U.P.P. (Playstation)

 Unfortunately, I couldn't find any information on what UPP stands for. But I did find out that apparently, when it was released, the big selling points for UPP were the attack animations and the voice cast. Though I've never been into sriyuu fandom, so I can't really comment on that, I can say that the attack animations do look really great. The characters appear onscreen casting their spells in big, screen-filling animations. Well animated and high resolution, you could be tricked into thinking this was a PC-FX game or something.

 

But I should really get onto describing the game in which these attacks are taking place, shouldn't I? It's a typical match three coloured blocks falling stuff puzzle game. Except that the blocks are floating upwards towards the top of your well instead of falling to the bottom. For the sake of convenience, just remember that if I describe falling or gravity for the rest of this review, imagine I did so upside-down. Anyway, the mechanics of the actual colour matching are as generic as can be: you put three or more of the same colour in a row, and they disappear. The combat aspect, though, is similar to the Hanagumi Taisen Columns games, in that rather than sending junk blocks over to your opponent's well by making chains, you instead fill up a meter, and can use the meter at your leisure to perform a character-specific attack.

 

These attacks are pretty varied, too! From simple things like filling up the bottom of your opponent's well, sticking all the blocks in your opponent's well together so they don't fall when those below them are erased, and so on. The final boss in single player mode has an especially harsh one: a few random blocks in your well will temporarily be turned into skulls. Erase three skulls over the course of the match, and you immediately lose! Unfortunately, as interesting as these attacks are, and as impressive as the animations that accompany them are, they also provide the game with its biggest negative.

 

The problem is that the pace is so slow! My favourite puzzle game series is Magical Drop, in which matches are often over in a couple of seconds, making UPP's matches feel glacial in comparison. The meter-building gameplay is slow enough (even though it never feels as such in the aforementioned Columns games. maybe the meters just fill faster in those games?), but the much-lauded animations cause everything to stop for ten to twenty seconds while they play. That's longer than an entire Magical Drop match, for a purely cosmetic element!

 

UPP isn't a bad game, and I think it's worth playing at least once, just for how good it looks. But I don't think it's a puzzle game anyone will be going back to for years and years, and I especially don't think it's one that you'll get a lot of fun out of through playing against human opponents, either. Most of all, though, and I think I've said this about puzzle games a few times before: I can't imagine anyone ever choosing this over Magical Drop or Puyo Puyo or Money Idol Exchanger or Landmaker or any of the other greats of the genre.