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merging pops -- when fruits in suika game are merged they make a pop which pushes other fruits away and also pushes the new larger fruit away from whatever it's resting on. risk: making progress in the game has the potential to move other pieces in ways you don't anticipate like: (1) pushing a piece into an area of the board you didn't want it (2) exploding a piece upwards out of the board and ending the game. reward: the player can use these launches to their advantage to move pieces to other parts of the board they'll be better used. typically for me I may for an orange out of smaller pieces and then launch it to where I keep the rest of my oranges.
btw my understanding is that larger fruits cause larger pops, which means that as the player progresses, each fruit becomes riskier and riskier to create as it may send other things flying.
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weight -- fruits are kinda all the same weight. or at least very very similar weights. this is what allows a player to use cherries to push a fruit to another place on the board, because cherries are about as heavy as every other piece while having the leverage of being small so they can get in between the wall and a fruit and push it over. this comes with the risk that the cherry doesn't go where you anticipated, or that the cherry actually prevents two other fruits from merging later on. so there's risk in where the cherry goes and reward in control over the board.
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fruits are a liquid -- the best way I can describe the way suika treats the fruits is as some sort of liquid... what I mean is that fruits tend to balance out at an equilibrium level so there is a flat line that the fruits will land on based on their weight. this means the player has to manage the structure of their fruits and weigh down light+large fruits so they stay stable and can merge with a second large piece as the player builds it up. if the player weighs down their piece with a fruit that's too small they have the chance of pushing it to the side and ruining the structure they tried to create. also when the player weighs down a large fruit, they run the risk of having their weight blasted off into the atmosphere when a large merge happens lower down.
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merge precedence -- lets say there is a clementine touching two oranges, and you drop a clementine on it. now there is an orange touching two oranges. which will it merge with? as far as I can tell it will merge with the orange that is higher up and to the left. a lot of suika clones choose to make a downward precedence so the new orange will match with whichever orange is lower and to the right/left. every game has to make this choice but the fact that suika has chosen "upwards" makes the game a lot harder! it means that the player has to be careful which matches they make, even if they have a piece they want to match with right now.
going back to the oranges and clementine, if the player places an orange above and below a clementine, when they get another clementine they're going to get an apple on top of an orange, which could close off the lower orange and make the player unable to move forward. learning the precedence can help the player avoid this mistake
ultimately this punishes players for hoarding oranges and clementines all in one places because when you place a clementine on an orange then it's risky unless you get another clementine immediately afterwards. however it's also risky to only place oranges in one place because each fruit only has a 1/5 chance of being an orange.
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space: suika is a weird puzzle game because the farther you get the less space you have... until you make a big match. this creates a "squeeze and release" that Sakurai talks about on his youtube channel. as the player works towards larger and larger fruits, space is running out more and more creating tension and then!!! whew, everything comes together.
people may not like some of these aspects of the game and want to change them in a clone of suika! but it's interesting to acknowledge that these seemingly small decisions create game sense and risk/reward dynamics that I haven't seen a single clone replicate.