Puzzle and Dragons Z comments

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Puzzle and Dragons Z (GungHo Online, 2013)
There's a good possibility that you have already played Puzzle and Dragons. If not, it was originally developed by GungHo Online Entertainment for smartphones in 2012 in Japan. It came out in the U.S. about 9 months later, and Europe the following year. There have been a few sequels since then. The one I bought is "Puzudora Zeto" (the Japanese name for Puzzle and Dragons Z). This spin-off was paired with Super Mario Bros. Edition for a Nintendo 3DS release during a Fan Appreciation Festival in 2013. I'd been seeing a used copy of Pazudora Z in Book Off for a couple of years, but it looked fairly uninteresting as an RPG, and I kept passing on the game. Recently, though, Book Off has been pulling 3DS games from the shelves of most of its stores, making it harder to find ANY RPG of any kind now. The few used RPGs they do still carry are either ones I already have, or are still in the 2,000 to 4,000 yen range. (This strikes me as strange, in that they don't think there's a market for used 3DS games, but that the games they think people will still buy are still really popular.) Anyway, I had a little free time one night, and the Book Off nearest me had one copy for 280 yen ($2.50 USD). So, what the heck, I got it to review on the blog.

Visually, PaD-Z is a stunning, well-drawn game. The dungeons look good, the backgrounds in the main town are very high-tech, and the dragons are fairly unique. The game itself could have been made better, though...

At its heart, this is a three-in-a-row matching jewel puzzle game. The playing field is a black screen with a border frame, in the field are different-colored spherical jewels in a 6x5 rectangle. On the 3DS, you use the stylus to drag one specific jewel around the screen within a fixed time period (about 15 seconds). As you drag the one jewel, it switches places with the next one you take it to. You use this switching action to make the jewels line up 3 (or more) of the same color in a row or column. When you lift the stylus, or when the timer times out, whatever jewels are in a connected straight line will flash out and be replaced with new gems. The goal is to have multiple combos of jewels triggering one after the other. The more combos total, the greater the effects of whatever jewels you eliminated from the screen. A lot of this is purely random, and even though I once racked up a full 21 combos once, it was just plain luck, and had nothing to do with what I'd done to set it up.

To give the puzzle section more structure, you have an RPG-style story to go along with a world map, multiple dungeons, and a plot. The plot: You live in a high-tech world occupied by dragon tamers. When you fight dragons in the dungeons, you can pick up eggs, which you can then choose to hatch and raise, or use for leveling up existing monsters. One day, an evil humanoid dragon arrives on the planet along with minions and henchlings, and turns the place into a giant jigsaw puzzle. The jigsaw pieces represent part of the main town, and large groups of dungeons. Your goal is to go into the dungeons as they are recovered, return the planet back to normal, and defeat the final boss.

The town has several places to visit, but there's effectively zero treasure hunting to be had. You can choose to play one of two characters, a boy or a girl. I picked the girl, Tetsuko. You get two friends, Nick and Sara. Sara occasionally becomes available to add to your party as a supporting NPC. Her ability is minor healing at the end of each round. You can enter the houses of Nick and Sara, as well as your own, to talk to the NPCs inside, but that just gives you a bit of backstory for the plot. No treasures or items. There are other NPCs scattered around the town. Some give you subquests for minor item rewards. One woman near a red cross sign will tell you if any subquests have opened, and where to find the people for them (not really necessary, since those people have "quest" floating over their heads at that time). Next to her is a guy that rewards you for finding dragon stones (fragments of rocks with dragon carvings on them). In the far southeast corner of town is a machine that gives you random items in return for energy. Tetsuko's father has a Shinto shrine at the northeastern part of town, where you can get a scroll good for visiting a special dungeon once per day. Giving scrolls to the assistant in front of the shrine lets you visit those special dungeons. There's a warehouse at the southwestern corner, and a Colosseum at the south end, near the exit. One more visitable location is a school grounds at the northwestern corner, but I haven't found anything to do there.

The main dragon tamer complex is at the middle northern part of the town. The complex has two halves. The left half lets you play against anyone else that bought a copy of the game, plus there are a couple practice dungeons for learning how to play the puzzle game, and a library for talking to NPCs for backstory. The main part of the building has Nick and Sara, plus the head of the dragon tamers, who gives you your marching orders against the enemy. The right half of the building has 3 machines, which become operational as you progress through the game. The first machine lets you hatch any eggs you receive. If an egg is new, it will have "???" in the name. It's worth hatching one (and only one) of each new egg, to get the starting-level version of that dragon. The second machine lets you evolve your dragons to the next stage, assuming you have the right chips for it (see below). The third machine uses energy to consume spare eggs to let you level up your dragons faster than if you simply ran through the dungeons and amassed exp.
[Edit]: I've been told by someone else that you level up better if you match the color of the egg used to the color of the monster using it. I need to try this out.]

