I'm unsure if there's a proper term for it... - in German maybe? - that describes a rite of passage through young adulthood that I'm sure everyone on this site has experienced on some level, at some time: finally having the disposable income to obtain something you coveted in childhood and then inevitably finding out that it wasn't everything (or even anything) that the media and advertising you consumed as a child promised you that it would be.

For me, many of these holy capital-cultural artefacts centre on Pokémon. I know it's cliche to refer to yet another Japanese entertainment juggernaut as something analogous to a religion, but it's hard to deny the comparison when your town's priest spent a lot of time between 1997 and the new millennium talking about the Satanic properties of Mr. Mime, Magikarp and Misty. The Catholic Church was afraid of Zubat for a while.

The mysticism of Pokémon was so strong in rural Scotland that my school descended into riots over Pokémon not once, but twice. When someone in our class sent a mail order to China for a copy of Pokémon Silver almost a full year before the game even existed in Europe, people handled it with the same practiced reverence they'd use at the church across the road, carrying it faithfully like it was a relic called the Ark of the Crobat or the Holy Granbull; a really cute snapshot through the crack in time that succeeded the rise of global capitalism and Thatcherite deregulation of children's advertising and preceded the advent of the mainstream internet and all that it entailed. We got our cheat codes from a newspaper back then, and the day the MissingNo glitch was revealed sent our schoolyard into rapture. But like all religions I've been involved in, time eventually revealed this false Pokéfaith for what it was - a moralless money-making vehicle for paedophiles.

While Pokémon Puzzle League wasn't high on the list of Pokérelics I coveted, it still excited me, I think - the idea of a puzzle game (I already adored Tetris) with Pokémon (I already adored Pokémon) that was faithful to the anime (I already adored Pokémon: The Animated Series) was so exciting to me, but I always ended up choosing classic N64 titles like Earthworm Jim 3D and California Speed whenever I finally scrounged together something for the offertory at Electronics Boutique. Perhaps I wasn’t as committed as I remember myself being. Finally playing through it in 2022, decades removed from the incident at my school where a nine-year-old kid was beaten up for selling fake shiny Charizard cards, I could no longer believe in the utter pish that I'd been drinking back then. I couldn't even muster a smile for a MIDI instrumental cover of the PokéRap on the title screen... What's become of me? I guess this is what it means to be an adult.

kind of a wraparound charm to the no-doubt rushed as hell localization and skinswap to make panel de pon into pokémon here - as another site member noted, very flash game vibe to this one, and i like it. i grew up with generation 1 and though i'm by no means a pokémon fan today, not by a longshot, this does poke a little effectively at the nostalgia part of me still holds for this era of the series. seeing all the wonky gym leader designs from the era was super charming and this was a great time to play with my friend much more knowledgeable about the franchise these days than i. i'll make the funny contrarian joke and say this is my favorite pokémon game and it's not EVEN a pokémon game but i could genuinely see myself getting a lot of mileage out of this one.

“Completed,” I say, like I didn’t give up on level 10 of Very Hard and the last stage of Line Clear mode. I feel like that’s more fitting than actually becoming a puzzle master, though. This is the old school Pokemon Anime we’re lifting our voice clips and portraits from, after all, and Ash cannot be allowed to win lest we have to move on to a different protagonist instead of keeping this kid in a Sisyphean quest to become a Pokemon Master for 25 years.

Man, it’s weird to think that they’re actually retiring Ash, isn’t it? I never actually played this game in particular back in the day but it just oozes the vibes of the time, with graphic design being the devs’ passion and the Midi renditions of 2 B A Master’s track list. Yeah I owned that CD. I have no idea what happened to it but it’s lost to time… it was a nice nostalgia trip, this one. Team Rocket were such icons even though, much like Ash Ketchum himself, they are considerably more competent than they ever were in the anime outside of the times they weren’t doing crimes.

Maybe if they did a contemporary Panel de Pon clone I’d be more compelled to go the whole way to victory, but honestly I ain’t that good at these puzzle games. I had fun zoning the fuck out while making the matches, but at a certain point it becomes too stressful to vibe to, and if I’m going to keep losing to Giovanni it should at least be the cool one from the Adventures manga instead of the mediocre one from the anime.

First time ever playing Panel De Pon. Or Tetris Attack or whatever name it happens to have in English at any given time. It's a pretty fun puzzle game, easy to play, hard to master, that type of thing. The Pokémon skin over it all is...odd. Like they don't implement any of the actual Pokémon mechanics - moves, super effectiveness, catching, etc. The Pokémon you choose just acts as the backdrop of the stage and has the sound effects. I get that making RPG mechanics in a puzzle game might be broken, but why choose an RPG to base the game around then? Just use Yoshi again or something if you're too scared to use the real Panel De Pon characters. At least the anime music is pretty cool to have.

Also I know there's a "story", but having only Ash be playable, and then only 3 of his Pokémon be available to play is kind of lame. Like you're already doing next to nothing with the Pokémon, at least let me choose between his full kanto roster. Funnily enough you can't even choose other characters in the other various 1 player modes, as they don't have selectable Pokémon at all. So I think choosing from the wide cast is only available in 2 player mode? Admittedly I never checked that much.

