Gameplay Basics:
Four examples of valid groups of four. Piet Mondrian, eat your heart out! In Puyo Puyo, you drop pieces from the top of the screen into a well. The pieces which you drop are made up of two puyos. You can rotate these and move them freely. To eliminate puyos, you need to collect them into groups of four. Pieces are considered touching if they are directly connected either horizontally, or vertically. Diagonals do not count. Some examples of valid groups of four are given on the left.
Puyos always obey gravity - Even puyos which appear to be connected will separate and fall individually, if there is empty space beneath either one. New pieces are always created in the third column from the left. You lose the game if this column becomes full. And of course, to score the big points, you need to set up combos and chains...
Combos are created by eliminating more than 4 puyos at the same time. This can be done by eliminating two different sets of puyos at once, or just by making a big grouping of one color. Two examples of combos are shown on the right, one above the other.. Even though the top combo is one color, and the bottom combo is two colors, since they both result in the same number of puyos being eliminated, they are worth the same number of points.

Combos don't usually score as many points as chains, but they are easier to set up.

Two examples of combos.
Chains are created by setting up a chain reaction, so that when one set of puyos is eliminated, another set of puyos is eliminated immediately after gravity takes effect. An example is shown on the right. After the four greens are destroyed, the two blues which are resting on top of the greens will fall, and match up with the other two blues, and all four blues will also be destroyed.

This would be referred to as a 2-Rensa chain, because there were two seperate times when puyos were being destroyed. High Rensa chains score very big points, but are very difficult to set up.

A basic chain.



Two Player Mode:
Puyo Puyo is designed for two players. In order to win, you have to make your opponent lose. Similar to most puzzle-fighting games, when you set off combos and chains, you will send your opponent garbage.
Four matching puyos adjacent to several ojama puyos. In Puyo Puyo, garbage comes in the form of "Ojama Puyos", or garbage puyos. These are colorless puyos which will not match up with eachother, or anything else. To destroy them, you must match up any other puyos so that they are touching the Ojama Puyos. Any Ojama Puyos adjacent to destroyed Puyos will be destroyed also, as shown on the left.
In the later Puyo Puyo games, if your opponent hits you with a 20-ojama-puyo attack, and you hit your opponent with a 15-ojama-puyo attack, the attacks will cancel eachother out, and you will get 5 garbage puyos dumped on you.



Strategy:
Much of the skill in Puyo Puyo comes in just being able to invent chains, and set them up quickly, and this is something which can only be learned with practice.

In the beginning of a match, you should be trying to increase the number of puyos on your side. If you only have 11 puyos on your side, then you obviously can't get any monstrously big chains, so you need to be setting puyos up in groups of twos and threes - but not fours! Ideally you want to devote all of your puyos to a single high-level rensa chain.

After about thirty seconds (or when your opponent sends his first attack, whichever comes first) you should launch an attack. If you're building up a big 9 or 10 rensa combo, and this takes you longer than 30 seconds, then by this time your opponent will probably have a pretty good offensive setup, and you will be in extreme danger if you don't start attacking.

Your first attack should probably be your biggest. After the first attacks are out of the way it's much too risky to set up anything big, because your opponent can attack and cover it up, so you should try setting up small 2-3 Rensa chains.

If you need some help beyond that, here are a few more specific strategies.

Friends don't let friends use Nohoho! Shown to the left is the vicious and wacky Nohoho strategy, invented by the intelligent frog salesman himself, Nohoho! First, you must fill up all your right three columns. You must do this VERY quickly! Speed is much more important than how you arrange the puyos. After your right three columns are all filled, start making matches with the filled up columns, like I did in the middle picture. About %50 of the time, stuff will match up, giving you at least a Level 2 combo, though it can get pretty high if you are lucky.
For those of you who wish to play Nohoho, here are a few Nohoho pointers to help you on your way...
  • Speed is more important than planning!
  • Nohoho only works well with three or four colors. With only three colors, Nohoho is unbeatable!
  • Nohoho relies on LUCK and PATIENCE. Keep knocking out that left column! Try, try again!

    If you have trouble going fast enough, you're probably thinking too much! Over and over, just hold right on your controller, then drop. Maybe rotate twice occasionally, if you need to keep pieces from matching together. If you want to see Nohoho in action, just play against Nohoho! He's the frog-looking character in Puyo Puyo 2, 3, and 4.

  • Templated chain. Yawn.

    It's common for players to start out with a templated chain like the one on the left. Ideally, the bottom three rows should all be joined together, and the contents of the fourth row should match the puyos to their bottom-left. On the left, when I kick out the three green puyos near the right side of the well, most of the bottom four rows goes with them. A rather easy 5-rensa chain.

    The strength of this strategy is that you can set up very big chains without needing to think all that much. The weaknesses are, firstly, that it is VERY horizontal, which makes it prone to attack! In the left example, if my opponent sends me just ONE piece of garbage in the rightmost column, my whole combo will be difficult to salvage. Secondly, it's a very rigid setup, and you don't always get the right pieces for it.

