if your puzzle game needs a flashing indicator to tell players where they can stack or clear -- doesn't that mean you haven't made the design speak for itself? TORYUMON, like SEN-KNOW, is trapped in its messy visualistic overly specific building-block subgenre. as the devlog indicates, it's easy to create pure failstates where placing a pattern against the wall completely screws you. SEN-KNOW manages this with a strange, under-indicated block-decay system. as for this game? the devlog gives us a perfect picture of the design challenge: the math doesn't work! there are too many types of block! making the garbage blocks be four quarter circles is a hack at best, a bandaid at worst. leon did demonstrate to me how powerful the chain-theory of high-level play can be, but much like high-level sen-know, the level of abstraction and specialization is pretty out there.

look: the music rocks, the sound design is nice and crispy, some of the best i've seen in this series. the game commits hard and well its aesthetic, unfortunately alongside Chinese stereotypes that Japanese devs often fall into. i love that the playfield a place, a door; that touch three-dimensionalizes the game into place-ness that i find truly admirable. as leon noted, having character-specific traits that aren't drop tables is truly great, maybe only CALCUNE comes to mind as an alternative pick, and this seems way more balanced. still i... the dev said it himself, and leon summarized it as such: "this game was mainly a historical afterthought." sen-know was an aesthetic tour-de-force, and this is...a few tweaks away from being "not a game." 6.0/10

info on jamp via https://gdri.smspower.org/wiki/index.php/JAMP
game development in the Phillipines: https://www.scribd.com/document/56911359/Game-Development-in-the-Philippines-1992-2008
the devlog in question. please note i read out a machine translation, so i apologize for the many inaccuracies. i'm having a lot of trouble figuring out who exactly the hell wrote this, but here you go: https://www.wizforest.com/diary/150305.html;
leon's cohost: https://cohost.org/leon
Vikas music's excellent channel of eurobeat remixes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWQ4IVOuXa8M9htzbaSKlmg
a 1cc playthrough by webbedspace: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OQTrOW9lVE

This game's presentation is more thoughtful, rich, and thorough than most, even this team's other game on my list MONSTER SLIDER. I love the story, the garbage blocks, the sound design (however doinky woinky it may be). They clearly put some thought into enemy AI's that reflect their character (like Bunny's frog stacking!). The calligraphic style gathers all elements into a wondrous fairy tale. Unfortunately: omnidirectional match-3 sucks. No way around it. The shared piece preview is just weird; i can't see it being truly a competitive element in high-level play. Yes, clearing chests with the bubbles adds garbage to your combo, which offsets the numbing tiny placements. But it's just wrong. It's just wrong and not good. I have to give a lot of points for how gorgeous this is, but i think it's gameplay fails completely. 6.5/10

I'm so far removed from the game that I don't have much to add. I did learn afterwards that Eighting is full of staff from Compile, esp. Kazuyuki Nakashima and Kenichi Yokoo. (Also uh when Toaplan disbanded some people went to Raizing which is for the purpose of our discussion basically Eighting, and some of the ones who didn't go there went on to Akumi, Gazelle, and most notably Cave.) Eighting mostly makes licensed games now but did make the immaculate and unmatched non-ochimono puzzle game Kuru Kuru Kururin.