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| An average level of Tripuzz. |
Creating a truly compelling puzzle game is a surprisingly difficult task. The runaway successes of Tetris and later Puyo Puyo meant that almost every developer relevant at the time tried their hand at a falling-block (or at least mechanically adjacent) puzzle game at least once; some of these went on to become beloved classics in their own right (Panel de Pon/Tetris Attack and Magical Drop come to mind), others... significantly less so (anybody remember Zoop?). Tripuzz very much falls in the latter category, being a match-4 game with cute presentation that got precisely zero attention on release, which, to be quite frank, is a crying shame, because it's an absolute joy of a game through-and-through!
Tripuzz was one of the absolute last games to be released by Santos, a developer whose roots technically date back to the golden age of arcade gaming with the Orca Corporation, which you may know as being the company that a bunch of guys worked at before they went off to join a little company known as Toaplan; although describing the entire Santos lineage would frankly make this blog post already far more unwieldy than it already is and is frankly worthy of a blog post in of itself, the long story short is that Orca's former CEO, Takeshi Tozu, would found several more development studios, all with heavily varying degrees of success. This incarnation of Santos, the final one before they were absorbed into Yumekobo and Tozu vanished off the face of the Earth, was mostly responsible as a subcontractor for some less-than-stellar ports (and the perfectly alright Flintstones game for the Genesis). Santos only ever released three games under their own banner, those being the unexceptional-but-playable shmups Stahlfeder and AirGrave, and of course, Tripuzz.
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| Do not ask me to do anything more than a four-link. |
As previously stated, Tripuzz is very much in the Puyo mold - connect four of the same colored pieces together, come up with strategies for chains (referred to as "links" in this game) in order to defeat your opponent. What truly separates it from pretty much any other versus puzzler of its type is, of course, its triangular pieces; although there had been a few attempt at triangle-based puzzle games both before and after (Sachen's Pyramid and fellow PS1 game Vadims come to mind), Tripuzz remains the only game I've played in which it feels as though genuine thought was put into how the pieces should work, as opposed to desperately trying to shove a triangular peg into a round hole and praying it results in a functional game (Pyramid especially comes to mind here). The game's two main innovations on the established versus puzzler formula, the ability to phase your current piece through everything and the ability to create giant enclosures with adjacent pieces of the same color, both feel like they were specifically built around the pieces being triangular; they feel very deliberate and offer creative strategies beyond just chaining, and I feel that they are what ultimately turn Tripuzz from being merely a decent idea into something worthy of standing next to the all-time greats of the genre.
Four gameplay modes are present in Tripuzz: the single-player story mode (although this game is quite light on "story" even for a puzzle game), the legally mandatory multiplayer mode, a puzzle mode, and a time attack mode. Both the single and multiplayer modes allow you to pick from a decent array of cute characters (nine in single-player, eleven in multiplayer), who all have their own unique garbage patterns, some even directly matching the characters' designs, which is a nice touch (e.g. petals for the fairy character, shurikens for the ninja). The puzzle mode contains a grand total of ninety different puzzles, ranging from the easy to the genuinely mind-bendingly difficult; I still have yet to complete all the puzzles myself. The time attack mode is exactly what it sounds like; create the largest chains you possibly can within a certain amount of time.
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| One of several puzzles that you will encounter within the puzzle mode. If you can solve them all, you are officially smarter than I. |
In terms of presentation, Tripuzz is also no slouch; the game features some highly vibrant and appealing spritework and the character designs, while nowhere as iconic as those found in say, Puyo, certainly have a charm of their own, which is further accentuated by the brief little "attack" animations that play in-game and the fact each character has their own individual ending. The music is also very well-produced, with perhaps the absolute pinnacle being Rod (the Middle Eastern character)'s stage theme, which features some absolutely shreddin' guitar. Perhaps the one real thing you could level against it is that it perhaps feels a little low-budget, but I don't really think that's much of an issue, especially when compared to, say, another Japan-exclusive PS1 puzzle game, unStack, which came out only a year earlier, for the exact same price (4,800 yen, not exactly Simple 1500 range but also not full-price), and looks, sounds, and feels like something you'd find on an old Windows shareware CD.
Does this all mean that Tripuzz is absolutely perfect, though? No, not really. One of the game's weirder quirks involves the amount of garbage blocks the game will throw at you at any given time, as it will very frequently stop just short of completely destroying the player's board. While this does give the player "one last chance" to perhaps clear the garbage and offset it to the other player's board, it does mean that matches can often last just a little longer than you would maybe like for a versus puzzler of this type, as very much seen here. An endless mode I feel would've also helped a lot, especially considering this game's mechanics aren't the most immediately obvious to grasp. It's also technically one of those games that lock progress behind difficulty settings, although it's significantly less egregious than most as it offers unlimited continues, meaning you can effectively bang your head against the wall until the game gives you enough "power" to the point where a 2-chain can do a fair amount of damage towards the enemy AI's field; it also helps that the "true" final boss is a complete pushover, especially when compared to the penultimate boss, whose garbage pattern is an absolute nightmare to deal with.
Did Tripuzz ever have a chance at being the next Puyo or Magical Drop? Probably not; it's perhaps just a little too mechanically complex from the get-go to have the same wide appeal other versus puzzlers have. However, if you truly take the time to learn its mechanics, you will find a truly ambitious, unique puzzle game that simply never got the time of day it so desperately deserved. I'm definitely not the only person to think so, either, as there currently exists a partial fan translation by bankbank, who you may remember from such Internet classics as Bart the General and RE: Get to Schol on Time. Tripuzz is an absolute delight of a game, and I'm glad it's finally getting the attention it deserves almost 28 years after its release.
