Tetris Effect / YMMV

Annoying Video Game Helper: It has been known that new players (or new Tetris players in general) often accidentally ruin SRS spinning opportunities in Connected VS mode by dropping a magic mino that cause a cascade and close up the hole.
Awesome Art: The whole game is incredible art style after incredible art style.
- Several of the stages use particle effects to mimic things like bubbles in water, splashes, flames, stars, and even animals and people. The pulsing of said effects is downright mesmerizing.
- Most stages also have beautiful landscapes surrounding the Tetris board, ranging from the ocean's depths to a view of the earth from space.
- Some stages are far more abstract in their presentation, with one being a beautiful display of pulsing and rotating kaleidoscope pieces. Said stage is even titled Kaleidoscope.
- All of the aforementioned factors are enhanced even further with how the stages are moved and altered with your movements. Sometimes the environment itself will shift, rotate, or light up in different ways depending on your movements and placements, even reacting to Tetris clears.
- The devs also know this: There's a theater mode that will let you chill to the game's audiovisual soundscapes at your leisure, without gameplay.
Awesome Music: Literally the entire game's soundtrack. We can't list all of them, but we'll go over some highlights.
- To start us off, we have the absolutely gorgeous "Connected (Yours Forever)", the song used in the reveal trailer for the game, and used for the introductory stage. It gives an incredible sense of wonder with the beautiful voice of Kate Brady singing uplifting and empowering lyrics.
- "Joy", which plays over the Jellyfish Chorus stage. Complimenting the striking and upbeat visuals of the stage with a song that's just as upbeat and incredible, with an excellent pounding beat that kicks in alongside some amazing vocals.
- "Spring Field", the theme of Prayer Circles. It uses lovely, majestic sounding percussion instruments alongside an almost ethereal voice.
- "Flames", the theme of Ritual Passion. What starts out with somewhat simple sounding low tones evolves into an astonishing, pulse-pounding beat alongside chanting in time with the music. Coupled with the beautiful visuals of the people below the board rapidly bowing down to it, it creates what ends up looking like a prayer inspired dance.
- "City Lights", an upbeat jazz theme that is made even better by the fact that, in-game, your movements of the pieces contribute to the song with piano chords. The song on its own without your movements is also excellent.
- "Three Senses", the theme of Kaleidoscope. It starts of sounding somewhat hollow, but in a beautiful way that ends up giving way to a simply incredible sound of electronic and subtle sounds that add up to something out of a space flick.
- "World of Colors", the theme of Mermaid Cove. The Sia-inspired vocals and a truly breathtaking chorus make for a spectacular track. Several YouTube commenters on videos of "World of Colors" say the song had them in tears.
- "Always Been But Never Dreamed", the theme of Metamorphosis. This is an absolutely jaw-dropping finale to the game's stellar selection of music from the Journey mode, with Kate Brady returning for it. Motivational lyrics, lovely melodies, and the perfect mix of electronic and real sounds add up to the song that deserves to be the Grand Finale of Journey mode.
- "1989", the theme for the level of the same name. It starts off with a remix of the classic Tetris theme that sounds very similar to the original. Then once you clear enough lines, it becomes an amazing techno remix of the same theme which makes you feel like you're finally playing some REAL Tetris.
- Area 3 from Connected. The music already starts out serene, but when your team enters Zone mode, it becomes absolutely ethereal, with what sounds like an angel serenading you as you and your partners work to build up lines.
Broken Base: The PC version of the base game being a timed Epic Store exclusive drew sizable ire from the gaming public (a move mostly viewed as trying to lift console game 'exclusive culture' into what was previously a 'free-access' PC platform that doesn't have hardware incompatibility reason to justify the division) It's not until 18 August 2021, two years later, that the game's Updated Re-release version Connected was simultanously released on both Epic Store and Steam.
Difficulty Spike: Several of the game's stages both play this straight and invert it. Some stages can go from rather calming, slow-paced stages to suddenly going to the highest possible speeds upon reaching a certain number of lines cleared, while others will do the exact opposite, starting out blazingly fast before slowing down and giving you a chance to breathe.
Heartwarming Moments: A surprising number for Tetris.
- The lyrics to basically every song in English can be boiled down to "The world is amazing, you're amazing, and You Are Not Alone."
- The Connected reveal trailer is filled with tons of people playing Tetris Effect, arranged into the shapes of Tetriminos. Each of these people has a huge, gleeful smile on their face, with some singing along to the music. Plus, a few of those people are Tetris professionals!
  - And adding to that, the lyrics of "When you were born, something changed, my heart could not contain" are sung while the very first person is shown in the video, Alexey Pajitnov. The man who created Tetris. And he has such a huge smile on his face.
