This came out in Japan yesterday and I've been playing it a lot since I downloaded it. I absolutely adore Picross so I figured this would be the case and I was really worried about the F2P nature of it ruining my usual "play nothing but Picross for DAYS until you've cleared every puzzle" but... well.
At first the game was incredibly frustrating. There are a lot of timers to deal with. You collect Pokemon by completing their puzzles and then each Pokemon has a skill with a recharge time. If you use the skill, you have to wait for it to recharge before you can use it again. Some Pokemon have no recharge time (but very basic skills), some are low (half an hour), some--like Legendaries--are ridiculous (like 24 hours kind of ridiculous). You start with only one slot for your party and you have to buy more with the in-game currency ("Picroids"?). You don't necessarily need to use those slots, but it's certainly easier if you do. I'm sitting at three slots now but will probably feel the need to upgrade soon.
Like Pokemon Scramble (Rumble? I forget what it is in English--I'm talking about that other free to play game that wasn't Shuffle), you also need to buy the new areas every time you want to move on. They're... pretty expensive, in the long run. I guess playing normally, it might not be a problem because I don't know how much Picroid you get on a daily basis. Maybe it's enough to make progress not gruelling?
My biggest gripe with the game is the main stamina system. Basically, you have a "P-Gauge" in the corner that increases veeerrryyyy sllloooooowwwlllyyy. It starts out at something like 50 and you have to spend Picroid to double it. The way it goes down? By placing a pen mark on the Picross board. (X's don't count, thankfully.) So for every one pen mark you put on your puzzle--basically every correct square you solve--you lose one point from your P-Gauge. The early 5x5 puzzles had like... ~10 marked pixels each, so it wasn't too bad, but you have to upgrade this gauge quickly if you want to get any lasting enjoyment out of this game. I was constantly getting SO frustrated by how few puzzles I could do. Once you get to the 10x10 boards with ~45 pixels in each (and god forbid, the 20x15 ones that can have over 100), it's really difficult to play more than one or two puzzle sat a time even with upgraded gauges. (Not to mention, if you ever get something WRONG and have to redo it, your gauge still lowers for it.) However!!! If you upgrade our P-Gauge enough times, eventually it just turns infinite. I can now play as much as I want, redo levels as many times as I want, and I have all the room in the world to make input errors without hating everything in the world. This turned the game from a frustrating mess into a very, very enjoyable game and I highly recommend at least spending enough on the game to get this upgrade early!
You can also pay an exorbitant amount of Picroids to gain access to Mega Evolution as well as "Another Mode" which seems to be just a copy of the maps from the usual mode except all the puzzles are done in a new "Mega Mode" where some of the . I thiiink a previous Picross I've played had a mode similar to this but I can't remember which one it is. It's kinda challenging since it's still pretty new to me so I enjoy it a lot. It's a better purchase than Mega Mode since each puzzle on the Another Mode maps have their own set of missions that earn you Picroids. You earn Picroids by doing dailies (training? idk, I think this is daily but I have not had the game long enough to tell!), completing little tasks on each puzzle (such as: use a Dark Type Pokemon, use a bomb-type skill, complete in under 5 minutes, etc.), gaining achievements (like: marked 500 pixels, caught 50 Pokemon, etc.), generous handouts at the beginning to get you hooked and... of course... paying.
My verdict: If you like Picross, get this and inject about $20 into it--as if it was a "real" retail game--and you will have a lot of fun with this title. If you don't like Picross, or you are very patient, get this and play despite the timers. You'll probably have fun here and there when you pick it up. If you don't like puzzles and/or HATE microtransactions and refuse to support them? Stay far, far away. There will be nothing for you here.
And my disclaimer of course: I spent ¥2800 on this game. My logic was that if they had offered this as a full priced game (which is... what... ¥5000??), I still would have happily pounced on it, so if I have to pay up to that much to enjoy it as if it were a retail game with no microtransactions, I don't really mind. I could get to the same point with enough patience and perseverance but I was much happier spending a bit instead. If I hadn't felt like the money was worth spending, I'd be livid, but I'm having such a blast with it instead, so I have no regrets. :) We'll see if my tune changes when my Picroids run out and I'm back to earning them through the default means, haha. Although really, I've got ¥2200 more to spend before it cuts off microtransactions entirely so... we'll see. ;P
(lmao sorry for rambling so long I just... wanted to get my long-form thoughts out about this game and have no other venue. :P)
paired with professor plum.
