Puzzle and Dragons

[Warlock]

I talked some smack about Puzzle and Dragons a couple months back over on Inverted Castle, but seeing a bunch of people playing on the train again has led me to become re-addicted to it. Although there is some randomness inherent in the game, it's built on a solid-enough base that I find myself minding less the second time around.

Basically, Puzzle and Dragons is another one of the Bejeweled/RPG hybrids that was popular a couple years back, on the same vein as Puzzle Quest and Square's Gyromancer. It's essentially a combination of Bejeweled and Pokemon; you collect a group of monsters, build a party of six, and go spelunking through dungeons to collect treasure, earn more powerful monsters, and defeat the legendary Dragon Lord Zaerog (and maybe Satan and a bunch of gods and historical Japanese warriors who are also dragons for some reason along the way). There's actually a decent amount of depth to the game- your monsters each come with a 'leader' and 'active' skill; leader skills are often things which will buff your entire party, whereas active skills can be used after a certain number of rounds for an immediate effect. You'll also bring one of another player's monsters into your party as a 'guest'; this gives you access to a wide variety of monsters and skills that otherwise wouldn't be available. There's a daunting number of monsters to collect, and plenty of normal and 'special event' dungeons to explore.

(I should note also that you're not playing on the same 'board' as your enemies. One of the things that was always a big turnoff for me in Puzzle Quest and its relatives was the cheating AI; there's a lot less of that here.)

All in all, it's a pretty solid game. It's free-to-play on phones and tablets- though as with most f2p games, there's a premium currency you can buy with real money (or have slowly dribbled out to you) which gives you various advantages.

If anyone's interested in giving it a try, I can post a little more about the game and maybe write up a quick 'getting started' kind of guide.

- HC

[Warlock]

Some more thoughts on this one, to be organized into an Inverted Castle post.

I wasn't a big fan of the gumball-machine system by which most monsters are distributed at the time, but I've come to see some of the more positive aspects of the system upon futher exposure.

The big plus of the system- as I see it- is that it creates a wider variety of teams; there's much greater emphasis on working with what you've got to build an optimal team than on putting together one of a set of known builds. Of course, there are a handful of viable endgame setups- and most of them do involve getting lucky, although there's at least a couple very strong farmable builds out there- but there's much more variety in the early-, mid-, and even late-game builds than there would be in more deterministic games. Look on the Wiki, and you'll find lots of advice for a lot of different team builds- not just the half-dozen 'good' builds of the week.

It's a system that's easy for developers to abuse, of course, and Puzzle and Dragons often rides on and occasionally crosses that line; in addition to rare and powerful Gods, the gumball machine is also filled with an assortment of less impressive monsters. Even during special events where Gods show up with high frequency, it feels like the chance of seeing any- let alone one that you're interested in- is as low as 20 or 30%. Not impossible, but frustratingly low when a single 'pull' amounts to a week's worth of effort in gathering their IAP currency (or, of course, bought to the tune of $5 a pull).

The other downside is that this encourages 'rerolling' at the beginning- starting the game, taking the first pull you get at the end of the tutorial, and then deleting and reinstalling the game if it's not to your liking. This is a lengthy, soul-crushing process (which the developers seem to have gone out of their way to make more annoying)- I'd be more sympathetic if your first pull was guaranteed to be decent, but you're subject to the same random numbers as anyone else, and therefore have the same better-than-even chance of grabbing one of the mediocre uncommon-drop-in-any-dungeon monsters as anyone else.

Part of the reason it works, of course, is that Puzzle and Dragons is mostly single-player; there's very little interaction with other players ingame, and no real competition between them save maybe showing off trophy dragons. This sort of thing simply wouldn't work in a competitive game, where there's much more pressure to put together the best possible build in order to be competitive (unless the game is designed such that all builds are nearly equal, which presents its own set of problems).

It's still an interesting mechanic; it's interesting to see how the randomness encourages different paths through the game. It might be a cool addition to a number of genres- starting out a random set of timed unlocks from your FPS-with-RPG-elements, determined at the time of your signinng up, or providing a random subset of the playable characters available in your console RPG on any given playthrough.

- HC