the Puyo Puyo Manju revival continues: the new matcha flavour has launched at various in-store venues over the last couple days, and will be available online from tomorrow:
I wrote about this on twxttxr as it was happening but I guess I didn't touch on it here, so here's the basic story behind this strangely-popular snack, which goes beyond "thing in the shape of another thing":
One of the many, many Puyo Puyo-branded initiatives produced during the '90s Puyo boom was Puyoman, a Puyo Puyo-themed manju snack that was produced and sold in the merch stores/tourist traps Compile ran around their native Hiroshima, and also sold nationwide via mail order; their basic varieties were the standard Puyo-shaped maple manju with red bean paste filling and a Carbuncle-shaped version with custard filling, but they also produced dozens of variants that were exclusive to their stores, or to certain fan club promotions, etc. The Puyoman started off as a licensing deal with a certain bakery but Compile ended up bringing the entire production in-house, and one of the common stories you hear from anyone who so much as thought of joining Compile in the mid/late-'90s was that their "employee training" consisted of baking manju at the warehouse or one of the stores.
Puyoman quickly became a genuinely popular and successful snack, beyond the novelty of the branding, and even as Compile started to implode and they'd ceded the IP to Sega, they clung to the Puyoman business as it was practically the only thing they had going that was still profitable—they were even one of the first confectionery vendors to go hard on Rakuten, back when it was still a fledgling online business. Part of what made them popular was they were reasonably high-end snacks for something so cheap, and that's ultimately why they didn't lean even harder into that side of the business, as the profit margins would've necessitated a massive increase in production and most of the people at the company had zero interest in making a hard transition into bakery.
Once Compile finally petered out, the specific rights to Puyoman were scattered to the winds: Compile's former president owned the recipe but the Puyo Puyo IP belonged to Sega, the specific Puyoman trademark belonged to D4 Enterprise (who'd picked up the rights to most of Compile's non-Puyo Puyo output, including the RPG series that spawned most of Puyo Puyo's characters and lore, which came with its own complications) and the actual molds and other equipment specific to producing Puyoman had disappeared. (One former Compile employee claimed they'd ended up at a repo company that essentially wanted a ransom for them). Sega, D4E and Compile's former president Niitani had all individually teased the return of Puyoman in one form or another, or produced similar products meant to evoke Puyoman without actually being Puyoman—Sega produced a limited number of Puyo Puyo nikuman, for instance, and Niitani planned to use the Puyoman recipe to produce new snacks as part of a failed crowdfunding campaign for another game—but the authentic snacks seemed doomed to never return.
Jump to April of this year, when Hiroshima's Heiando Umetsubo chain announced Puyo Puyo Manju, a Puyo-themed snack that conspicuously used the classic Compile-era Puyo designs and otherwise looked and sounded identical to the classic Puyoman: these were indeed a legitimate successor to the original snack, made with the original molds and with reference to the original recipe, with official license from Sega... all that's missing is the original name, so strictly speaking, they're not the same snack, but people know what's up. (The recipe's not exactly the same, either, apparently as a consequence of having to approximate certain techniques that are now cost-prohibitive, but the people who enjoyed the originals seem happy with them.) As it turns out, someone from the former Compile days now works at a business maintenance company that not only happened upon the original molds but also the wooden base molds used to produce the originals, so they were able to finally make something happen by providing one of the crucial pieces of the puzzle.
This announcement was buzzing heavily online for days afterward, due in part to the initial release being limited to specific Hiroshima stores: people were going on pilgrimages to go buy them, and everyone involved seemed extremely surprised by how well they were selling and how much difficulty they were having in keeping up with demand. They debuted around the G7 summit and the makers seemed to be banking on their politician-themed snacks at that moment, so I think they were blindsided by all the attention being given to this weird secondary thing they dropped out of nowhere. Just anecdotally, a lot of the demand is being driven not by people who loved the original snack but by younger folk who saw the Puyoman advertised in the manuals of their Puyo games and desperately wanted to try them but couldn't talk their parents into buying them, or whatever. One anecdote going around was from a guy who lied to his history-teacher grandpa about wanting to see the war memorial as an excuse to go to Hiroshima and hit up the Puyoman Honpo.
I figured the sales would drop off pretty quickly (not least of all because they're not great value for money; ¥1000 for a 4-pack is a little much, especially when you were getting 8~10 for the same price back in the Puyoman days) but they've remained popular, and now they're dropping a long-awaited second flavour. For as much as these things intrigue me—as a coelocanth of Puyo-mania, and as an example of a random side-business that was once poised to consume Compile—I can't say I'm a massive manju fan, but as far as manju goes, these ones weren't too bad (ie not quite as sweet as I was expecting), and I can see myself actually enjoying the matcha version. Godspeed, overpriced maple blobs.