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.
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.