Puzzle & Dragons -- #2. Puzzled About Dragons?

Cruel, unusual, and cannot be stopped:
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Yes, I know. Most people who know what this is probably doesn't need it explained to them... either because they already know... or know well enough to stay far, far away. So then who is this actually for, exactly?!

Hush, token concerned onlooker, these are not questions we ask when mad science is afoot, we merely carry on and let future generations worry about the consequences.

Besides! The most important part of my assaulting your visual senses with a game is... to actually delve into the GAME part of the thing, right? Right. I said "right"!

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Because there IS actually a game here. Part of what has fueled my general disdain for mobile gaming is the financial practices, which we've already got coming on in spades courtesy that OTHER more obvious mobile tie-in tagalong that I'm sinking my claws into at the moment... but, as with my not-so-little aside when setting the stage for Skullgirls Mobile, the BIGGER umbrance I take with them is the fact that they barely qualify as GAMES by any reasonable standard.

This goes double for mobile "puzzle" games... more accurately described as "match three" and the like, because if Tetris qualifies as a "puzzle" game... the bar has to be set several magnitudes lower for most of what huddle under that rickety umbrella, especially in this particular form factor.

Most of them trace their lineage back further than the technology they thrive on these days... back to when people played such minor dalliances on their PC browsers. For all your Candy Crushes and Hunie Pops and Puzzle Quests and the like, endlessly recycling their content and begging for social integrations and impressions and ad revenues and payment to continue playing without having to wait or perform some other menial, invasive task... there was another. One that raised my ire long before I knew how far the dominoes would fall, bringing us to today's quagmire of a "puzzle" wasteland.

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In the beginning of the end, was Bejeweled. It was a quaint enough notion on its own, don't get me wrong... but it was apparently as addictive as it was insipid. A horrifying consequence, as it would happen. Swap two shapes, as long as at least one of them creates a like-kind threesome, and they will disappear. Then more fall in from above to replace them. If those should make more matches, then they will also clear. And so on and so forth, in a frequent cascade of sight and sound and psychological conditioning. The game basically played itself, doled out countless points for the work of a random number generator and chaos theory taking over from there.

I will admit that I may be on a bit of a high horse here, but I kinda prefer that my games be... games. Not hyperactive screensavers with minimal user interaction, much less player agency. Much less... actual play.

In due fairness, at least several others have tried to elevate this formula from the drudgery that it was content to rake in untold sums merely wallowing in... but the path of least resistance wins out time and again, and why bother doing all that work when it'll only push away your indolent masses, already eager to adore the endorphin rush the simplest of feedback loops already conjures?

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Not so with Puzzle & Dragons. I'm serious. I'm kinda mad that I have to be serious about this. Granted, the endless cascading cavalcade of auto-clears is still in effect, but the primary player action of moving a piece around like a slide puzzle on crack creates such a vastly more engaging foundation upon which players may interact with your puzzle. It actually IS puzzle-like again instead!

To the point that it's almost a shame that it's so deeply ensconced and buried beneath a grindfest to make quaint static images seem like they're doing all the heavy lifting. Again, don't mind my pessimistic injection into the commentary here, because there's nothing inherently wrong with layering a collectible strategy element into the mix... but the end result is indeed in service to the more profitable aspects of the game, not the... um... "game" bits...

And that's why THIS amount of coverage is PERFECT! ...or verging on it. This is the part of the whole proceedings where the game is nearest to the purity of "PUZZLE ...and oh, there's dragons"... whereas everything after is a controlled descent into "DRAGONS! ...if you slide the puzzle around a bit" instead.

...oh, except "Dragons" turns into "cute anime girls, occasionally with limited animation" or "random licensed property tie-in that you'll never get without insane amounts of gambling input"... to the point that what we see even here clearly shows how much of the "game" has been overtaken by these colorful monstrosities.