Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles review

Steven Legg 23 Nov, 2009 at 5:55pm ET Article published in Gaming

Yes, you can play as a Dreamcast VMU. This is among the less strange things in the game.

All of this extraordinarily dry puzzle game-mechanics talk aside, this game is tripping on more acid than Beautiful Katamari’s developers could’ve possibly ingested in a year. The self-referential hamster wheel this game seems to enjoy running on so much only grows more and more evident as the game experience moves along. Perhaps in some attempt to flaunt their oh-so-obvious knowledge of “Video Game Arts”, the developers randomly scattered mini-games throughout the story mode that look, act, and sometimes play like a variety of classic games on many different gaming platforms. Trust me, when you start launching a green slime thing named Tama off of what appears to be a spring in the Green Hills level of Sonic the Hedgehog, you’re going to feel your mind begin to melt—but not as quickly as it might when you’re forced navigate an 8-bit sprite through a sequence of mini-dungeons that can only be completed by selecting the right adventure command to kill slimes, flush toilets, sit in chairs, or pull Master Sword wannabes out of a very familiar triangular stone before arriving at the chest he must open.

The fun doesn’t stop at the mini games—just wait until one of the developers address an “unintended bug” that has somehow caused Amy’s sprite to randomly swap panels of her graphic around, and proceeds to explain why this “art style” is incredibly new and hip to his “Video Game Arts” apprentice who appears to be some sort of advanced slime thing that has figured out how to grow a body beneath its bulbous green head—right before suggesting that Amy Puzzle Battle for the right to have her sprite fixed.

Or how about when the character named Aiba asks Amy to help him find the “COLRARMR” (Items and spells can only have 8 characters where he’s from, duh) so that he can upgrade from 8 colors to 256 colors after an explanation from a translucent blue version of Hao known as “Dr. Left” about the mask and transparent layers of sprites (programming included). There is a constant feeling of “What is this I don’t even…” all the way down this rabbit hole.

This game was as much of a headache as it was entertaining. The ingloriously self-edifying, druggie-meets-weeaboo story mode serve to further remind me why I still hate the concept of a spin-off. Buy this game if you’re interested in seeing how much mental flip-flopping you can handle before you begin developing a brain tumor—it is only meant for the most detail-oriented, obsessive puzzle gamers that enjoy riding the Jap train all the way to crazytown. One thing still bothers me though, as the developers are ethnically half-Chinese: are they just making fun of the whole Japanese game industry with this? Or is this a serious product?

The world may never know.

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Comments

23 Nov 2009 ~ 6:19pm Thrax Image very relevant:
23 Nov 2009 ~ 11:16pm Archonn Hi there! I went through the whole review, mostly paying attention to find whatever mistakes about the game system i could find. The rest of this comment might therefore sound quite irritating/nitpicky, but hey, i did like your review! If anything the fact i bothered going over all these little details proves so, right?

Bursting more than 4 blocks of the same element is called a "Combo", not just four. Your "Elemental" description is a bit confusing, but it is correct.
You don't actually need to have the second burst's blocks falling into place because of the first burst to have a "Chain", as long as the second burst occurs right after the first one, it's a chain. As a matter of fact, chaining as you described is quite hard, to the point the Yuans never bothered to program the AI to perform it.
A burst that cleans all blocks of the same type is a "Full Combo", not clear.
While the Wind and Water clear and the Void clear are in the form of a diamond, the Full Clear is not, being instead the Void block surrounded with 6 different blocks.
Skill level settings (more precisely, the Beginner-Advanced-Expert selection) change when you can perform Time combo/chains , not the way they are calculated (addition) and achieved (perform Combos or Chains while under a specific time limit). The other level setting, between Normal-Hard-Master, is just a funny way of asking how many types you want as special. Two means Normal, one means Hard, zero means Master. That's it, no such thing as blocks functioning in a variety of ways.

On what you cite as story mode's major flaw, well, it's just, the way you wrote it, it doesn't look like as much of a flaw? I mean, if the only way to clear any particularly hard stage was through skill, wouldn't it mean that, for most people, they'd only get to the first duel and then quit because they can't just stumble upon a favorable block layout and move along to the next batch of easier tutorial-like stages? What you're really looking at here is how the makers screwed up with the difficulty curve of the game; their inability to create actually stupid computer opponents. For all the inspiration this game took from Tetris Attack/Panel de Pon (aka PokÃ©mon Puzzle League), they sure could have given a damn good look at how the easiest CPU players played (and guess what? i've seen people losing horribly to it - just goes to prove your point about how this game is for obsessive people or something)

Oh, and on the Arcade mode section... The only thing the three difficulties do is dictate the types of special blocks available, not "also".

