Eight years ago Puyo Puyo Tetris got localized. The crossover is a massive step down from past main series games, but it was the first game to get localized since Fever in 2004. I hated it as a game, but I thought that it would be a good sign for the future because its record sales would surely mean the next mainline game would get localized too.

We never got an actual mainline game. But we’ve been teased over and over instead.

The next year we got Puyo Puyo Champions, a budget versus mode client that’s pretty much just a romhack of PPT’s engine with assets recycled from the mobile spinoff. It actually fixes all of the problems I had with PPT, the online is fantastic… but it is still nothing more than a bare bones versus mode client. There is no story mode or any other singleplayer content at all, nothing like the fantastic stuff past games were packed with, which makes it a very hard sell for new players.

Then we got Puyo Puyo Tetris 2. A bugged ctrl-c ctrl-v of the first game. Literally no new content. I already hated the first one and this is even worse in every way. Even the things that Champions fixed are broken again. The fact that this horrible rehash even exists is an insult and I detest it with every fiber of my being. But the worst part is that it split the playerbase from Champions, which basically ended up killing both games in the end.

Then Puyo Puyo Puzzle Pop. The trailer looked like it was finally going to deliver on what I wanted. But they made it exclusive to Apple fucking Arcade. The game is so dead that if you try to play it online, you will simply be matched into bots. Sega knew the exclusivity deal would kill this game and they tried to fake the online to cover it up.

Eight years of disappointment after disappointment. The IP is long dead, Sega’s just parading its corpse around to tease.