Item drops and stuff
PaD-Z doesn't use money or gold. Instead, you receive energy (ene) (along with exp.) from each battle. The more difficult the enemy, the more exp. and/or ene. Occasionally, enemy will drop eggs or chips. Each enemy will drop an egg or chip of their species. Eggs can be hatched to give you dragons for your party, or consumed for leveling up (99 cap). Ene is used for running the leveling up machine in the main HQ (500 ene per egg consumed). Or, if you go to the random prize machine in the southeast corner of town, you can spend 5,000 ene each to get random chips, scrolls and eggs. In the original online smartphone game, these random prizes were in-game purchases.

Starting out
You start out by picking your player character, and then running into a small light-blue dragon that becomes your sidekick. The bad guys divide up the planet, and the dragon tamer president tasks you with fixing everything. You get to run through a practice dungeon to figure out how the puzzle battles work, and you get a couple eggs to hatch and add to your party. The first jigsaw piece that's restored represents Chapter One of the story. Chapter one gives you 6 dungeons, which each can have between 1 and 3 stages (some of the later chapter dungeons can have as many as five). You have to go through the dungeons sequentially, and each stage in the dungeons in order. Each stage is one puzzle battle. As you win the puzzle battles, you open up the next stage, and ultimately the next dungeon. The final dungeon of each chapter gives you a big Boss Dragon battle. If you defeat the enemy controlling that boss, the boss will thank you for liberating it and give you a special stone to put in inventory for use at the end of the game.

Fighting
You can have up to 5 dragons in your party, plus one more temporary supporting dragon that levels up with you, but is part of a randomly selected list you pick from when you're prepping for the battle. You can create three different teams, and select one of those three teams for the battle (I think there is only one place where this is a useful thing in the game, outside of having different teams for playing against your friends). Each dragon has a color, which has a rock-scissors-paper relationship (I think it's fire beats wood, wood beats water, water beats fire; light and dark beat each other). The puzzle frame is 6x5, and can have different combinations of the red, green, blue, yellow (light) and purple (dark) stones, plus pink hearts for healing. Not all dungeon stages contain all of the colors, or hearts. You go first. Drag one of the jewels around the frame to get the other jewels to form 3-in-a-row or 3-in-a-column patterns. When you let go or time-out the game will eliminate all of the matches, and replace them with new jewels. The more combos you have, the more damage any particular color will dish out. Say you only do one combo of 3 red jewels (called "drops"). If your monster has been leveled up and has a decent strength stat, any red dragons you have in your party will damage the enemy for a few hundred HP of damage. If you don't have a red dragon, nothing happens. If you complete a 3-drop heart combo, you get a little healing of your health bar. If you have 10 combos of all colors and hearts, then each of your dragons will dish out that much more damage. Damage does depend on the color of the enemy. Green enemies are damaged more by red attacks than anything else. Blue has a higher immunity from red damage.

Each dragon has three main stats: Atk, Def, and HP. HP and Def are totaled up to create an overall party stat. That is, if each dragon in your party has an HP of 100, you as the player have 500 HP on the health bar, plus whatever you get from the supporting NPC dragon. Def does seem to be a total party stat. Atk is per dragon, and is affected by how many drops of the same color are eliminated, and what your final combo number is. After you attack, the enemy attacks back, if they can. Each enemy dragon has a little number next to their head which represents how many turns before they can take a move. Moves can be stat buffs, party debuffs, or actual attacks. As a note, some enemy dragons have very high Def, making it hard to defeat them with fewer than 7 combos of the opposing color. But, they're generally extremely vulnerable to poison attacks (look for dark party dragons with the poison skill).

Each dungeon stage is made up of a map that may have branch points, and various combat type points. When you get to a branch point, you will be shown the directions you can go, and what drop color you need for that direction. Play like you would for a regular battle. Whatever color has the most eliminated drops is the one for the direction you go. Say you can go right (red) or left (blue). Take your attack turn and eliminate at least three drops of one color. For example, maybe the result is 2 combos, for a total of 4 red, 0 blue and 3 green. There are more red than blue drops eliminated, so you go right. Combat points can be regular battles, challenges (dragons worth more exp), "imps", "ene ghosts", dragon statues, chests or bosses. "Imps" are special gem dragons (gold, sapphire, ruby), which offer large amounts of exp, and gem eggs that are great for leveling up with the machine in town. Ene ghosts are ghost dragons that are harder to kill, but give you more ene (energy) or ene chips (drop items that add 100 to 1,500 ene to your bar total). Chests can be steel or wood, and can contain scrolls for the shrine dungeons, or ene chips. Dragon statues give you rock fragments for redemption in town.

Imps and ghosts fight like normal enemies. Chests and statues have requirements for opening them. Wood chests could be something like "3 combos" or "4 red drops total" in 3 turns. As you get into the later chapters, the requirements for bigger rewards can be much harder to meet, such as "5 green drops in one column all at one time" AND "6 purple drops in one row at one time" AND 9 combos, in 5 turns. Because of the random nature of the game, these requirements may be impossible to achieve (if you never get any purple drops) and you have to go through the stage several times to get successful. Statues are fixed, but only available once per stage, while imps, ghosts and chests can appear randomly per stage. There are a total of 50 rock fragments in the game.
[Edit: I've also been told that the temple dungeons at the end of each chapter are more likely to have shrine scrolls as chest treasure, and that the scrolls are for the color of the temple. Therefore, if I want to quickly level up a Light dragon, I should find the temple that offers Gold scrolls, so I can go to the town shrine and fight in the Gold dungeon to get Gold dragon eggs for use in the leveling machine in the Tamer Complex.]

