hoooo... this one is gonna be a doozy. buckle up kiddos
ok so lets get simple things out of the way: as a single player game i think puyo is kind of booty ass. you can use the simple single player modes to lab out chains or whatever but past that marathon modes are not that interesting. this is only thrown into sharper relief by the fact that tetris has a pretty broad set of single player content, some of which is a very serious challenge (tgm, te:c master, etc) and some of which is a pretty neat spin on the usual formula. so imo that point pretty trivially goes to tetris.
as vs games, we are operating in a totally different space. in this sphere i think the base game mechanics of puyo put it way, way ahead of tetris—mid-to-high level puyo is all about screenwatching, reacting to your opponent's decisions, and making your own builds safe, resistant to RNG nonsense, and capable of responding to multiple different situations. on top of this building chains is not really intuitive in the way clearing lines is. as a result of throwing all these things into one pot, we have created a game with a dizzyingly high skill ceiling. just considering its basic mechanics alone i don't think any other puzzle game comes close in terms of depth. the flip side is of course that learning puyo usually requires a large upfront investment which i'm not super thrilled about but that's sort of another topic for another time.
but when we talk about vs tetris we can talk about a number of different things, which i have a number of different feelings about. so lets go through a bunch of these and see where we end up
in the official guideline corner we have games like puyo puyo tetris and tetris effect: connected
these are pretty standard. ppt vs survived for a long time off a gentleman's agreement not to 4wide until people like kazu decided to do something about it. the fact that there is a speed limit means top-level play really rewards efficient back-to-back which is interesting but not always in a vs game sense, so i do enjoy watching it sometimes but it's not what i usually reach for
te:c, with zone battle, appears to try to solve a few of my gripes with guideline vs:
- the issue of making it possible for people to actually hit each other even if they can only clear singles (this is actually a problem in many games: puyo and even others like panel have it to some extent too)
- the issue where reading the flow of a match is perhaps not obvious to new players
- they actually broke from the guideline to nerf 4wide, even if only a little
for these reasons i consider te:c to be the standard bearer here. its good but its not puyo
next up is the unofficial guideline group which is currently exemplified by tetr.io and jstris
i actually did not really care to watch either of these for a long time and still don't really care for jstris. they actually make much worse the problem of following matches unless you're already tetrispilled because it's fairly common for people to be playing above 3pps at this point in time. i was also relatively uninterested in the meta, even at the top level, because it seemed like people were just downstacking out of whatever, and if you didn't downstack in time, it just meant you weren't playing fast enough.
however an inkling of hope came to me when i watched the grand finals of tetr.io cup 15, where diao and czsmall played what i consider to be the most puyo-like set of tetris that has ever been played. at their level the game is no longer just about squeezing out dps and pressuring your opponent out of the ring. they harass. they screenwatch. they build counters to harassment. they bide their time. and when the moment strikes they blow their opponent out with a massive attack that not only doesn't fit on one board but probably wouldn't fit on two either. it's a shame that there are maybe 5-10 people on the planet capable of playing like this on the regular and it's still hard to understand for a newcomer, but it's decidedly more interesting than it used to be.
at the end of the day, we are still at best looking at "puyo, but with tetrominoes" so i don't think we can meaningfully say this gets there.
and of course we also have tgm versus
tgm is of course known mostly for its difficult single player content but its vs mode is actually very interesting. you send garbage with any double or bigger, and where you clear it decides where the holes end up on your opponent's board, meaning playing this at a high level requires screenwatching and reacting as well. it also has items. there's a lot to get into but i would recommend the tgm versus guide if you're interested in more details.
this meta doesn't really look like puyo at all, and it is definitely a more interactive game than any of the classes before it. i do think it's pretty hype and enjoy watching it a lot, but i'm also not really clear on how deep it really goes because the meta has had so much less work than the other big classes of vs tetris.
all this to say that i think vs tetris has a lot going for it, and you can do a lot with the general framework, but i still think that puyo is the Better Game since its elegant simplicity spawned a meta that has gone on for literal decades with no sign of stopping. the game itself has practically gone on unchanged since puyo 2 and they haven't found the end yet
