sigh

Welp, I 100% completed this in under 100 hours... but was it really under 100 hours? According to my 3DS, I first played this game on March 26th, 2021, and I just finished it today, over a year later. I suppose that's not too out of the ordinary for a lot of games that you might put down for a while and pick up on a later date to finish...

Pokemon Picross is different though. I won't lie and say that I played it EVERY single day since the first day I played it, but it certainly feels like I did. I didn't give a single cent to this microtransaction-riddled freemium game. That is the main reason it took me so long.

But I did it. I finished every puzzle, every mural, every mission, every achievement, everything. Yes, I finished everything in the alt-worlds too. This required me to boot up my 3DS virtually every single day to get the daily reward of 10-15 picrites. So I could slowly, slowly, slowly, unlock all 30 worlds.

So the most reasonable question to ask from this point is, why did I do this? There's no justifiable answer, I just like Picross. And even though this game is fundamentally broken with the way it presents itself, I can't help but find enjoyment from it. I probably could never actually finish a game I didn't at least somewhat enjoy, much less 100% it.

Admittedly, I kind of appreciated how I could only play a little bit of it at once. It's enjoyable in sort of a masochistic way. The longer it keeps me from progressing by blocking my progress with paywalls, the more of my life I'll get to spend playing Picross.

I wouldn't be able to give this game a positive score and still have a guilt-free conscious, but I genuinely like some of the additions that this game presents to the standard Picross formula. Jupiter has never failed when it comes to gameplay, and this game is no exception to that. In fact, I'd argue that this particular Jupiter Picross game has something much more unique to offer than any of their standard entries to the franchise.

More specifically, the idea of completing puzzles and earning abilities from doing so is a very intriguing idea to me. At the end of the day, I have played a lot of Picross in my life, so I never really cared for all of the extra powers that the Pokemon give you in this game. But I still think the idea of unlocking certain abilities/functions through completing puzzles is a genius idea and could have cool implementation if done correctly.

Beyond unlocking things, there are other things this game does right too. For example, even though having achievements can seem superfluous to a lot of players, I appreciate having a checklist of some sort in order to challenge myself in certain areas of the game. Also, considering I have literally never sat through a mainline Pokemon game, it was interesting gaining some basic knowledge of some different Pokemon.

With all of that being said, this is still an inexcusable cash grab of a game.

This is my first, last, and only review on this website, and the only review I've ever given a video game in general. I'm giving it a 5/10 because it's atrocious but also it's Picross. That is all.