    Level 9 chain! Impress and embarrass your friends! Shown to the left is a larger example of this strategy: You can see that the five purple pieces are about to get destroyed, and when they go, almost EVERYTHING else goes. This chain reaction will send over 600 puyos sent to my opponent, which is very embarassing for them! Setting up something this huge only really works if your opponent sends you little or no garbage.

    You can see in the bottom four rows that this all started out with a very simple templated chain.

    A quick and dirty combo-chain setup.

    A very general strategy when building chains is to end with a huge combo. Even a 2-rensa chain can send 30-40 puyos if you end it with a large combo! An example is show on the left: You can see that the right three columns are filled with reds, greens, and blues separated with three purple puyos. When the seven blue puyos get destroyed, the purples go, followed by the 13 assorted puyos. Even though this is only a 3-rensa chain, it will send enough to kill my opponent.

    This strategy is great because it's easy to expand, and difficult to cover up. You can create the initial three- columns- seperated setup in about 15 seconds, and then it's up to you when you want to set it off. Even a 2 rensa chain ending with a huge combo sends a rock, so you already have a good counter to anything your opponent throws at you.

    As you get better at the game, you'll develop a more dynamic strategy of your own. In general, make sure you don't wait too long to attack! This is a very bad habit of mine. Try to make your first attack around the 20-30 second mark!

    If your stack gets too high, go on defense, and don't worry with combos and chains... Just eliminate whatever you can, and try to get rid of garbage puyos!

    There are only so many possibilities for your first two or three pieces. So just like in chess, try memorizing a few good opening setups, that way you can play faster and more consistently!



    Review:
    Skeleton T bears no resemblance to Mr. T of the A-Team. Definitely a 10. Graphics are colorful, and the characters are very cute! I never thought a skeleton could be cute before Skeleton T!

    Although this game was released amidst a flurry of tetris-style games, the gameplay is far different from tetris, or anything else. Before Puyo Puyo, all puzzle games were designed to have a 1-player mode, and they were designed so that it was impossible to live forever - The blocks were the player's primary enemy. Tetris was the only game in which two players sent garbage to eachother. In Puyo Puyo, it's pretty easy to live forever (the puyos are your friend!) and the emphasis is on the multiplayer mode.

    The control is outstanding, especially in Puyo Puyo 2 and up. The pieces rotate very freely, they will rise and fall to fit into nearby crevices. If you're dropping a piece into a very narrow column, too narrow to rotate, you can hit either rotate button twice, and the piece will flip upside-down.

    The Computer AI is pretty good. During the beginning of a match, it tries to build up its field, and after it's done, it starts trying to set off combos. It is restricted to building up its pieces randomly, for the most part... It won't deliberately set up 5 rensa combos, but they still happen accidentally sometimes.

    Well, we're almost at the end of the review/info for Puyo Puyo. I could talk for hours and hours about little facets of this game, so if you have any questions or just want to talk puyos, please e-mail me. Now a quick run-through of the games, and their differences....

    Puyo Puyo - Very basic. Garbage does not counter, and the vs. com mode is very linear. Was ported over to the U.S twice, once by Sega and once by Nintendo. Sega's Puyo Puyo clone, "Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine" flopped, due to lack of cuteness. Nintendo made "Kirby's Avalanche", which did pretty well, and was pretty cute. Kirby himself sounded much too feminine, but the enemy voices were very fitting and funny. "Squishaaaay"

    Puyo Puyo Tsu - Improvements everywhere. Now in the 1-player mode, there are 35 or so characters instead of 12, and your opponent is chosen via roulette. Garbage countering is introduced, so now there's a point to 5+ rensa combos (In the original, a 4 rensa combo would kill your opponent always, now they can counter it and survive. Oh-ho!)

    Puyo Puyo Sun - Sun Puyos! Interesting. Now whenever anything is countered, both players get a Sun Puyo, which sends between 3 and 104 puyos when eliminated, depending on how cleverly it is used! Also, characters now have different attack animations and voices! Harpy sings scales, Arle tosses ice and fire, Skeleton T drinks tea. When your character receives large amounts of garbage, they scream at you in Japanese.

    Puyo Puyo ~n - Special Abilities! I haven't actually played the game so I can't say for sure whether these help or hinder the gameplay. Each character now has a unique ability which matches their playing style. Nohoho has the Nohoho Slot, which randomly flips the columns of your well vertically. Skeleton T has the Super Dynamic Ocha Bomber, which increases the amount of garbage you send, as long as you don't rotate your pieces.

    Puyo Puyo is an extremely difficult game to find in the states. If you've got a PC, there is a PC version of Puyo Puyo Sun out in Japan, which is absolutely great. You can save your favorite matches, and it's got HTML and bios on each character. There's even an extra "Puyolympics" bonus game thrown in which is good for a few laughs.

    If you're going to emulate it, go get Puyo Puyo Tsu for SNES or Genesis. The voices and animations are much better for SNES. Both versions have the two-player functionality and garbage-countering and cuteness which make Puyo Puyo fun to play.

    Click on the gorging Nohoho to head back to my main puzzle fighting page.

    BACK... Nohoho eats his own body weight in seafood.
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