Puchi Carat 🤝 Void Stranger
Launching it for the first time and then swiftly posting screenshots of the hot animal woman 12 minutes later
PUCHI CARAT 2
Instruction Manual
1. Story
Flourite Aqua Berylmarine, the main character of Puchi Carat, wakes up one morning to discover that her prized Clothing Hoard has been stolen by the Kremlings, led by the kooky King K. Ro
You thinking I'm referring to Nervous Delivery, Go Go West or Bad Moon: 🙋♀️
Me, smiling contentedly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4TctM5on-Y
SOCIETY IF THE PUCHI CARAT GBC PORT ACTUALLY HAD CHIP CONVERSIONS OF THE GOOD TRACKS INSTEAD OF JUST THE MAIN MENU AND CREDITS:
*there's no image because the Puchi Carat GBC port didn't have background images*
Imagining the cast of Puchi Carat in an Octopath Traveler style RPG, but when they finish their story arcs and are about to join up to fight the puppetmaster behind everything, they just end up eating each other instead.
That being said, I had envisioned a number of possibilities: that they might reveal something about the ancient origin of the 12 gems, and in particular that they might "save" the player's character from their fate in the "normal" endings.
Most of the characters use their wish from the 12 gems in a shortsighted fashion, limited by their own ignorance and base desires, and this imagined character might force them to make a wish that brings them peace…
The game is fine as it is, but I like to daydream about this.
When I first played Puchi Carat, I was absolutely convinced for awhile that there was going to be a secret 1CC-only True Last Boss. There isn't one, unfortunately. Even though there is a secret extra character, it's just a crossover cameo.
*sees someone remark that good writing has to be perverted* Yes. And that's why Puchi Cara– *🚨bubuBUBUBU🚨* ３ＬＩＮＥＳ
Live uncompressed 120FPS footage of me right now
OK, look, hang on, LOOK, listen to me, the thing is that when you continue in Puchi Carat, it automatically changes your name on the scoreboard in order to denote that you used a "CONTINUE"–
Never ask a man his salary, Puchi Carat fans about Opa, Puchi Carat fans about whether the game itself is actually all that fun to play, Puchi Carat fans about which character name romanisations to use,
*thinks about how the main reason Puchi Carat is so good is because the Roman republic calendar had 12 months in it* Wow
Zelda TotK fans playing Puchi Carat are going to call the gems "the Secret Stones" because both games use the same made-up word for them in Japanese…
This Ruco is just a Line sticker
Best part of this is being able to enter your initials by sliding the mouse left and right… now that's text input, baby.
I don't think I mentioned it, but if you want to play Puchi Carat in MAME, my ideal input setting is this: dial analog control set to Mouse X, speed to 5 and sensitivity to 6, for the classic Breakout experience. You may duplicate these settings for player 2 if you want local VS.
Like, I sincerely love them all, but… a character like Aqua or Pearl simply could not exist, on a fundamental level, in Petal Crash's world.
God. Just. It's so freaking funny to think about how much Petal Crash's narrative and world design owes to Puchi Carat, and then actually compare Petal Crash's thoughtful, self-conscious and gentle cast with how positively rancid Puchi Carat's characters are
Me: "I feel like Money Idol Exchanger is a 'discount Puchi Carat'–"
Figurative Plato-style interlocutor named Euthyphro or some crap: "You mean, because it has a grid of small change descending from the ceiling instead of gemstones?"
Me: "…You know, yeah, that's what I meant."
Thinking about all the Puchi Carat spinoff games we never got because it didn't become a smash megahit that killed Puyo:
• Garnet & Shyst RPG
• C-Mond shmup
• Leisure Suit Peridot
• Bee breakout clone, made and released before they realised what the hell they were doing
A great 3-chain of inspirations through history
*thinking with 100,000 watts of brain energy* Kumikumi in Puchi Carat is definitely a parody of Arle's famous pet, isn't it
Naïve, shallow critic: "Peridot is the author-specific fetish character in Puchi Carat."
Me, well-versed in the ways of the world: "Aqua is the author-specific fetish character in Puchi Carat."
What with Soldam and StarSweep both having great Game Boy ports of their music, it makes me regret that Puchi Carat's Game Boy music uses the sound chip so roughly (getting barely any value from the noise channel in particular).
The 13th route – Patrako's – is on face value a "joke" route where nothing actually happens, but I'm starting to see it as the most emblematic route of the whole game: all it does is build the world and the setting, and nothing more.
I also fell into the classic pitfall of conflating narrative and plot, but what Puchi Carat accomplishes is outside of plot altogether - the characters barely change within their own individual route, but together they are built up across all of them.
I used to think compelling game narratives in non-narrative-oriented genres, like shmups and versus puzzlers, was a hard problem, but now all I can think about is how much Puchi Carat accomplished with precisely four dialog boxes of identical size per level.
C-Mond🤝Cirno
What kind of romanisation is this
Having spent the past day and a half playing Puchi Carat extremely seriously instead of just partially seriously, I have now concluded that the only explanation for its gameplay and garbage systems is that Ruco designed all of it.
Puchi Carat arcade Super Gamer 1CC… achieved!!! After 10 hours of attempts, I figured out enough routes to whip this together.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMjnXBp1Y0c
UPDATE: In the interests of Basic Game Design, I have now set the switch to "Normal" (3 lines).
It's come to my notice that I have been playing with non-standard dip switch settings – the "Difficulty" switch was set to "Easy". This dip only affects how many lines a ball drop feeds in. I have now, in the interests of challenge, set the switch to "Very Hard" (5 lines).
Doing Puchi Carat arcade Super Gamer difficulty 1CC attempts
Instantly destroying Pearl and Dearl from Puchi Carat by saying they look like Kirby midboss gijinkas
DID YOU KNOW… ALL OF THE TRULY GREAT VERSUS PUZZLE GAMES BEGIN WITH "P"…
Panel De Pon
Petal Crash
Puyo Puyo
Puchi Carat (← not actually a puzzle game)
AND, THE GREATEST OF THEM ALL…
Pac-Attack
IT'S TRUE !
Puchi Carat and Land Maker come from a timeline where puzzle game and Breakout game narratives are actually good. Conversely, Darius and RayForce come from a timeline where horizontal shmup narratives are actually good.
Nothing could have predicted this humiliation. Especially not every other character's story mode route.
Me when streamers make fun of Bee's vaguely Pokémon-like vocal squeaks after I've experienced his story mode route
*thinks about Puchi Carat* Wow
Puchi Carat is a competitive videogame