Puzzle & Dragons Gold
Switch
Boy, does this one sting. At various points over the past seven or so years we’ve wanted to shout from the rooftops about our love of Puzzle & Dragons. Yes, it wants your money. Yes, the waifu-collection aspect is off-putting. But it’s one of the all-time great puzzle games, one of unrivalled strategic depth and flexibility. A colossal hit in Japan, it’s never quite stuck overseas, and we’d hoped that PAD Gold, the series’ Switch debut, would remedy that. In the unlikely event it has any effect at all, the opposite seems more likely.
In fairness, this is not quite Puzzle & Dragons. The chief sources of inspiration are the moderately successful spin-off anime, and Puzzle & Dragons Radar, a Japan-only mobile app that combines geolocationpowered treasure hunting for goodies that can be transferred to the main game, and a reinterpretation of the core PAD mechanics in a PvP setting. Each team’s health pool is split into four; each player blind-picks which of their team members’ skills they want to use, then solve their boards simultaneously, denting each other’s health pools with the resulting damage. That continues until one player’s health bar is emptied or eight rounds have passed, at which point the combatant with the most HP remaining is declared the winner.
New players – which, for the western release, is just about everyone, given Radar’s Japanese exclusivity – are woefully underserved by a whisper of a tutorial and a miserable UI. Online matches are the focus, but we find the servers barren barely a week after launch, and when we do find a match it’s not a fair fight, since we already know more than the game is prepared to teach us. The rematch option might as well not be there; we retire undefeated, but unsatisfied. A singleplayer story mode is there to pick up the slack, but it’s barely two hours long and seems to exist solely to load you up with currency for the game’s monster-collection gacha machine.
This is where Puzzle & Dragons Gold truly falls apart. As Radar proved, PvP is a poor fit for a game whose success has been in large part defined by its lack of balance; the best way to monetise a PvE game longterm, after all, is with power creep, and Puzzle & Dragons has that in spades. Yet here everything must feel fair, and so nothing is exciting, and the sprawling teambuilding options of the main game have been neutered in the name of balance. There are just 20 team leaders in the game; the 500 subs available from the gacha can only bring so much variety, and pale in comparison to the almost 6,000 available in Puzzle & Dragons itself. We’ve been playing that game for seven years, and it still finds new ways to excite us. That this barren, boring work should share its name is an outrage.