I’ve really been enjoying Puyo Puyo Tetris on the Switch, so I did some research on the Puyo series. Most of the games never made it out of Japan, sadly, but I did find out that this was a re-skinned Puyo game.

I remember seeing this in the stores back in the 90s, didn’t have a clue what it was about. Since I have the Sonic Mega Collection Plus compilation, I decided to boot up the good ol’ PS2 and put my Puyo skills to the test.

The scenario mode has you go through 12 of Robotnik’s henchmen (they’re actually robots, so henchrobots?) then Robotnik himself. You get a passcode after beating each stage, so on subsequent game sessions, you can continue from where you left off previously, which means that you won’t need to beat the game in one sitting. (I totaly did though :3)

Before each stage is a short cut scene featuring the robot you’re about to do battle with. These are pretty amusing and contain some terrible puns.

The first few stages were easy and made me feel confident, but things started to get harder around stage 6. Game overs were common by the time you get to the 10th stage. I was terrified of hearing:

“Yee Haw!”

This phrase meant that a 2 chain (or more) was performed by the CPU, and a crap load of garbage Puyos beans are on their way. You never know if the next “Yee Haw!” would mean your demise, so you start to stress and make bad decisions, which usually means yet another game over.

The speed of the final stage is absurdly fast, so much that you really need to think ahead and decide where the next beans will go, while you’re still placing the current ones. Rotating the beans became very unresponsive, and that made things quite frustrating. Not sure if that was due to the PS2 emulation, but it made me change my tactics to minimise rotations, and try to place the beans vertifically where possible. Eventually, after close to an hour on the same stage, I finally got the better of Robotnik.

After the end credits, I was greeted with the message:

“Let’s try hard level.”

…sorry, let’s not.

Last but not least, the music in this game is so damn funky, love it!!