Started Waku Waku Puyo Puyo Dungeon without having opened the sealed bandana that it comes with. Bold!
The game itself doesn’t offer many surprises at first, since it appears to be a classic roguelike RPG similar to Shiren the Wanderer (Mystery Dungeon), but set in the whacky Puyo Puyo universe. Which it is.
What took me back by surprise is just how challenging it is from the get-go. The first dungeon is just two floors, then a boss, but that first boss fight is tough! Because you have no idea what items do until you take them back and appraise them, it can feel like a game of luck at this stage.
Visuals are a mixture of prerendered graphics and pixel art sprites, with magic spells effects being FMV video overlays on top of the action. I wouldn’t say it’s massively aesthetically pleasing as it’s not the best use of 90s prerendered CGI given the never-changing top-down camera angle. It’s functional. Oddly, the PlayStation director’s cut, Waku Puyo Dungeon, seems to have superior graphics. The second dungeon has moving lava where that background is a solid red colour on Saturn.