I love Puyo Puyo.

I hate Puyo Puyo Tetris. It's a big step back from previous games, and it's the worst online experience I've ever dealt with in my life. And I honestly think it gives beginners a bad first impression of the series, because by juxtaposing it next to a more popular game I regularly see players get confused when it doesn't click in the first five minutes and decide they'd rather just play Tetris instead.

I utterly loathe and despise Puyo Puyo Tetris 2. It's everything I hated about the first game but buggier. And it's all ctrl-c ctrl-v, the only 'new' content is a butchered adaptation of Chronicle's Skill Battle, minus the full JRPG story mode that Skill Battle was built around. It has serious problems competitively, but by splitting the playerbase, it killed Puyo Puyo Champions, the more functional game I kept trying to run tournaments for but could not get players to show up.

The true depth of my hatred really just stems from Sega's decision to rehash a second crossover. It has been ten years since the last proper main series game, Puyo Puyo Chronicle, and that game was Japan-only - the last game to get localized was Fever, 26 years ago.

There was a time when, despite not liking the first game, I had high hopes that this game succeeding in the west would lead to bigger and better things for the series. Surely Sega willl follow it up with a main series game along the lines of the ones I liked, and surely they'll localize it. But that didn't happen, and the tragedy is that I understand exactlly why it didn't. PPT outsold everything else Sega ever tried to do with the franchise by an order of magnitude, and it did so by selling to an audience that only cares about the other game. So Sega realized the most profitable course of action is to keep riding the coattails of a more popular game because that's all anyone cares about. I just want Puyo Puyo to be its own game, but why would Sega ever go back to that when they know that even the most low-effort ctrl-c ctrl-v rehash will sell far more copies as long as it has the more popular game attached to it?