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Also released on PS4, "Puchitto Cluster" (aka "Petite Cluster") is a fun budget puzzler released in 2020 by "ULLUCUS HEAVEN Inc." (best known for their "Fragment's Note" titles). For the low price of 500 Yen, you get a decent little bit of content and chibi-style anime characters swinging around magical attacks. While it has a fun but uncompromising gameplay loop, it's well worth the price of admission.

There isn't too much of a plot, but there is a surprising amount of dialogue; essentially, you take the role of one of five (plus one hidden) magicians who maintain the balance of ... (couldn't find the name of the kingdom) until one day when a mysterious doppelganger goes around causing mischief for our heroines. The antics ensue as each character realizes it is a misunderstanding and run around attempting to find the one truly responsible for the mean-spirited pranks and ultimately band together to make the perpetrator behave... while it is nice that each character's story takes place over several episodes and from different perspectives, it won't win any awards. The game was designed to be cute above all else and succeeds in being so, but it's also pretty fun as well.

The core puzzle action is actually somewhat unique and fairly intuitive -- the game is an inverted drop puzzler not too unlike "Magical Drop", "Money Idol / Puzzle Exchanger", "To Heart: Date Exchanger", "Oshidashi Zintrick", etc. but with its own twists of course. The player controls several magic tiles and three columns that are allocated to different directions or buttons. The goal here is to sandwich two tiles together to convert the tiles in-between into said color/type, but you can only convert one type at a time. What this means is that if you have a moon-sun-sun-moon, you'll get moon-moon-moon-moon. However, if you have moon-sun-star-moon, it won't work... you would need to do moon-sun-star-moon-star which will create moon-sun-star-star-star which THEN needs moon-sun-star-star-star-sun WHICH BALLOONS INTO moon-sun-sun-sun-sun-sun WITH A FINALE OF moon-sun-sun-sun-sun-sun-moon... WOWEE! Eliminating five or more of a type creates "shadow" nuisance tiles and quickly clearing all three rows creates the deadly "All Flash" which drops a crippling amount of shadow drops (very difficult except at the beginning of a match).

Matches are made a little more interesting as combos, character stats and "favorite tile" play into the game's meta as each character has HP and matches are won by knockout or time (highest remaining HP). Generally, the more HP a character has, the weaker they are while high attack warrants low HP, so you can go from a tank to a glass cannon, the the game favors a more aggressive playstyle (and thus the glass cannon). This game is not as balanced as some other puzzlers as characters don't have special abilities or such that can turn the tides or get out of a sticky situation and once a character has low HP or is stuck in a bad situation with too many nuisance tiles, it becomes almost exponentially difficult to recover. Tiles that reach the bottom of the screen don't have a particularly bad effect, though not clearing a big link is a missed opportunity (and it can speed up some of the remaining columns).

The game has online play for its low asking price as well as several offline versus configurations and the ability to unlock costumes in a simple manner for all the characters. You can also reference in-game help materials to take advantage of all the game has to offer. The game looks pretty good and has a nice soundtrack -- the story itself can be fast-forwarded (though the option says "skip") and the story battles are actually pretty challenging (the last two stages will really test your abilities) but you can get a solid few hours of entertainment out of the game. This is a video of the game in action illustrating various things. You can get this version at:

https://store-jp.nintendo.com/list/software/70010000022569.html

Enjoy.

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