Anyway I am terrible at these games. I have no eye for setting up chains, and definitely no reaction speed to put them into place. But even with that in mind, the difficulty in this game is WILD. Easy mode was of course easy, but then I got roadblocked hard by Gary, the first battle, on medium. I almost gave up, but after finally beating him I managed to stroll through the rest of normal with little difficulty outside of Erika, weirdly. Then hard mode came and I got all the way to Blaine without a single loss, but Blaine beat my ass multiple times in a row. I didn't win a single battle in one try after that, but it varied between 2 tries or many many tries. I guess you could say it's consistent that the difficulty ramped up at the end there, but, for example, with Loreli, after multiple ~3 minute matches where I kept losing, I had one game where she just lost in 18 seconds. And I didn't do anything special in that game. Maybe there's a mercy counter or something, but if that's the case then even that isn't consistent because some opponents seemed to have their "easy" match way faster than others. There were also games where I managed to pull off some pretty crazy chains (mostly by accident tbh) and the opponent recovered like nothing, while the winning game would be me doing nothing but getting a few 4 block combos. I don't get this difficulty at all, it's like the difficulty is mostly RNG, but the difficulty you select is more like the "highest" RNG it will pick.

Trying to get through npc dialogue felt pretty clunky too.

So a decent puzzle game, with a lazy Pokémon implementation and a difficulty that makes no sense. Lots of modes at least if you really wanna go deep into it.

My best friend and I played this game on a whim one day and had a blast. Neither of us had played Panel de Pon before, so we were on equal footing and slowly learning how to play better. It's become a mainstay anytime we meet up now. We love making fun of the voice lines.

There's a lot more to this game than just the PvP, but I don't find Panel de Pon fun enough to actively go after it.

"AWW POOR BABY"

Another very solid entry in the Panel de Pon series. Despite me not being very good at it, I love Panel de Pon and the act of playing makes me feel very good in my brain, and this entry does that just right. Has all of the modes and features you would want from this series, but now with the very charming and nostalgic wrapper of the Pokemon anime in the late 90's, basically the height of Pokemania in the west. The voice clips, the midis, the appearance of all these different characters and just the aesthetic in general, it is so of this very specific era of Pokemon marketing in the west and I love it.

Stuff like puzzle mode and line clear mode are all really good here, and the usual endless and timed modes are here as well as the good single player "story mode" (various VS games against AI with bits of dialogue in the middle). 3D mode is the big new addition here, which is probably the only thing here I would call bad, since it's just way too overwhelming, and basically makes this a completely different game, one I'm not nearly as interested in.

Outside of that, there's also the added difficulties and the fact that this game is much faster and allows for more precision than the previous game, Tetris Attack, but as someone who, like I said, is not great at this, it doesn't do much for me. Overall, I think I would still play the SNES version over this one. I find the Yoshi pixel art theming of Tetris Attack very delightful and more aesthetically appealing, and as good as this game is it doesn't add THAT much more. Not to say this game isn't delightful and I wouldn't revisit it though. I don't know, the margin is very thing between them, this could easily be 4.5/5 as well. It's very good, I love Panel de Pon, why must it be ignored by Nintendo.

Pokemon Puzzle League is an interesting game to give a score. The game is fun because Tetris Attack / Panel de Pon is fun. The thing is that's the only thing good about this game. The UI is that of a 2000s flash game, the soundtrack is composed of terrible renditions of the Pokemon anime music, and progression through the single-player campaign is even ruined by the fact that you can't reach the end on anything but hard mode. If this game invented Panel de Pon and was the only way to play it then this game would get more of a pass and at the end of the day, the gameplay would supersede the terrible way this game is presented. But it isn't the only way to play Panel de Pon so what does this game actually have to offer. Giving this game a good score would feel like giving every match-three game on the app store a good score because the concept of match-three games is solid. This is a bad version of a good game. Now I'm going to go play a version of Panel de Pon that doesn't feature Ash screaming every two seconds.

Pokémon has been plastered over every sort of thing you can think of, so of course an already existing puzzle game - Panel De Pon - got the treatment.

Half a decade later and although some things have been added, such as a 3D version, the game is still the same and in fact I would say that although this version is more “content complete” it's a little worse.

I would normally not "mark down" due to a Pokémon skin, even based off of the anime. I have nostalgia for it. I enjoyed the short intro and laughed when I beat Tracey in 14 seconds because I always thought he was crap.
It's just as a skin it comes across a little cheap.

This is probably due to the technology, using existing art from the cartoons makes sense but the quality is low and for me doesn't stand up to the beautiful pixel art Panel De Pon had.

The campaign is as simple as you'd expect in a puzzle game but again feels less than the game it's copying.
I finished Normal and Hard, so maybe I missed on the really cool stuff like Misty with a machine gun in Very Hard, but I doubt it.

It's a shame that it's so half baked, the panels can either look like the classic ones or Pokémon themed but where some are 'types' like water, fire, grass, there is also "circle"... could they really not have thought of something else?

I would have also liked that picking your Pokémon could actually affect the match up. A bonus for matching your types panels maybe?

Overall, this is fine. It's good even because it's Panel De Pon but I find almost no reason to recommend it over just playing the classic outside of if you are truly Poké-pilled, high on them Ash-fumes and then maybe the skin will be worth it.

I only clicked on the game to remind me what it was exactly and then completed it twice though, so if you want to gauge how addictive it can be then there's a clue.