Having a chance to reflect on Wii as a game through unlocking everything for the first time gives me a chance to reflect on it a little bit more than multiplayer revisits brimming with nostalgia, and as such has helped me realise that while it's still a great game, it's one bested by others both before and after it in nearly every department for me. Double Dash and DS nail the track design and have better single player experiences (also DS is still my favourite to play due to the complexity of the drifting system, something that while gone from this game it manages to replace very well), and 7/8 are much better at presentation and variety especially owing to 8D's number of tracks on display.

MKW is often a game that feels larger than life due to what online multiplayer and leaderboards spawned, as well as the completely overhauling mods that I still think of more when I think of this game, but as the basegame itself goes... It's pretty middling. I'd still highly rate it as a multiplayer experience especially alongside a trackpack like CTGP. but as a base it's pretty solid but far from the best the series has to offer.

When I started this, I declared that unless anything drastic happened, it was my favourite Puyo game to date. God how that slipped by the end.


The laundry list:
- Absolutely no gameplay variety (only 1-on-1 Puyo 2 battles in adventure mode despite multiple rulesets being available in other modes)
- Very formulaic tickbox cutscenes (character has an overarching scenario which will be joked about in the first cutscene by that stage's character, said character then leaves very quickly after battle is over, no room for any development of anyone short of their assigned architype for their story mode)
- All over the place difficulty balancing (listed level is often not indicative of how hard they'll actually be because of their usage of support items, also said number decreases and increases at random anyway meaning there's no real skill curve)
- Clearly finished content being locked behind future updates (they're available to fight in the story mode being fully voiced and modeled, but only characters who have story modes are currently playable. On this note, please don't give every single playable character a story mode)
- Currently no ending in the game (I'm sure one will be patched in but to not even have an ending shows either how much of a rushjob this is or how desperately they want you to keep subscribing for the content updates in subsequent months and therefore payments)

All of this left me feeling extremely jaded with the game and honestly with Apple Arcade as a "legitimate" gaming platform in general. Great stuff has come out of it (on their final patches once the year or so of exclusivity is up mind you), but for Apple to continue to prove that they want console quality titles to be their flagships they need to ship them in a state comparable to console games. People moan about how many patches you need to do on console nowadays, but on said platforms I've never seen a game advertised as a system seller just tell you to come back for the ending in a few months time. It's ridiculous.

This game needs far more time in the oven as currently even despite the clear ambitions on show, it just isn't finished and therefore can't even begin to stack up to other far more accessible and affordable offerings in the series. Maybe in a year or so we'll see a final-ish build be shipped out to consoles and PC, but until then this isn't really worth your time, especially if you'd be going out of your way for a subscription and/or an Apple device to play it.

I enjoyed this a lot! It's one of those games that I'd put down for a bit and have to really convince myself to pick back up (hence how long it took me to complete) but once I actually just got stuck into it I'd always have a blast.

It's a short and handhold-y game for sure, but one that gives you a guided experience through some fun gameplay scenarios. Not the world's greatest platformer or anything, but it made me smile all throughout and I'd say I enjoyed my time with it the entire way through, so I'd give it a recommend on that basis. Not gonna blow you away, but you'll be charmed in the process.