Puyo Puyo is a 1991 puzzle game from Compile. It is the largely-forgotten first game of the Puyo Puyo series, predating the arcade game and its ports. It initially released for the MSX2 by Compile, as well as for the Famicom Disk System as a bonus disk for Tokuma Shoten's Famimaga magazine. After the success of the arcade game, Tokuma Shoten would publish an enhanced port of the latter release for the standard Famicom.
Puyo Puyo began life as a domino-matching game intended for Compile's MSX2 disk magazine "Disc Station", but things changed when Kazunari Yonemitsu, the man behind Compile's dungeon-crawling RPG Madou Monogatari 1-2-3, got his hands on the project. Yonemitsu swapped the dominoes for "Puyo Puyo", the Cute Slime Mook of Madou Monogatari, and included cameos by Series Mascot Carbuncle and then-unnamed heroine Arle Nadja; the game also became a full retail release in the process. Compile's president Masamitsu "MOO" Niitani also wanted to have a port of the game release for the Famicom, but was concerned about Nintendo viewing the game as a ripoff of Dr. Mario, so Compile settled on the dying Famicom Disk System in an attempt to fly under the radar. note
Puyo Puyo includes three gameplay modes: an Endless mode, a puzzle-solving Mission mode, and a rudimentary Versus mode.
Tropes that appear in the 1991 Puyo Puyo:
- Dolled-Up Installment: This game did not originally involve anything from Madou Monogatari, it was instead originally designed as a game where you would stack dominoes. Adding Arle, Carbuncle, and the Puyos was later incorporated to give the game more character.
- Early-Installment Weirdness:
- The game features six different Puyo colors. Puyo Puyo (1992) uses five colors as a standard, while later games default to four colors with an option for a fifth.
- This game does not feature any characters beyond Arle and Carbuncle, and Arle only makes an in-game appearance in the MSX version. This, of course, means that there are also no character interactions.
- Arle has her early "red-stripe" design from the MSX Madou Monogatari 1-2-3 and Disc Station illustrations, as Puyo Puyo released slightly earlier than the PC-98 port of 1-2-3 that introduces her more familiar "tank top" design. The box art for the Famicom cart version appropriately uses a super-deformed version of the latter design.
- The competitive mode is an after-thought, and the default garbage Cap is a measly 30 Garbage Puyos.
- Easter Egg: Holding down certain keys when starting a game on the MSX will either replace the Yellow Puyos with Carbuncle or replace every Puyo with humanoids.
- No Plot? No Problem!: There's no narrative here, just puzzles and cute animations for clearing Mission mode.
- Stylistic Suck: The ending of the MSX version's Mission mode features a crude doodle of Arle and the Puyos.
- Updated Re-release: Tokuma Shoten re-released the FDS version on the Famicom proper in 1993. This version adds more options, most notably the ability to increase the garbage cap in multiplayer.
