You ever finish a game against the CPU, then look over at their board and their next piece and go "Uhhhhhhhhhhh… 🙀"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVlS6393yD0 – Been messing around with score attacks of Pochi & Nyaa, which are technically also speedruns because all the big points are tied up in time bonuses. Check out the ending in this one (at 4:50)
"This is good. I only need 21 cats to win this." – phrase that you would have the chance to utter if you played Pochi & Nyaa
New blog post! https://fairysvoice.net/blog/How_to_Play_Pochi_&_Nyaa-_Forms/ It's a how-to guide for playing Pochi & Nyaa, explaining what sort of shapes are best to make and why, containing most of the know-how I've picked up from playing it for 2 years. Give it a read if you want to try the game!
Pulling this one off the shelf to see if I've "still got it"…… Maybe I'm due another hour with the controls, but other than that…
Bangai-O (1999)
Today's Pochi & Nyaa video
Over 100 in under a minute
Pochi & Nyaa is actually good for beginners because the garbage blocks are just dogs and cats. Yes, you're going to take 78 garbage and lose, but all that means is your board is filled with cats. You can't get that mad or upset.
Now, those FREAKING Puyos, on the other hand,
I played Pochi & Nyaa on Fightcade today and my mind decided the nyan blocks looked like Void Stranger statues >:((((((((
Thrilled to announce the release of a simple tool for any curious Pochi & Nyaa players: the Pochi & Nyaa Calculator – https://fairysvoice.net/pnyaa/ , which calculates the power of structures in the game. The numbers indicate the attack power when popped at that location.
Discovered that the damage algorithm in the PS2 version of Pochi & Nyaa is different from the Neo Geo version in one very specific yet common case, and now I'm holding back screams like a mandrake in a library.
Pochi & Nyaa is such a solid game that I suspect that you could take its entire ruleset, throw out the damage formula, replace it with something that makes chaining do something again (e.g. total blocks popped x number of chain links) and you'd instantly get a similarly fun game.
Me after I've downloaded Fightcade and parked myself in the Pochi & Nyaa lobby
Exclusive fresh-from-the-darkroom photo of me right now (I'm all the goddesses and cherubs enjoying Pochi & Nyaa)
I already posted a 1CC video for this port, but here's another one I got just now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0Q8SH6cfCk Once you get the hang of it (which can… take a while), it's a pretty consistent run.
Been playing Pochi & Nyaa story mode on the arcade (Neo Geo) port, which has worse controls and graphical feedback than PS2 but, importantly, only has 5 stages, making for a nice 8-minute challenge… Love this game.
Interesting risk/reward moment… at 0:38 I don't fire the counter because I had one more yellow in Next… but I'm not sure if adding it to the middle column was a bit risky for what ultimately became 6 blocks of garbage. It did bury the enemy's green structure pretty well…
Ladies and jury of the gentlemen,
THE GREATEST 1CC VIDEO TITLE I WILL EVER MAKE???
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RzYMVugnLA
Something I'm growing interested in is the idea of discarded colours being placed specifically to collapse into paths - how, in this example, after cracking the red, the yellows almost collapse into a complete paths, and then after firing the yellows, the blues fall into place.
The three Magic: The Gathering "player archetypes" (Timmy, Johnny, Spike) are actually pretty good at describing versus puzzle game designs.
Pochi & Nyaa, for instance, is a peak Spike game. You only play it if you want the joy of outplaying your opponent.
Pochi & Nyaa is definitely a game where the only worthwhile advice for getting good at it is "learn the matchup".
By the way… I just did a 1CC of the Neo-Geo version of Pochi & Nyaa, and I only want to say, A) the controls in this version are dramatically less responsive than on PS2, and B) the CPU is definitely easier (at least for default Level 4 difficulty). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LG55kh2Vyik
He only had 15 coloured blocks left on his board
Pochi & Nyaa would be so funny if it had Land Maker colour elimination + colour-contributing garbage
Not just because dropping to only one colour would make it pretty difficult to make forks
Who's got that one Pochi & Nyaa video
*absolutely no one alive takes the bait*
…OK, so, look, just watch this damn video
Notes:
The stages (opponents) are based on the number of Hurry Ups you receive in a match. Getting up to 3 Hurry Ups skips you ahead that many opponents until the end. I could have skipped up to 1 more stage by stalling, but I simply played it safe.
