LogFAQs > #951233868

13. Pokmon Puzzle League (N64, 2000)

I've teased a "favorite puzzle game" in a few prior writeups, and here it is. In Puzzle League, or Tetris Attack, or Panel de Pon, or whichever incarnation of this game, you're attempting to line up three (or more) or the same icon in a row, vertically or horizontally, to clear blocks off of the screen. Doing so will send some amount of garbage to the top of your opponent's screen. Cleared space will cause the blocks above it to drop, potentially creating more lined up icons, resulting in a big chain of cleared blocks if you're either clever enough to set it up in advance or quick enough to react to what's about to fall. Your cursor is only limited to swapping two blocks horizontally adjacent to each other, so there's a bit of a learning curve in what kind of options are possible, but it's still quite easy to pick up.
While games like Tetris and Dr. Mario are largely built on single-player endless play, with multiplayer modes kind of built up around the existing structure, Panel de Pon feels truly designed for head-to-head versus matches. At any point, you can manually rise another row of blocks from the bottom; also, any garbage blocks you receive will turn into normal single-square icons once you clear anything touching them. This means that you can, and will, have a giant wall of blocks across your screen at some point in a versus match, and unlike Tetris, having an ugly stack near the top is not a death sentence. The game's built to engage in a back-and-forth war of attrition until one player makes a crucial mistake or is overwhelmed. While it absolutely helps to be able to make big chains and combos, a scrappy player can go a long way by just moving quickly and keeping themselves alive. I feel like the dynamic of the game - both balancing big-scoring moves and short-term threats - is like a very basic fighting game, but of course with the charm and inherent challenge of being a puzzle game.
Pokmon Puzzle League is probably the best version; at least, it's the one most easily suited to multiplayer play. There's a unique 3D mode where your 6x12 grid becomes an 18x12 cylinder, which never showed up in any of the later GBA or DS ports. There's a whole host of modes - endless mode for practice; puzzle mode to solve fixed challenges in a set number of moves; story mode to face off against cpu opponents; and line clear mode to race to clear out a section of blocks as fast as possible. The game's theming itself is a weird one too, as it's based solely on the Pokmon anime, and was first released in North America, featuring songs from the U.S.-produced 2.B.A. Master soundtrack rendered in MIDI form. It also has a boatload of memorable sound clips from the playable trainers/Pokmon themselves. (Good battle! When you're hot, you're hot! Aww, poor baby!)
But man, it's all about that core gameplay. Wigs and I had a bunch of close matches against each other at Magfest one year. I have a friend who always plays me very close when we break this (or Tetris Attack) out. When the Switch Online release of the original Panel de Pon came out last year, I was playing it daily for months. There's something about puzzle games that when they click, and you're playing just right, nothing in the world feels quite like it. (Honestly, it's kind of comparable to nailing a song in a rhythm game, but I digress...) If Nintendo ever gets around to bringing over a new version, or maybe (now I'm dreaming) in a PuyoPuyo Tetris-style compilation, it'd be an instant day 1 purchase without a doubt. For now, this N64 gem will have to stand as the definitive version of the best puzzle game ever made.

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