#pripuz

Gaaruru

Junon icons 🦋

For some of the 12 Days of Anime Christmas feature on Vanilla♡Blessing, I’ve taken it upon myself to review the magical girl-adjacent mobile games I wasted actual real hours of my human life playing using a GameFAQs scoring system. - qb

PriPara PriPuz is a legalized gambling app for babies created by Takaratomy-arts, and it escaped into the human realm on September 2016 available on iOS and Android.

PriPuz’s story mode missions are multiple years behind the current pace of PriPara, with the most recent mission being barely past season 1 when the show is on approximately season 5. Seasonal events featuring a wide variety of characters are usually up to date with the anime and tend to be used instead to feature characters as they are introduced in the show. Sometimes the events get extremely weird like the apocalyptic Justice League ripoff, or the PriPuz Saga Medieval RPG, or when they paid bkub to draw some of the cards.

Lore - 4/10

PriPuz is extremely stressful, poorly explained, very loud, and reliant on physical dexterity, which is really messed up for what’s presumably a kids’ game. An average minute of PriPuz gameplay would take an hour to explain fully but the basic mechanics are you create chains of the same idol on a puzzle grid up to 6 pieces long in order to get a Puzzle Piece, which you can tap to add bar to your Rhythm Game Meter, or wait until you have built up 4 Puzzle Pieces (Pu, Ri, Pa, and Zu) before you pop all of them at once to freeze the stage timer and initiate Cylume Time. When in Cylume Time, all taps on the screen will automatically clear any connected chains of the same idol, so you flail your thumbs on the screen wildly causing approximately 5 catchphrases a second to bombard you until the cacophony is over. Cylume Time is when you typically get the most points, so the optimal strategy is usually to get as many Cylume Times as possible within the 40 second time limit. During non-Cylume Time, you can activate special moves from your three idol team for an effect that is sometimes beneficial. You are also able to activate a Making Drama at exactly the 25 second mark of the original timer, which clears the screen of idols and has a special effect depending on the front idol. After the timer is up, if you filled the Rhythm Game Meter, you get to play the world’s simultaneously easiest and most difficult Rhythm Game while static images of idols spin around wildly on a virtual stage and “Likes” fly in from off screen to distract you while your idol unit sings a special song that doesn’t sound like them. This rhythm game is almost impossible to not get a full combo on, since the window for hitting a note is enormous, and nigh-impossible to get a maximum score on, because the window for a perfect note is bad. Assuming you got a full combo, which you can regularly get by tapping randomly on the screen without looking at it, you get an additional prize box. Prize boxes also typically drop from the top of the screen at the 30, 20, and 10 second marks of the overall timer. None of these mechanics are sufficiently explained in the game, and any and all special events or modes will wildly shift the mentioned rules and goals without any warning. The entire time you’re being bombarded with the most obscure tracks on PriPara’s soundtrack, barely ever the main songs, but it doesn’t matter because over half your time is spent listening to the maddening Cylume Time jingle. It’s an awful experience all around.

Mechanics - 0/10

It’s a gacha game and it’s incomprehensible and impossible and predatory and I bled for my God Rare Idols god damn it. You can power up the luck of an idol card by feeding them weaker versions of themselves which I feel is a powerful metaphor for life. I have 27 million gold coins in PriPuz and they’re completely worthless. 

Progression - 2/10

PriPuz hates you and will never give you gacha gems for free and thinks the amount of precious gems needed to pull 11 usually worthless cards is worth over twenty dollars USD. I know at least one unnamed person who, charmed by a red-haired boy idol, thought PriPuz might show mercy with an offering of cash money, and was struck down, receiving not only no red-haired boy idol, but nothing even remotely useful. PriPuz is available in China, and thankfully is required to disclose their rates for rare cards. They are across the board the worst I’ve seen in any mobile game. There is zero recourse if your goal is to pull a specific card other than dumb luck, duplicates are useless, and every month they make less gems available, aside from the paid shop. The paid gems can be used to fuel premium gacha with twice as good rates, but since these rates are still awful, it’s never worth it. PriPuz’s microtransaction system is insanely predatory on a level I’ve never seen anywhere else and I would not trust adults with this game, much less children, and even less the extremely young children this game is recommended for.

Microtransactions - 0/10

score = 0/50