Puzzle Quest 2

A little more than a year ago, I finished Puzzle Quest and was surprised by just how much fun I had playing it. Simple but sharp looking interface? Check. RPG elements like leveling up, equipping weapons, and learning spells? Check. Easy to play while watching something on TV? Absolutely. Don't get me wrong - Puzzle Quest wasn't a fantastic game, but it was an enjoyable game, which is all you want from a six-dollar title.

Fast forward to six or seven months ago. I'd just finished the then-last-remaining DS game on my backlog, and I figured I could use another one. You know, for business trips and for logging in front of shitty TV shows and such. I found Puzzle Quest 2 for ten bucks at GameStop and thought, hey, why not?

Big mistake.

For one thing, within two months or so, I'd received a 3DS for Christmas along with three or four games. So much for needing another title, huh? Secondly, where the first Puzzle Quest took me somewhere between 15 and 20 hours to beat, this one took me close to 35. And thirdly - and most importantly - while the first game was light and charming and easy to appreciate, this one just flat out sucked.

I'm not sure why. The core gameplay is exactly the same as it was last time around; to succeed in battle, just line up three discs, Bejeweled-style, to either gain mana reserves or deal damage. Seriously, I have no idea why what was so fun a year ago was such a pain in the ass for me over the last few months. Let's quickly walk through the differences to see if I can figure this out.

In Puzzle Quest, you spent time between battles on a world map, viewed from the top down and navigated by clicking on different places. Simple. In Puzzle Quest 2, the inter-battle environment was an isometric dungeon crawl. Blech. In Puzzle Quest, every battle had something to do with the plot at hand and advancing the story in one way or another. Nice. In Puzzle Quest 2, most battles were just random encounters with unavoidable bad guys standing in the dungeon hallways. Ugh. In Puzzle Quest, I controlled the game on a fifteen-inch screen by lazily flicking my fingers back and forth across a trackpad. Easy. In Puzzle Quest 2, I controlled the game by tapping and swiping a stylus on a four-inch screen a few hundred times per battle. Hand cramps and squinty eyes, dammit!

Alright, I'm starting to see why I was so down on Puzzle Quest 2. Just goes to show how a few minor differences in gameplay can drastically affect the extent to which you can enjoy a game. You know what the Puzzle Quest 2 experience really reminded me of? Luxor 2, the second game I ever posted on the blog, and still one of my all time least favorite. Such tedium! No fun!

At any rate, I'm very happy to move on from this one. And on the bright side, that's now three thirty-plus-hour games beaten so far this year.