game in frustration. The game would then rebalance upon me logging back in, I’d smash the battle and then it would instantly scale back to the highest difficulty. I eventually had to turn off the scaling difficulty because it was negatively impacting my experience far too much.

While I did enjoy the ridiculous story, there is a cutscene before and after every battle. When each cutscene can go for 10 minutes they started to overstay their welcome just a little bit by the end. I feel that halving the number of cutscenes and just making them slightly longer would have been a good compromise.

Where the game truly thrives though is in its multiplayer. I played against my partner in couch splitscreen, and we had an absolute blast with the multiplayer mode. After sinking in 40+ hours in the Adventure Mode my skill in Tetris and Puyo Puyo had developed quite a bit. However, by changing the game settings and multiplayer modes we were playing in we were able to give me a big enough handicap that we became evenly matched in our battles against each other and could have fun while providing each other a meaningful challenge.

Overall, I’m really glad I got Puyo Puyo Tetris 2. I’ve sunk a lot of hours into it these past 2 months and despite the quibbles I mentioned above I couldn’t be happier with the game.

Final Verdict: 8/10 (Good)

I’ve recently been playing a few JRPGs, including the very first one which helped define the genre, Dragon Quest. This is a series I’ve not had a lot of experience with and so I was curious to see whether I would enjoy the first game. I’ll have more to say about it next time though.