Everyone please watch this 1CC, but especially watch at around 5:06 https://twitter.com/webbedspace/status/1668957933189869568
New 1CC!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrE725LMdsg
Whenever I lose in Pochi & Nyaa, I know it was absolutely my fault for not stockpiling long enough or tanking well enough. Whenever I lose in Puyo Puyo, I know it was absolutely my fault for expecting the fourth puyo of one colour in the next 12 pieces and then not freaking getti
What versus puzzle game CPU matches feel like
• Puyo Puyo: catapult battle with only timber and ropes provided
• Pochi & Nyaa: pistol duel with Metroid charge beams
• Panel De Pon: boxing match while wearing plate mail
• StarSweep: knife fight atop a mountain of daggers
Pochi & Nyaa is the Smash Bros. of versus puzzlers:
• Not obvious whether any attack is enough to KO
• If you aren't KO'd by a hit, then you can definitely recover
• At high percents ("Hurry Up" x4 or more) it devolves into frantically spamming down tilts and neutral airs
I honestly really, really like this game's CPU AI. It really does force you to learn the important stuff: countering only that which is necessary, keeping your main attack ready to fire, using screen space as a resource, and making sure you can numerically win an exchange.
By the way: every time "Hurry Up" appears, all players get an added damage multiplier (which the site calls "Rate" https://web.archive.org/web/20040515113848/http://www.aiky.biz/pochinya/lesson/lesson13.html). Puyo has a similar but, of course, much more opaque system. Thus, as the site says, holding back a big stockpile is numerically rewarded.
This somewhat crudely illustrates what higher-difficulty play involves. This game places heavy emphasis on being able to hang back and tank the opponent's first hits by keeping the middle column low and the rest high, and building both your main attack and some followup fire.
Saw a review that called Nyaa and Pochi the game's "Carbuncles", which, well… it feels like a tremendous burn to compare the two unaccountable divine forces that steer the game's conflict and watch over all its battles, to pets… even though that's literally what they also are…
The videogame's website has an entire Strong Bad Emails-type section where you could write to the tutorial boss??? And it had 162 emails?!
WHO WAS RUNNING THIS SITE https://web.archive.org/web/20051024001742/http://www.aiky.biz/pochinya/udonsoudan.html
I think it's cute how Pochi and Nyaa are depicted repeatedly pressing red buttons to represent these two gods meddling in the affairs of mortals.
Liv's beam attack is called her "Optimistic Blast"… Why is so much of this website written in-character…
I can't believe Misty (Pochi & Nyaa character) is canonically on a journey to find the puppetmaster who cursed her dick. *absolutely none of my remaining followers know what the frick this is a reference to, thus causing me to lose 3d6 Relatability*
The only two characters who get voiceacting in Pochi and Nyaa are… Nyaa the cat and Pochi the dog.
If you want my Pochi & Nyaa character tier list, simply visualise the Puchi Carat character tier list I posted a couple months ago, then replace the row containing "She's hot" and a picture of Patrako with "He's hot" and a picture of Paradisus. The other rows are still a WIP.
The linked article says that while Pochi & Nyaa was being developed by Compile, it was meant to be set 1000 years after Madou Monogatari… Of course, by the time it released, they no longer owned the rights… ;_;
My brain right now
The main character's Japanese dialogue is so extra…
Another page (temporarily retitled "Teach Me! Graber-sensei") describes most of the game world locations… it's just like Puchi Carat… :' )
I can't believe this. The official Pochi & Nyaa site has a section called "Teach Me! Misty-sensei" (can't remember what this is a reference to) and one of the pages asks the reader if chaining is the point of this game, and you have to answer "Yes" or "No".
