For an arcade puzzle game based off an anime, they put WAY too much effort into this. I'm not complaining though, this game is fire.

Again, for an arcade release, this has a really impressive amount of content. Every character has their own routes in both of the single player modes, and you're able to unlock tons of pieces of art of all the characters that any Azumanga fan will get a kick out of. Not to mention the gameplay itself is just solid, it's just Puzzle Bobble/Bust A Move pretty much but it's still really fun. This was actually my first time ever playing one of these games, and it being introduced through one of my favorite pieces of media ever made me have a lot more fun with it. I do think the gameplay can occasionally be a bit luck reliant, which for a puzzle game isn't really my thing, but eh it's not the end of the world.

As an Azumanga fan, I loved this. Getting to play as Osaka in a video game is a very powerful feeling and unlocking all the cool recreations of scenes in the series was so awesome. As a video game fan, I still really liked this. The gameplay is really fun, and the amount of content is insanely admirable.

My peak senses are tingling.

Puyo Puyo Tetris is straight up just one of the best puzzle games AND one of the best crossover games ever made and I don’t really know how I feel about that. I do know how I feel about the game though, THAT SHIT SLAPS!

They could’ve so easily just made this “puyo puyo and tetris haha lmao.” But instead, they went above and beyond to give us a strong contender for the best entry that both of these series’ have seen. With a wide variety of game modes and gimmicks, tons of playable characters, a whole ass STORY MODE, they tried way too hard on this game and I am all here for it.

The story mode is so insanely goofy and stupid, yet I still managed to fall in love with all the characters and the crackhead energy they each have on full display. Plus it manages to just do a really good job of balancing all the different gameplay styles and showing you them without cramming them down your throat. Going into the campaign I really only cared about Tetris and barely cared about Puyo Puyo even remotely. But they somehow made me genuinely invested in learning the mechanics and trying to pull off the best combos I could.

This is also just an incredible party game, some of those game modes get intense as hell and that was when I was playing with only CPUs. Real life/online multiplayer with this shit is probably 10 times as crazy. Shoutout Big Bang in particular, that one is definitely my favorite.

Admittedly I am definitely aware of how unbalanced this game is competitively, since a good Puyo Puyo player will pretty much always beat a good Tetris player. But I just don’t care man, this is a package that has so much more love put into it that I really cannot hate much about it. I’ll get to the sequel later down the line, but for now I’m gonna continue to have a blast with this one. Btw shout out Arle and Carby they're my goats 🙏