Game:

Puyo Pop Fever (2003)

Duration: 9:06

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1

So now that my meaningless philosophical ranting is out of the way, let's talk about the reality of the Puyos and their poppage. For all the talk of how the pinnacles of Puyo Pop operates, I'll have you know that we two are not there. Not by a long shot.

I'm not sure if that's more or less interesting to play and watch, because when I see a high-level Puyo match underway, I just find myself staring blankly in abject horror followed by amusement as I watch all the pieces get popped away on one field and then the other in some massive tug of war as to who will be the first to meet their doom.

I don't think I have the dedication to be able to build patterns like that, almost like a blob Lego set slowly engineering the other player's doom. I'm always trying to figure out where I should put my next piece just for the sake of keeping the current formation within the realms of the clearable...which I often fail at, because somewhere along the line my brain trips over its own handiwork and I ruin one chain reaction by building another link overtop the trigger point, often because I can't even decide where the trigger point should go, as I've got more than one that will set off the reaction.

In truth, I think I probably think too low from my "training" with Panel de Pon...in Puyo, the formations have a lot more vertical leeway and come in a greater variety of shapes, so what goes down may very well clear something much higher up in the formation.

My other major "weakness" that I notice in matches is that I'm a little squeamish (I guess? I don't know how else to put it, exactly...) about the Fever Mode and the implications of sending nuisance Puyo to my opponents.

Fever offers a rather strange proposition, one that seems built with the idea in mind of chucking out the standard Puyo dynamics, or at least temporarily putting them on ice, and giving one player a good, strong push in the direction of throwing a huge preponderance of nuisance Puyo to the other side.

The reason why this gives me pause is because I know that if I take the offensive, my opponent will get whatever moderate number of nuisances I can muster, and unlike a player that is a highly-skilled chainmaker, you can be almost certain that the time I put into making a chain reaction will yield far too few nuisance Puyo to be at all life threatening. More importantly, it will require more time for me to build up some more momentum and in the meantime my opponent can simply make small clears to offset mine, gradually filling the Fever meter.

On the other side of the field, on the other hand, my opponent will have buckled down to play a bit more defensively...giving me only small bits of nuisance Puyo to harry me and my feeble attempts at chain synthesis, which I will almost surely not be willing or able to offset, because the only material with which to do so on my side of the field will be the chain I currently happen to be building.

At best this means that I will be getting one or two offsets and Fever meter points once in a while, and every time I do, the chain I sent over will be good for at least two or three offsets. My only saving grace, yet again, is the fact that my opponent here is...really not very good at the Fever patterns yet. I attribute this to lack of exposure, the same dubious "advantage" that I held for Bleach, so it really is only a matter of time before that vanishes and I'm going to have to learn to adapt to that properly...

I suppose on the upside to that, a successful and productive enemy Fever would create the nuisance that I needed to fill my own Fever meter, so I guess maybe it would be a matter of setting up for a lot of offsets after my opponent is about to enter Fever mode.

There will be more on Puyo as I feel like I learn more about it firsthand, naturally.