OK… so far I've unlocked 2 of the 4 secret characters… but for one of them I had to watch a Nicovideo playthrough and reverse-engineer the conditions by which it got the unlock.
If it turns out I have to beat Time Attack for another one, I'll be slightly miffed.
Thinking about the official Pochi & Nyaa plushies…… (from https://web.archive.org/web/20040522165227/http://www.aiky.biz/pochinya/diary/diary_030703.html)
I feel so sad that this game, whose design feels so much more polished and refined by historical hindsight, isn't popular like Puyo is.
*I am quietly reminded that Puyo isn't even popular* Oh… that makes me feel better.
Just discovered that this freaking videogame (Pochi & Nyaa) offers this control scheme, by default, for playing 2P versus with one controller…!?
Getting good at Pochi & Nyaa is literally this
You people won't BELIEVE how cathartic it is to play this videogame after Puyo Puyo 1 and destroy two garbage blocks with a single drop.
Time to play the game the way _I_ want to. *sets every Story Mode battle to best-of-17*
*imagines how disgusting Pochi & Nyaa could get if it had Kasiori's Open attack, letting your lines detonate the opponent's* Holey moley
I'm absolutely convinced that Pochi & Nyaa Moment 37 hasn't happened yet, but definitely could and should
Dang, this Pochi & Nyaa tournament set (at 1:58:30) is wild… Makes me wish this game actually had a real tournament scene and not just emulator netplay (weeps) https://youtu.be/asiI0oql0CA?t=7108
This music track is for STAGE 3??
This is Umineko episode 8 music (when pink woman fights purple woman)
Well… believe it or not, but this game A) never had an OST, and B) has not been ripped for download on any of the usual sites. But… using a few specialised tools… I was able to pull the tracks straight out of the disk image, and play them as-is. Can't believe it was that easy.
I'm really curious about the decision to make this game's board 7-wide instead of the Columns standard 6… I'm convinced that after they figured out that masterfully elegant garbage formula, 7-wide was the ingenious little hack they needed to make the numbers work out just right.
I'm reminded that arcade Puyo Puyo 1 was the big moment when this changeover happened - it offered ZERO single-player modes other than the story mode, and since then, VS. CPU battles have been the "main event" - in Panel De Pon, Puzzle Fighter, etc.
That being said, it's interesting how the "primary" single-player modes both of these games have - time or move-limited scoring - simply place a hard limit to work inside of, entirely focusing on combos or chains as ways to get points instead of also being efficient clears.
In this game, where you can clear pieces at will, there's no longer even a hint of danger from the basic rules - it's more-or-less given that without the opponent's attacks, you could survive forever. Petal Crash is pretty much the same way.
One thing I've been thinking about a lot is how, as these games push more toward player interaction, they move away from the notion that they are "puzzles" like Tetris or Columns, where simply putting the pieces together at all is challenging.
Enchanted by some of the music in this game, which sounds straight out of Arkanoid DS. This is what happens when a game with very 90's character designs gets delayed so hard it ends up in 2003.
It took me awhile to twig onto this, but the main character being named Prim (from ぷりん, lit. "pudding"), who's going on this quest just to get pumpkin pudding, and who wears pudding-coloured clothing, has got to have some traces of Cotton in her.
Puchi Carat (1997)
Instantly immolating the final boss by calling him "discount Slappy from Goosebumps"
Here is how Pochi & Nyaa explains how much garbage an attack sends, and what maximises garbage. No other versus puzzle game explains its garbage formula so intuitively. Petal Crash doesn't explain its garbage formula. Puyo's garbage formula has freaking FOUR variables in it.
Playing the game Pochi & Nyaa. This game feels so modern in how it approaches the versus puzzle genre, even more than Petal Crash does. Absolutely everything is simplified. You can just press a button to clear structures, like how Petal Crash is "just collide the blocks".