Puyo Puyo Puzzle Pop - TV Tropes (2024)

Puyo Puyo Puzzle Pop is an Apple Arcade-exclusive Puyo Puyo game, released on April 4, 2024. It's a lighter package in gameplay content, consisting of the Tsu and Fever rulesets, with Endless, Endless Fever, and Tiny Puyo available for Ranking challenges. The Adventure Mode follows Puyo Puyo Tetris 2's style of progression, featuring a map of stages to navigate. Returning from Fever 2 is the Item system, allowing you to equip up to three at once to assist you in battle or for added challenge.

Amitie has a dream about the mysterious cat-like Meena, guide of the Dream World, who manages bring Amitie and her friends into the World of Dreams. At first, the world seems to be a patchwork of familiar worlds where anything can happen, but there's one issue: Meena can't take them out of the Dream World, having borrowed more power than she was able to fully control from another, and just runs off without a word. Without much of a lead to get out, Amitie, Arle, and Ringo split up to find said higher being to be able to wake from the dream they're trapped in.

The game features four main stories and five side stories to play through, with many more to come in later updates. Side stories can be unlocked with keys obtained from the main stories, allowing you to play as them in all other modes on unlock. The first update wave on April 25th adds in Schezo and Ms. Accord as Main story characters, with Draco, Lidelle, Risukuma, and Ally as Side story characters, as well as the Challenge Dungeon mode. The third update on June 27th adds in Rulue, Ecolo, and Dark Prince as Main story characters, and Witch, Ocean Prince, and Yu & Rei as Side story characters. The fifth update on August 29th adds in Sig as a Main story character, Carbuncle and Rafisol as Side story characters.

Puyo Puyo Puzzle Pop provides examples of:

