Magical Puzzle Popils (Game Gear) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
111A playthrough of Tengen's 1992 puzzle game for the Sega Game Gear, Magical Puzzle Popils.
This video shows a playthrough of all 100 rounds on the standard mode. Following the regular ending, I show Level 0 (the true final stage made available once you have gotten "perfect" on every stage) and the final true ending.
Magical Puzzle Popils was one of the few games that made me wish that I had a Game Gear instead of a Game Boy as a kid. The couple of magazines articles and screenshots that I had seen convinced me that I needed to play it. Even if I had a Game Gear I probably would've never played it since it had such a tiny print run, and still to this day, few people seem to know that it ever was a thing despite it being released in all three major sales territories.
Popils is an old-school, arcade-style puzzler. Each stage occupies a single screen, and the goal is always to save the princess. To do this, you punch, stomp, and headbutt blocks while avoiding hazards. Breaking blocks will shift everything sitting in the same column, and you have to be both clever and careful in order to create safe pathways to the princess. Neither of them can take a hit, so if one dies, the entire stage resets.
It's extraordinarily simple, and I think that's the key to its success. It requires a great deal of thought and strategy but it never gets bogged down with arbitrary rules and restrictions.
Everything in Popils has a hyper cutesy, storybook style aesthetic that's clean and colorful, and the simplicity of the graphics make the stage layouts easy to quickly consider without any ambiguity. I've always really found the art attractive in this one, even if the couples' black eyes still creep me out to no end. The music never changes through the 100 boards, but it's actually quite catchy. Maddeningly so after you've played awhile.
If Popils reminds you of a certain line of classic Taito arcade titles, you might not be surprised to learn the clear connexion between them. MTJ, or Mitsuji Fukio, the designer credited on the title screen, was in fact the lead designer on Bubble Bobble and Rainbow Islands (...as well as Darius II and Volfied)!
There are enough similarities that had they slapped a BB title on it, this could easily have taken the place of Rainbow Islands or Paradol Stars. And, if I may be venture to be so bold, I'd argue that Popils is just as good as the Bubble Bobble titles, complete with an almost-as-catchy theme song!
The game also has quite a bit of replayability to it - there's a fully featured stage editor that allows you to save up to 30 custom levels to the battery-backed memory!
If you like puzzlers, this one really is a no brainer. Though Famicom and PC Engine versions were developed, neither of them were ever released, and so Popils is one of those rare exclusive titles that even today is worth buying a Game Gear to play it on. I can't think of any other GG titles that I would say that about.
Popils is a genius title that's criminally overlooked - even in Japanese there's virtually nothing about this game online! Hopefully this video helps a few people discover this hidden gem. It's my all-time favorite GG game, no question.
Kanpai, Mitsuji-san, and RIP. You were the man.
*Recorded using LCD shaders through Retroarch.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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