Well, that's it. I'm tired and it's pretty messy, but this should be everything i had an issue with. Thanks for reading!
24 Nov 2009 ~ 12:41am primesuspect That poster's comment proves one thing: That game is for people like him, not people like me.
24 Nov 2009 ~ 12:50am ZenMode ^this
24 Nov 2009 ~ 4:24am UPSLynx I am SO GLAD you used Eggy's text message for the caption.

That'll never get old.
24 Nov 2009 ~ 4:43am primesuspect It was one of my greatest joys.
24 Nov 2009 ~ 9:32am Archonn Aw. Can't a man nitpick without being judged?
Anyway, as i said, that comment was just me trying to help with a few things that were wrong.

Talking about the review itself, i liked it. You nailed the feel of the game, much more so than other reviews which talk about how the game is "A love letter to the retro gaming", or about how the graphics suck when they do their job just fine, even though said job involves questioning the sanity of the developers. If i had to add anything, it'd be small stuff, like, a link to the demo (http://www.dcevolution.net/index.php?id=wind_and_water) , how the game does provide a way to skip any stressing stage with an item from the shop, or how the puzzle mode can be quite the tool if you're looking on how to play the game, as it teaches lots of ways to form those pesky diamonds.
24 Nov 2009 ~ 10:11am Thrax I had a chance to play this title as it was being reviewed, and I would rather like to never play it again. I consider myself an experienced puzzle gamer, having blown hours and years on titles like Tetris, Bubble Bobble, Lumines and even Bejeweled. Games that match colors and shapes on the fly appeal to the way I think, as I can quickly recognize visual patterns, but Wind and Water was an absolute nightmare to play.

Not only was the core mechanic of the game not immediately evident, at no time did any of the events that occurred throughout the process of learning the puzzle system make their triggers or motivations clear.

That is to say: I was playing this game, and it never--not for one moment--had the courtesy to make sense.

I won't even touch the self-aggrandizing story mode.
24 Nov 2009 ~ 12:03pm Archonn @Thrax: For me, at least in the very beginning, what made me stick with the game were the similarities to Tetris Attack, a favorite of mine from older times. But yes, i think i speak for everybody who played this game that at first it does looks like nightmarish. Several things stood out for me; the wobbling of the cursor when you move it horizontally, the craziness that is forming diamonds, the unintuitiveness of where blocks go when you spin them, whether i was supposed to be looking out for combos or chains, and more.

I only really started to "get" the game when i figured out you're not supposed to arrange blocks in a diamond format. As you said, puzzle games are supposed to be played by quickly recognition of visual patterns, but diamonds are hard to recognize/form. Therefore, the secret is to form patterns you can actually work with, and from those, "mechanically" transform them into diamonds.

Say, for example, you can form a vertical line of four blocks. That should be pretty easy. From there, move the cursor to the center of the line, and press A, up, A, A, down, down, A, A. Yes, this will make a diamond, and surprise, you didn't have to think about it once! And don't worry about pressing any particular button wrong, once you do it right the first time you should be able to see how to fix it should you make a mistake.
This is much easier than staring at the four blocks and going "Well, so this block, i'll move it to here, and then this one right next to it, and this third one, oh damn i screwed up the position of the first two blocks while moving the third, now i have to move this one to..."

The good news here is that having to memorize a sequence of 8 moves is the exception, most of the time, 1 or 2 button presses are all that is needed to transform a few particular easily-recognizable groupings into a diamond. The key to learn them is the Puzzle Mode, which teaches you everything you need to know about forming diamonds, as long as you are paying attention.

Well, given the fact that you said you'd rather like to never play it again, i should finish this comment already. Anyway, i could say that part of the fun i had was managing to conquer it's messed-up exterior, but really? All i did was chaining, over and over. Now THAT was some serious fun. I got really addicted to W&W back in the beginning of the year, when i got it, but by now, i only play it rarely, even more so if you take into account how infrequently i pull out the Dreamcast. I still can't beat that last difficulty level, but i'm okay with that.

On a final note, i just realized i wrote another tl;dr comment. Isn't that something.
24 Nov 2009 ~ 5:04pm primesuspect You should just register