LogFAQs > #932708152

#35





Years of release: 2012-present (Mobile)
Beaten?: Hahaha, you FOOL

Puzzle & Dragons is not a game. It is a curse. I hate this game. I hate myself. I hate what I have become. Ranking this game on my list at all is a moral failing, a complete negligence of my responsibility to acknowledge this game as an utter monstrosity. On the other hand, not ranking this game on my list would be a lie. Step one is admitting I have a problem. I have a problem, and its name is Puzzle & Dragons. The puzzle is figuring out where the hell I went wrong with my life. The dragons are metaphorical.

If you're not familiar with the game, think of it as Pokemon combined with match-3 puzzle gaming, like Bejeweled. You have a 6x5 board of colored orbs, and you have a limited time to drag one orb around the board, swapping it with other orbs as it moves, trying to align all the orbs on the board to match groups of 3 or more. Each color corresponds to an elemental type for each of your team of monsters/anime girls, who attack based on how many combos you deal. You get monsters/anime girls you defeat and you can put them on your team or use them to power up your other monsters/anime girls.

It's a really strong concept. I'm a fan of both puzzle AND dragons (but not the steady creep of anime girls into my Pokemon clone) and, looking for something to tinker with during downtime on my phone, this was the poison I chose to pour straight down my unsuspecting gullet. I nearly put it down after about an hour, because it started out with a 'babby's first puzzle game' sort of vibe - the game gives you a powerful monster right off the bat and my first few weeks with this game were almost insultingly easy, effectively impossible to lose. Several months were needed before I could even advance this game to the point where I needed to start grinding or really putting any thought into what I was doing, thanks to this being a mobile gacha game with a stamina bar.

I stuck with it. I don't know why. Something about the lure of this game was too strong and kept pulling me back into its orbit. I picked up this game in early 2015, and I have played it nearly every day since, for nearly five years straight. Once I started playing long enough, something weird started happening: the game got interesting. Oh, it took months, both for me to reach the game's endgame, and for the game itself to develop challenging content. But eventually, by about the time I got to 2016, PAD really started to bear its fangs. Monsters started throwing around defensive abilities, debuffs, and a bunch of shit that messes with the board, forcing me to actually use thought and skill to put together strong combos, and to plan out my teams to deal with each threat. Team building started out basic but got increasingly more complex as the game started throwing out harder shit. Having rare and powerful monsters wasn't enough anymore; now I needed the right ones, with the right active and passive skills. Now that I have a few hundred different viable monsters/anime girls (mostly anime girls, this was not my doing) in my box, picking and planning the right ones is now something that actually requires engagement from my brain.

I still can't quite get over the fact that it's a gacha. The stamina issue is no longer really a problem anymore (I have nearly 400 of it when I started out with like 20 or whatever), but it remains a fact that this game is designed to attract whales to sink thousands of dollars into it, and that always makes me feel a bit gross playing it. Pulling machines to get random monsters (usually anime girls actually) is always a bit unseemly, knowing some people are sinking all their money into pulling it over and over. The game seems designed to keep you playing every day, offering increasingly impressive bonuses for logging in, and the power creep is really something else, making all the stuff I had in 2016 seem like a joke compared to stuff I can get easily in 2019. The good news is that I've never really had to spend money on the game. If you play a little bit every day, the game is extremely generous about showering you in freebies, and despite never paying I have a really extensive roster of monsters/anime girls (and it is mostly anime girls, let's not pretend this game has ANYTHING to do with dragons anymore), some of which are among the best in the game.

The other big problem with this game is that it has no defined end. It's an endless, sisyphean loop of new challenges being added every day, just constantly watching the numbers of all my monsters and my own rank go up with no finish line in sight. There's really high-end challenges that take years to build up to and conquer, but it's not like the game has some kind of story, the only reward is getting to do more stuff, forever. It's enough to make me question the purpose of even playing video games at all, but then I get a stupid dopamine hit because the game gave me 5 free magic stones just for logging in that week, and the cycle continues. My lizard brain is happy. When my lizard brain is happy, all of the worries of my higher conscious seem to be put aside.

But there has been a lot of quality time spent in this game, crunching strategy and overcoming some of the really difficult challenges the game has to offer. For a mobile phone game that I originally thought was genuinely for babies, I'm shocked at how much complexity and nuance it has had to offer me over the years. That's why I'm still playing it in 2020, and I don't think I'm stopping any time soon. Even after 5 years, I'm still surprised sometimes, when a new quest is added that actually forces me to sit down for a good hour, looking through my monster box and plotting out which anime girls I need to win. It'd be hard for me to find another game native to phones that will help me kill time when I'm sitting aroud on the bus or whatever. Hopefully phones will be able to give me something with a little more depth, a little more meaning someday, but until then PAD stands alone as the only phone game I've played that has really engaged me on the same level as my other favorite strategy games and RPGs. I hate it, but PAD deserves credit where credit is due for five years of keeping me not bored when I need it most.

If all that's not enough, then know that this is a game where, if you want, you could compose a team of Sephiroth, Terry Bogard, Zangief, Hello Kitty, Santa Claus, and Rita Repulsa from Power Rangers. Among others. This game has more crossovers than Smash. It's kind of incredible.

Why did this turn into the longest writeup, sometimes it's Grim Dawn and I have like one short paragraph and nothing to say bu