It's Puyo alright. I haven't played through them all in order (never touched Sun, I should give that a shot), but it seems that by this point, they really figured out what the default difficulty should be. I will say that the super attacks seem very unbalanced (some are way more useful than others, some are pretty situational; Draco's is great for getting rid of nuisance puyo, but not very good for getting rid of your own misplaced puyos, and for many it's hard to plan around them), and there aren't very good in-game explanations for what they all do (I assume explanations would be in the manual somewhere), so their addition kind of feels like a dud. Mission mode seems to have been introduced in this one, and it's pretty decent, albeit unchallenging if you're competent with chains and just a little persistent (though Hot and Spicy difficulty get VERY tricky, e.g. "clear 4 colors at once"). While I don't dislike the art direction the series took after Fever, the old-school anime style at play here for the character portraits and cutscenes is pretty top-notch. A bit content-light otherwise, but I'm glad it got an english translation patch (shoutouts to Precise Museum).

not the craziest game ever really, but it has a lot of charm to it. Being a puzzle game from the N64/Dreamcast era, it has simplistic gameplay combined with a lot of simultaneously updated and slightly outdated visual flair, and honestly I kind of love it. The sprite art is kind of whatever to me, but I really like the hand drawn art, and the kind of hard to make out 3D backgrounds in the cutscenes always really appealed to me idk why, it just has a super cool look. I think the game did get a bit frustrating at points, especially with the new power up feature. I think it’s a cool addition to the series, I appreciate them spicing up the core gameplay for sure, but it also just means the CPUs can almost always unfuck themselves, making matches drag a lot more. Still though, I’d def go back to this one the soonest out of these earlier Puyo games. It’s the same great gameplay with a lot of extra charm in the presentation, and even if it gets a bit tedious at points, it’s still a really cool piece of Puyo Puyo history.

I love the games style. Still one of the most unique ones Puyo has had. The music especially; recent Puyo games try to keep the same tonal consistency between games that just don't appeal to me as much after the 3rd time I've experienced them. These feel really fresh to hear after playing the newer games
https://youtu.be/Pq1TRn8_LNE
https://youtu.be/aI3GSm7HTrk
(v this one has a great title v)
https://youtu.be/dlE4NaqAZ2Q

For the actual game though, the new "Super Attacks" don't feel balanced at all. They're new specials similar to the RPG mode in Chronicle and Tetris 2. Some powers are just blatantly better than others and just makes playing as some characters frustrating. I personally never saw a use for picking anyone but Draco in story mode for this reason, it was just better. I can see it being fun in a hectic way in multiplayer though

I love the character interactions and the voice acting too it's so cute. its just fun i love it. i'll be thinking about the silly moments all the time. I wish they did anything at all with Doppel though. They give literally no explanation to what she is lmao

If puyo puyo 2 is the championship edition of puyo where things are extremely fine-tuned for balanced competitive play, then this 4th game is the rainbow edition where balance is thrown out the window for the sake of fun. Every character has their own special ability/super move, each varying in wackiness. Some characters reward you for playing bad. Some drop a giant screen nuke on the enemy for no reason. Some completely wipe away the entire game board. If puyo puyo sun was already too nonsense for you don't touch this one with a 40 foot pole. If you like dumb nonsense and just wanna dick around with unbalanced superpowers, then this game is made for you.