“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.

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.

via Nintendo Switch Online Nintendo 64

I hate this game turned me into what I swore I'd never become: a Candy Crush mom.
Really, I've been obsessed with it. I don't know exactly how long I've played since I play other games on Nintendo 64 online but according to in-game stats it's somewhere between 4 and 25 hours--and probably on the latter side. I haven't "finished" the game because I'm unsure if I will be able to. I'm stuck both on the Giovanni level in the Very Hard tournament for 1 player and the Special Giovanni level after 6-5 in the Spa Service, which seems almost impossible. I might finish it one day but I'm satisfied with that for now.
3D mode is some kind of fresh hell when you're first starting it, though. It took me a couple of days to get used to it and I almost gave up but you get used to it over time.
Anyways, I've never played the OG Puzzle League but this is a fun game (that pushed me to the brink of insanity so there was a time when everytime I closed my eyes I saw colorful blocks)... I main Team Rocket or Sabrina in 2 player mode, which I've forced my begrudging peers to play with me.

Tetris Attack o Panel de Pon pero con Pokémon. No hay mucho más que agregar.

Hay Voice Acting del anime en inglés, y cuando logras hacer combos escucharas a los Pokémon decir su nombre. Esta clase de sonidos son los que le encantan a la persona que está jugando pero molesta a los que están cerca.

De todas formas es muy divertido, todavía no logro pasarlo en Very Hard.

Maybe one day I'll stop playing these kinds of games. I'm never good at them. The story mode in this game was probably a lot easier that other games in this genre, but it was still basically too hard for me by the end.
This game was pretty frustrating. The mechanics of the game didn't work as well as I felt they should. It was so precise to slide a block in underneath falling blocks, and it's impossible to slide a block under if it's one block below. Which is really annoying. Also by adding a layer of new blocks underneath everything as time went on, sometimes it would just randomly start a chain that ended up messing with what I was trying to do, which got really frustrating by the end of the game when I NEEDED to think and work fast.
Ultimately the story mode was just frustrating and annoying.

The puzzle levels were more interesting to me, but I also found that most of the time I was just using trial and error to get through, which wasn't fun. There were some pretty decent puzzles though.

Anyways the art was fine and the music was, at best, just boring remixes of the anime/movie songs with no vocals, and at worst, they got annoying after the 2nd time hearing them. Overall, I wasn't really a fan of this game, but there was at least a bit of fun to be had.

Claramente é um produto 100% comercial, só pra aproveitar o sucesso da marca. Pelo que entendi esse era pra ser uma sequência de um jogo similar de SNES que de última hora virou essa aberração. A interface grita "site feito em flash no começo dos anos 2000", tudo mal cortado com rebarbas aparecendo. O aproveitamento das artes do desenho é extremamente mal feita, tudo tá só colado de qualquer jeito. Realmente tenebroso.

O jogo em si é mais uma variação genérica de match-3, e não tem muito mais o que dizer. Mas é tudo tão barato e vagabundo que sinceramente, não entendo com que cara a Nintendo decidiu botar isso no Switch Online.

Acho que o pior pra mim é que pouco tempo depois desse jogo entrar no catálogo, Kirby Avalanche entrou pro catálogo de SNES. É outro jogo de battle puzzle mas ele tem uma apresentação mil vezes mais interessante e bem feita. E é um jogo que saiu anos antes do Pokémon Puzzle League num console inferior.