I'm pretty sure this is almost entirely the European localization, so don't hold this against the JP version, but the game has been slowed down to the point of being unenjoyable. After spending a lot of time playing the Neo Geo Japanese version this just felt like a massive downgrade in terms of gameplay. The changes made to Magical Journey also kind of suck.

It's really sad that to my knowledge this is the only way to play the game in English without having all of its content cut, and all of the new dialog and such they added is awesome, but it's just not worth it when the game isn't fun.

I have no clue why this game has such a big cult following. Sure, the aesthetic is cute but in terms of core gameplay I don't know why you would play this instead of something like Magical Drop or Puyo Puyo.

I think the idea of using activator pieces instead of connecting colors for a Puyo clone is a smart one, but I ended up finding it frustrating most of the time. The activation pieces you get are entirely based off of RNG as far as I'm aware, so you can end up building a chain based off of breaking one color and then you just won't get it. It also means if you get activator pieces for colors that are barely on your board they're just dead space. This issue would be somewhat alleviated if this game was entirely symmetrical between players like Puyo 2, but from what I can tell from my ditto matches, pieces start to differentiate for players before long so it isn't even a match of "who can make the better builds" it's just "who gets lucky."

I guess to make this a bit less annoying, you get absolutely no damage bonus from using chains. While I appreciate this as it makes the chaining system less frustrating by not emphasizing it, this makes the gameplay incredibly linear and samey. There's not nearly as much planning ahead with your build. It's just combining colors into bigger blocks, sending off attacks, and maybe lining up a two chain if you get lucky. Is combining these blocks fun? I think so, yeah. It feels really satisfying to make massive blocks and launch them off for huge damage, clearing a ton of your board in progress. It makes this game pretty fun in spite of its flaws, which stops me from calling it flat-out bad. Even if chaining usually sucks to do, building around an activator piece to set up another big block to be made and it actually working feels really good. After playing for a while though the game does start to become pretty monotonous though due to how linear the gameplay is. Oh well.

I think the epitome of the lack of that thought comes into the garbage system. As a Puyo fanboy, I've always appreciated the garbage system in Puyo compared to other puzzle games for giving a more active threat, burying what you've been building and forcing you to react quickly. Puzzle Fighter copies the system except now the nuisance puyo equivalent turn into regular pieces after a few pieces have been placed. I hate to say this, but I don't think this is a good system for Puzzle Fighter. When I have to wait to get activator pieces of certain colors, it's hard to consistently destroy these pieces before they turn into regular pieces. If you can after they transform is a crapshoot called "what character is your opponent playing as." I get it, custom garbage was a common thing back then. I don't know if it was ever a good thing, but I can at least defend it in others. In a game like Magical Drop it creates unique counterplay to other characters that you can master, even if it still makes the game super unbalanced. In Puzzle Fighter, there's really not any learning, some characters are just better choices than others. Ken is simply just built better than someone like Ryu, and I don't know how the developers didn't realize this would be a balancing nightmare considering Akuma is built to be better and Dan is built to be worse, you think doing that they would realize the rest of the characters are not balanced at all. And yeah, you can still force dittos to make this game work better, but it doesn't make different character dittos nearly as interesting as it is in other puzzle games.

So really I think every match in this game just plays like one of two outcomes. Both players build up a really big attack and send them at a similar time. There is not much risk of someone doing much worse without RNG since building a big block has much less room for failure than making a chain in Puyo. These big attacks offset each other, and this keeps happening making for an incredibly long match where everyone is bored. The alternative is both people make a big attack and the other gets unlucky, putting the other player on the ropes. Then maybe my least favorite thing about this game shows its ugly head: comeback mechanics. When you're about to die the game gives you constant activator pieces and those ones that destroy all of a certain color. This means oftentimes the other player will get a solid comeback and make the game drag out super long, or they'll just get extremely lucky and end up killing you with comeback pieces alone and the timing of the garbage being poor. This punishes low tier characters even more, by the way. It's just annoying, plain and simple. The non-losing player is getting constantly harassed if the loser has good RNG, and the losing player is just pushing down random pieces hoping it turns out well.

It probably sounds like I hate this game I don't know maybe I do? I can't really get myself to say it's bad, and maybe that's just because I've played worse puzzle games, but I at least think the gem combining gameplay is decent. It's just that the game feels like it was not really built with a lot of foresight outside of "let's make Street Fighter a Puyo clone because it's funny." Give this game a shot if you want, it's really not that bad, it's just never going to be my go-to when I wanna whoop someone in a puzzle game.