• Achievement Mockery: There's achievements for losing battles. One of them gives you a "Test with a Score of 0" decoration for losing ten battles.
• Alliterative Title: Puyo Puyo Puzzle Pop repeats the letter "P" four times.
• Another Side, Another Story: Similar to 20th's storytelling, the story is told through multiple perspectives, with notable a distinction between Main Story and Side Story. Main Story characters are directly involved in the plot, while Side Story characters do their own thing, brushing against the main story in the process. The game initially begins with Amitie, with Arle, and Ringo following after. After clearing their sides, Lemres' opens up, where he investigates Meena instead. Following him, Schezo looks into Meena's power, but for his ulterior motive to take it for himself only for it to get sidelined when he learns Sig's power is growing uncontrollably stronger. Ms. Accord also chases after Meena out of concern for students, who seem to be affected by the dream world’s power, and is able to get her to stay still long enough to comfort her over the situation and encourage her to let the group help her fix it instead of just running away from her mistakes. Ecolo, not pleased with somebody other than himself causing Ringo distress, decides to find Meena to give a piece of his mind, but decides to look for the Dark Prince to work together and fix this mess. Sig's story, however, takes place before everything, with Meena recounting how she met him.
• Art Evolution: The models are Chronicle's models, but retexured and reshaded with a more cartoony look to them, making them much more vibrant. The manzai scenes have also been upgraded from the two-person standard from 15th Anniversary, allowing a much larger cast to fit the scene, positional awareness, background characters reacting to situations.
• Breaking Old Trends:
  • This is the first game in the series to use the English logo globally instead of having separate Japanese and English logos. According to producer Mizuki Hosoyamada in an interview, this is to signify that this is the first Puyo Puyo game to be developed with a global audience in mind, rather than a Japanese audience like previous games.
  • Sig's new Final Boss theme, "Azure Roar!", has arrangements of sections from his two previous themes "In the Middle of Stroll" (from 15th) and "Easygoing March" (from 20th)... but it does NOT contain the main "Crimson Wave" Leitmotif, which has been a staple in all of his and Klug's themes ever since Fever 2.
• Brutal Bonus Level: Every character has their own Challenge Dungeon route that, while difficult and makes uses of all the available rulesets (as opposed to defaulting to standard Tsu rules like in the main story), can net you extra unlockable goodies, including profile aesthetics based on certain Quest alts.
• Cerebus Rollercoaster: Enforced, as characters' stories are fractioned into "Main" and "Sub" stories depending on how relevant they are to the overall plot. The sub-stories are naturally more comedic in nature, featuring sub-plots such as Feli getting Easy Amnesia or Raffina getting an Unwanted Harem, whereas the more dramatic main story has Sig being taken over by his demonic side due to Meena tapping into his arm’s power to make the Dream World a reality and potentially be on track to suffer a Death of Personality.
• Chekhov's Gun: After years of being teased and side-stepped ever since Fever 2, both Amitie's Red Puyo Hat and Sig's demonic heritage are both brought into the forefront as main driving plot-points, with Amitie's hat not only communicating with her once more (which hasn't occurred since her story in 20th Anniversary) but also finally discovering about her own latent power with the Dark Prince's help, while Sig's red arm is revealed to be The Crimson Demon, who slowly takes over his mind throughout the game's events thanks to Meena's interference.
• Dream Land: The main setting of the game, which appears to be Primp Town and Suzuran stitched together to be traversed with little trouble at all.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Thanks to Amitie's power, Sig is able to be rescued from his demonic influence and the Dream Land holding them all hostage is able to be cleared, and while Meena can't stay in the physical realm for long, she is able to achieve her own dream of having friends, and is implied she will be able to return and continue having fun within the dream realm.
• Fighting from the Inside: Multiple hints throughout the story suggest Sig is struggling to keep his body from being taken over by his red power. Klug in Amitie's story says (in Japanese) that Sig was trying to hold his arm down. When Lidelle encounters Sig, all he says to her is that she can't stay with him before running off. By the Grand Finale, Sig's conscience is barely hanging on by a thread, and he may have been lost for good if Amitie wasn't there to call him back.
• Filler: Unlike all the other Main Stories, which involve interacting with Meena, Sig, or the Dream World itself, Rulue's story is a very self-contained Be Yourself arc where she tries to raise her beauty points by copying the mannerisms or characteristics of every other girl she comes across. The only ties she has to the overall plot is when she encounters Schezo, who at first wonders if she's trying to find a way out of the Dream World, only to tell him she doesn't care about escaping and is more focused on improving her beauty.
• Hard Mode Perks: Among the assist items, there's a couple of items that increase the difficulty, such as having a higher garbage multiplier, or giving you a fifth color. If you win with these items in effect, it gets you extra points for challenging yourself.
• How We Got Here: Sig's Main Story chronologically takes place before anyone else's, showing how Sig came into contact with Meena leading to her proverbial Deal with the Devil.
• "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: This is how the final battle plays out, with Amitie calling directly to Sig's heart to break him from the demon's control.
• Look Behind You: Klug invokes this on Schezo, claiming some never-before-seen creature was there to make a break with his book that Schezo demanded. Schezo ends up falling for it, if only because he thought Klug saw Meena.
• Lower-Deck Episode: By nature, the Sub-Stories are this, showing the misadventures of various characters in the Dream World who are Locked Out of the Loop in regards to what Amitie, Arle and Ringo are up to. Rulue is also the only Main Story character to fall under this, for reasons explained above in Filler.
• Luck-Based Mission: Draco's Sub-Story enforces "No Rotation" on the player for all of her stages, in reference to her Artificial Stupidity where she'll never rotate her pieces, even on Core AI mode. Without access to a fundamental control aspect, you're left at the mercy of her drop set and what piece the game feels like giving you to try and build a chain with, and it gets harder once more colors are introduced later on.
• Mini-Game Credits: The main story credits has a simple endless mode integrated.
• Mirror Match: Meena makes Amitie fight a duplicate of herself to demonstrate the more whimsical laws of the Dream World. She later does this to Lemres when she learns he is close to finding out she's been using Sig's demon powers for her magic. Ms. Accord eventually has a taste of this when Meena gets desperate to fix the mess she's done.
• New Work, Recycled Graphics: The 3D models are reused from Puyo Puyo Chronicle with the main roster and animations being 1 to 1. The only notable change to them is the Puzzle Pop toon shader being applied across the board.
• Photo Mode: The aptly named Photo Mode allows you to make your own cutscenes, with a custom amount of characters on the stage, and blank speech bubbles for any sort of dialogue you want to insert.
• Trapped in Another World: Meena is unable to bring anyone out of the Dream World due to borrowing her power from somebody else, and it becomes the game's premise for Amitie, Ringo, and Arle to go find who is giving her the power so they can stop it.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Sig, while overtaken by the dark energy in his arm, initially helps Meena escape from Schezo if only because he still needs her around until he can fully understand his newfound power and the powers of the Dream World. Towards the end of Lemres' story, however, "Sig" abandons Meena as more of his demonic powers become accessible, with Meena trying desperately to hold on to their supposed friendship.