Dropping a TL;DR because I rambled way too much when the actual verdict on this game is pretty obvious. It's more Puyo. It's more Tetris. It's more story mode hijinks. Unless you're some uber Tetris tryhard who winces at the idea of slow DAS/ARR and is still @ing the official Puyo Twitter account asking for combo tables to be nerfed, you'll probably enjoy this game to some extent. If you don't know what any of that even means, then there's nothing to worry about. Full thoughts below.

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Hmm. I had about 600+ hours in the first game across all platforms. I say "across all platforms" because I own 3 separate copies of it, and even had the 3DS version pirated to boot (it's Japan-only, okay?!).

It had some clear problems. Unfortunately for our IGN reviewer friend, "the Tetris player is at a slight disadvantage" spread as a meme in the community - one look at the leaderboards disproved that brutally. Many top Puyo players didn't enjoy the hyper-defensive, vertical play necessitated by the frenzied barrage of T-spins and Tetrises they'd encounter every game. There were no filters to matchmake you with only other Puyo players. By contrast, most good Tetris players didn't really care. They just continued playing the crack cocaine, DPS-fiend game of competitive guideline Tetris relatively unfazed.

That's like, stuff only 1% of the playerbase really cares about though. And they ended up getting Puyo Puyo Champions as a stopgap measure to play quick, easy, arcade Tsu-style online Puyo matches on modern consoles. I was good enough at Puyo Puyo Tetris that I enjoyed sinking many hours into it, grinding ranked (there's a good chance you saw my name if you ever checked the top 20 UK leaderboards on any platform). I was scrubby enough at it that the balance issues didn't piss me off like they did many others. It reignited my love for Tetris and it was the entry that forced me to finally get good at Puyo. Now I spam GTR like 90% of the players online because I'm too scared to actually think. But it looks big brain to onlookers. Hooray?

Anyway, onto the game I'm actually meant to be talking about here.

Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 didn't need to exist. I'd accepted this back when I was entertaining the idea of this game as a hypothetical way before it was ever announced. But like, you could make a strong argument for every post-Tsu entry not needing to exist. With that thought in mind, and knowing I'd probably just chill out and enjoy the singleplayer and quality-of-life improvements, I bought it day 1 like the whipped consoomer I am. I then proceeded to shelve the game for 10 months after playing half of the story mode. I was just too burned out from the first game, which realy drove home just how much this didn't need to exist. I also wasn't enjoying the changes made to Tetris in a feeble attempt to improve balance (let's make Tetris slower! What do you mean it feels worse to play?) (They also reverted this change in a recent patch, it's the same as PPT1 Tetris speeds now lol. I'll probably play it more just because of this).

It's fine. The story mode starts a bit slow but has its funny moments. And its Schezo moments. A lot of the same assets are reused. And the original was already heavily reusing 20th Anniversary assets. Skill Battles return from Chronicle. They sure are a thing. Oh hey, they added filters to matchmaking so now you can specify if you want to play against Puyo or Tetris! But Puyo Puyo Champions and Tetris Effect already kinda exist by now, and most serious players already left to play those.

Okay, I need to bring up one of the funniest patches I've seen in a game. So somehow, launch PPT2 had a song that just straight up goes horribly off-key. A fixed version was patched in. Hobbyist mashup makers can feel vindicated knowing that actual pros fucked up this badly.
The rest of the music is thankfully not off-key. It's also nothing special really.

The fact this game isn't getting horribly slammed proves just how genius the core Puyo and Tetris gameplay designs are. You can serve them on the same paper plates you served them on 4 years ago and people will eat it up. Seriously, the package itself reeks of phoned-in cash-in. You could've just patched Puyo Tetris 1 to have those filters people have been begging for instead of releasing 2 more asset flips (counting Champions here). There's nothing substantial this offers that the first game doesn't other than those filters and some new characters (thank you for FINALLY ditching that stupid 24 slot tradition). A lot of people probably skipped this and I don't blame them.

But fuck all that I'm still giving this a good rating because you can play as SONIC. That's right. He's supposedly the fastest hedgehog around.