- Some people have reported being moved to tears because of just how gorgeous, striking, and beautiful the music and visuals are. It's almost like it's something more than just Tetris.
Most Wonderful Sound: The beat dropping in Connected mode and the sound of "I'm yours forever". Time to do some damage to the Zodiac Boss!
- The escalating sounds as you build up more and more rows in Zone mode, particularly in Pharoah's Code.
Nerf: "Center 4-wide" tactic that was Boring, but Practical up to eleven in competitive Tetris games especially in Puyo Puyo Tetris is toned down in Tetris Effect by the means of lowered reward off line-clear combos, with the bonus for chaining them ramping up later than most other games. Had it been left like it was, Zone Battle mode would be nigh-unbearable experience.
Nightmare Fuel: The Ritual Passion stage can come off as a little... eerie at times. The industrial and intense sound mixed with the frantic, confusing chanting as well as the uncanny figures bowing feverishly can be a little disorienting.
Polished Port: Two, in fact!
- The Oculus Quest version doesn't look quite as nice as the original versions, but that really doesn't matter when you're the one wearing the headset. It has intuitive controls for the Quest's controllers while still offering support for Bluetooth controllers, along with being playable wherever you bring your headset along. The Quest 2 version makes things look even better.
- The Nintendo Switch version had some skepticism leading up to its launch due to how surprisingly intensive the game's visuals can be. Thankfully, in addition to providing the same solid experience with very, very few drawbacks, this version allows you to bring the game wherever you want without strapping on a headset. It's yet another excellent Switch port.
Self-Imposed Challenge: The game's option menu lets the player adjust or turn off some useful features such as pre-drop preview, the number of pieces shown in Next queue, or more advanced ones like pre-spawn piece rotation if the player wants extra challenge.
That One Achievement:
- "Seriously? Seriously" requires getting an SS rank wherever possible, which provides quite a challenge.
- "Spin Artist" requires rotating Tetrominoes one million times. While not difficult, it will take a long time to earn it.
That One Attack: Boss enemies in Connected Mode will launch special attacks that heavily mess with your gameplay once their Zone gauge is full. This includes spawning moving area that limit where you can play, prevent access to your Hold function, cut holes in your perfectly arranged stack or throwing irregularly-shaped blocks into your queue. Higher level ones can even do things like spawning 4-5 lines of extra garbage on on top of its line clear or suddenly making you play invisible Tetris where you can't see your own stack. However, some of these particularly stand out ^note Keep in mind that the Final Boss, Tetrimidion, can potentially use any of those attacks, and these attacks are stronger from the start':
- All Area 3 bosses (Gemini, Aries and Virgo) have Spin, an attack that randomly mixes up the players' fields, and often result in large junk of garbage lines that cannot be cleared easily. It can appear as an attack alongside the bosses' signature moves.
  - Aries is particularly infamous for Invert, which turns fields with filled blocks into empty holes and vice-versa. This tends to make it much harder for players to dig down the inverted field, and it's especially dangerous with Spin or Bump Up ^note. Initially, it only affects a few rows, but if you take too long to defeat the boss, Invert can potentially affect your entire field, which can be very punishing if your stack is too high.
  - Virgo's "'No Spin' disables players' rotation abilities and randomly pre-rotates pieces beforehand, which tends to be a major problem for players who have been building stacks as often the piece cannot land safely on the stack without resulting in an overhang or leaving holes beneath. Essentially, it forces players to misdrop'' by placing the Tetrimino into an unfavorable state, since it cannot be rotated. However, it's a time-based attack, so technically you can try to stall out and wait for the effect to wear off, allowing you to rotate your pieces again.
- Before that, Libra has Hard Field which turns a few rows in the field into hard blocks. When you clear that specific line, the blocks that are affected won't disappear, and the row won't drop down. Essentially, this creates garbage lines that duplicate the lines that were affected, potentially at the middle or the top of the field. This can be made possibly worse with Twist, which shifts your stacks vertically and is an attack that Libra shares along with the other Area 2 bosses, Cancer and Scorpio.
- If you don't defeat Capricorn quickly enough, it will eventually attack by changing your pieces into Broken pieces that are significantly disjointed, and each piece tends to disrupt your stacks.
- Aquarius has Squeeze, which restricts piece placements with walls (that move with every piece placed). The results are not pretty if your piece will disrupt the stack on the limited area it can only be placed on.

YMMV / Tetris Effect

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