So this game comes out in 2 days. And here I am with a review just before that. At first I was happy because I thought ot myself “Hey, this will be an exclusive review!”, but no, there have been reviews for over a year for this game already. Why? Well, it’s a completely random story. It came out in Japan in July of 2007. Then NISA decided to bring it over to America. So after a little while, the game was pretty much done and a release date was set. At an Anime Expo, NISA was actually selling copies of the complete game. And then… It was delayed. Multiple times. Some reviewers got a hold of it though, and reviewed it at that time. After a year of the game constantly getting pushed back for unknown reasons. Partly due to Jaleco leaving the gaming business and such… But anyways, it was a bit random and reviews have been up for a long time, and ROMs were leaked and all. So frankly it was pretty much ignored since a lot of people could already play it.

But now it’s officially coming out, and I’m bringing you the not-so-exclusive scoop on it!

Read on and see if it was worth all that wait after having reviews out for so damn long or not.

Story
This takes place in an… undisclosed time period, and every inhabitant on the planet is chibi. One day, a major virus hits a bunch of people on the planet. The effect of this virus? It turns everyone into zombies!!! Nah, just kidding. It just makes everyone hit by it look ridiculous. Changes people into half-animal half-human half-fruit combinations, all that have something to do with their name and personality. There is one doctor on the planet who found how to cure the disease caused by the puchi puchi virus though. He put the people in a machine of some sort, which injects the patient with PURE AWESOME, which gets rid of the viri in their body. So… that’s basically it. Your goal is to threat everyone that requests threatment.

The game is filled with pop culture references (this is NISA, of course their references everywhere). Mostly in character names, but sometimes also in their description. If their names aren’t a kind of reference, they’re really… lame play on words. There’s not much dialog, but the little dialog there is isn’t too bad.

Not a great story and not developed… at all.. but it’s fine. It’s a puzzle game so a story is not really needed. The little story we get is kinda funny so it’s all fine.

Looks and Sounds
The game sports super deformed chibi anime-like characters, with a slight american cartoon flair to them. Each character looks majorly wacky and weird, as the sickness is supposed to do. And each looks unique. There’s really all there is to say about the graphics in the game. There’s barely any animation to speak of, other than some viri shaking to signal that they’re congealing. There’s a few interesting quirks here and there in the graphics, like the way congealed viri look like their non-congealed form. There’s a short animation on the top screen during operations showing your 2 nurses running around, but not much more. It’s a fun looking game, but the graphics aren’t really something to write home about. The character design is real fun, but that’s it.

The sounds… There’s really not many of them… the same lame music during stages, victory music, menu music, and sounds for when you lock a virus, form a triangle and remove viri.  The sound design isn’t the high point of the game really.

Gameplay
It’s a puzzle game, so the basics are quite simple. You have you game board with hexagons, and viri appear on those hexagons at increasingly fast intervals. The game is controlled with the touch  screen. When you touch a virus, it gets “locked”. If it’s locked for too long, it solidifies (or “congeals”). Locking 3 viri of the same color forms a triangle. Any virus whitin that triangle is also locked. You can form extra triangles, of course. Touching a linked virus destroys all the viri forming the triangle. It also starts a chain reaction on any other linked viri inside the triangle AND it also congeals any locked(but not linked) virus in the triangle AND “revives” congealed viri. If more locked viri are in the trangles that come out of the first one that is destroyed, the chain increases, making you gain more points and completed triangles. The more triangles you complete, the closer you get to using medicine. You can get stronger types of medicine with more points. Medicine “revives” a certain number, or certain areas of congealed viri. The longer you stay in a stage, the faster viri spawn (that’s good) and the faster they congeal (that’s bad). Also, a virus can congeal on its own (it shakes to tell you it’s congealing).

That’s the basic gameplay. Not very complicated, but as you go on it gets frantic and really, REALLY fun.

There’s a few modes of play.
The Examine mode is basically the story progression. You get a series of patients, each with different requirements to heal. Some require an amount of points, some require a certain number of a certain chain. This is the main mode of the game of course. It starts very easy. Getting an amount of point, getting a few 4-chains, simple stuff.  Then it gets a lot tougher. Getting high chains (up to around 15), stages where you only get points at when you get the required chain (those are brutal) and stages where you have to destroy all the viri in the stage. The increasing difficulty is great and keeps the game relatively fresh.
The Research mode lets you replay any stage you already beat, and completing multiple stages in Research mode adds more patients in Examine mode. The other mode is a training mode, where you can just randomly play on stages of varying difficulty but with no particular goal.

Overall
The gameplay is very fun. It’s fast-paced, requires fast thinking, and it’s challenging. Gameplay-wise it’s a great game. The other elements are a bit lacking, especially the sound, but they’re adequate.

If you’re up for a fun little puzzle game, Puchi Puchi Virus is definitely a good pick. And it’s probably gonna end up being a bit rare, since it is a NISA game after all.

jobocan Games, Handheld, Review, ds