In my generous yet negative review of Baku Baku Animal, i complained incorrectly that Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo has three colors to BBA's four. @leon corrected me -- they both have four colors!! -- and it left me wondering why i specifically dislike BBA compared to SPF2T. both games feature four colors divided into trigger and block pieces; when a trigger piece is added to a group of like blocks, they clear, and garbage is sent to the opponent. why did BBA feel unwieldy and unpleasant to me compared to SPF2T? am i just a hater because BBA looks kinda goofy to me? i wanted to interrogate my preferences more rigorously, so i have three claims to make about how SPF2T is better: aesthetics, tuning, and mechanics.
Aesthetics
Advanced puzzle players will need to know their board state quickly and efficiently so they can focus on identifying the upcoming pieces, determining a plan for next peices, and reading their opponents board state. But these eight symbols' visual business rebuffs a player seeking such immediate, clearly presented knowledge. In contrast, five-color Puyo Puyo conveys piece identification with both color AND associated facial expressions, double-reinforcing the player's board state after a quick glance. This essential visual elegance becomes more challenging to implement with trigger-based mechanics that doubling the total block types AND require the pair-ed-ness of certain blocks to be immediately apparent.
BBA's blocks are visually messy. The 4 trigger pieces and 4 color pieces each have a unique symbol relying on our childhood association with animal diets: monkey like banana, rabbit munch carrot, panda scarf bamboo, and dog chew bone. The four pairs do share a mascot color (yellow, red, green, and blue respectively), though only close to the margins of a block. It's hard for me, as an admittedly less experienced player, to immediately "read" my board state, because i have to sift through a great deal more information -- marginal color information, animal association, and visual patterning -- to get my split-second read.
SPF2T's blocks are visually oversimplified. Triggers are circular and wispy, blocks are square and crystalline. Like-colored blocks fuse into meta-cubes with distinct outer edges, signifying a concentration of pieces. The four pairs of blocks are linked by their color: yellow, red, green, or blue. This is mostly enough for me as a color-sighted person, though i lose some of the double-reinforcement of hue- AND texture-distinct colorblind accessible design (e.g., again, Puyo Puyo). Thankfully, both the official Capcom release in Capcom Fighting Collection and a variety of fanpatches (including one by our very own @trashboatdagod) alter the four colors to ones more accessible to two common types of colorblindness (not monochromacy unfortunately).
Of the two, SPF2T is demonstrably simpler and easier for me to read, BBA's block patterns require much more practice to develop a split-second board-state read. YMMV as a color-blind person; I'd be curious to know how Baku Baku Animal's use of visually eight distinct symbols helps or hinders your quick reads.
Tuning
My experience with BBA has been marked by a clogged board filled with orphaned trigger pieces I can't use or get rid of. I don't have a decompile of either game (nor the skill to read it), so it's not possible with total certainty to know how the piece randomizer works in either game. So i set out to discover, both intuitively and empirically, how often BBA gives the player trigger pieces compared to SPF2T. In the normal mode of each game I quickly filled the board with pieces without clearing any, and then paused emulation to count how many of each type of block I'd gotten in total. I did 10 rounds of this for each game, yielding data for 560 BBA blocks and 503 SPF2T blocks. I compared the color prevalence and trigger-piece prevalance over the two sets; you can see the resultant charts at the top of the post.
Casually, it definitely looks like BBA gives you trigger pieces a little over a quarter of the time, while SPF2T gives you trigger pieces a little over a fifth of the time. I can't confirm those "true ratio" numbers with such a small sample size. I can say (via a 2.52 chi-squared test result) the two trigger-piece-averages are not the same with a p-value of 0.11. That's not strong enough for scientific work (you need like p < 0.05), but it's also not nothin'. I will tentatively claim, therefore, that my intuition about trigger-piece frequency looks to be about right, and leave the last word on it to a decompiled piece randomizer function.
Mechanics
Most importantly, two essential mechanics combine to make SPF2T work unequivocally better when it comes to trigger-piece balance than BBA:
- In SPF2T, unlike BBA, trigger pieces trigger other trigger pieces of the same color. Two green trigger pieces in SPF2T will self-annihilate, whereas two Pandas next to each other in BBA will hang out on the board. (And like, good for them, but it makes my life harder.)
- In SPF2T, unlike BBA, the clear-all-of-one-color block (in this case, Diamonds) will clear both regular blocks AND trigger pieces of that color. In BBA, the equivalent BB coin will clear all of only one type of block: all bamboo will clear but not pandas, or all pandas will clear but not bamboo. SPF2T lets you clear literally twice the block types
A player is much less likely to orphan trigger pieces they can't use or get rid of. Resultantly, even though SPF2T's playfield is smaller than BBA's, SPF2T feels less cramped atomically. get wrecked, get owned