When you clear each of the first three chapters, go to the warehouse in the southwest corner of the town. One of the doors will open and you'll be able to loot a few chests for scrolls, chips and eggs. I don't know if there's a loot point for chapter 4. The one for clearing chapter 5 is in the Dragon Tamer complex.

Leveling up your dragons
You get a certain amount of exp from each battle, which is applied to all of your dragons in your party (plus the supporting NPC). You can also use the machine in the Tamer Complex in town to use eggs for exp at 500 ene per egg. Most eggs represent small amounts of exp. What you want are the Metal, Gold, Sapphire, and Ruby dragon eggs, which are worth 3,000 exp or more each, for much faster leveling up. While you can occasionally get these as monster drops from the imp fights in the chapter dungeon stages, you really want to spend more time in the town shrine dungeons. You can get Gold, Ruby, etc. scrolls from the steel chests in the chapter dungeon stages, as rewards for collecting rock fragments, from the warehouse chests, or from the ene prize machine in the southeast corner of town. These scrolls let you run through a short dungeon at the town shrine. The gem dragons are highly susceptible to poison, but you need to build up combos at the beginning of the stage (your skill bar moves as you get combos in the fights, and starts at 2 when you enter the dungeon map. Poison usually costs 4 skill points, and there's an upper cap of 10 skill points at any given time. Although, there's one party dragon that can add +2 to the skill cap.)

Each dragon has an upper level cap. Some are capped at 30, others 50, 60, 70 or 75. The best is 99. As you fight in the dungeons, you'll occasionally receive dragon chips as drop items. Revisit the second machine in the Dragon Tamer building in town, and look for the dragons that have the right chips for evolving to their next stage. Be careful, because some monsters need the same chips, and you don't want to waste them on a monster you don't need. Generally, you want a balanced party of one dragon of each color, and putting them all up to level 99 is pretty much a requirement for finishing the game. However, you don't get chips that often, so the choice of what dragons to evolve is pretty much up to random chance. And, if a particular dungeon stage doesn't include drops of a given color then that dragon can't deliver damage to the enemy in that battle (i.e. - no dark drops, all dark dragons are toothless).

Colosseum
Along the way, the Battle Colosseum will also open up. This lets you try different combat challenges against a timer, minus the supporting NPC. The interior looks like a game arcade, and the machines are in banks of three. One bank has beginning, intermediate and expert machines  where you have to run through a map of 5 battles in under 5 minutes. The better your time, the higher your ranking. So far, I've only been able to complete the beginner run in 2.5 minutes, for a rank of B. I haven't received anything from the game yet. Remember, the battles are the 3-in-a-row puzzle games against enemy dragons, and the longer it takes for you to plan out how to get combos, the worse your ranking will be.

For the most part, PaD-Z is not that challenging. It takes time to figure out the rules, and to learn how to plan out combo attacks, but that's it. Fortunately, the chapter dungeon stages aren't timed, so you can take as long as you like. If a stage proves difficult, (death does not mean "game over") either fight some more at an easier stage, or burn exe and unhatched eggs to level up faster. If possible, collect gem scrolls, and fight in the shrine dungeons to get more gem eggs for greater amounts of exp leveling. If you have rock fragments, turn them in for rewards from the guy near the red cross sign by the town exit. If you've finished any of the chapters, go to the warehouse towards the southwest to loot some of the chests. Evolve your dragons when you can, and have as many level 99 dragons in your party as your circumstances allow.

Having said that, I've run into an impasse in chapter 6, with the final boss in the stage 5 dungeons. It's a pair of Anubis-like dogs that are guaranteed to hit your party with instant kills that deliver 2 times your total HP if you can't defeat them within 4 to 6 turns. They have high defense, and I don't have enough gem scrolls or gem eggs to bring any of the other spare dragons I have all up to level 99. I'm thinking that I need at least 3 light dragons at level 99, and to get 7 or more combos with light gems per turn. I am so badly out-matched right now that I've shelved the game so I can get other things done.

Overall, my current impressions are that PaD-Z is a beautifully-drawn game that relies way too much on luck to be really fun to play. Part of this is because the company offered the game for free on smartphones and made their money up on in-game purchases for real money. It's not an RPG per-se, and I don't really like these kinds of puzzle games (with the exception of the original Puyo Puyo.  One of the goals in the game is to collect all 200-some dragon types, but something like 35 of them were only available as timed advertising promotional campaigns, and are now locked out of the game unless you have a memory editor to hack the code with. It takes so long to get chips that evolving that many dragons is not worth the effort, and you only get eggs for the dragons that exist in the dungeons you have access to. Bottom line is, the game's ok, but ultimately is just a plain time sink. Recommended only if you have nothing better to do.