Now before you get ideas. Yes, this is a fully priced game based on a mobile game. But not one we can get over here for whatever reason so unless you want to get some third-party import programs on your phone… THEN have to deal with systems designed to push you to pay real money this is your best option, one upfront payment and you get two games.

Well sort of. While it’s technically 2 games both are mechanically the same.

The Puzzle and Dragons Z part plays a bit more like how I assume the mobile game works while The Mario one translates Mario’s Brother elements into it.

The puzzles part is a simple job of on the touch screen having a bunch of orbs (and sometimes hearts) you need to chain a bunch of these matching to have your monsters or characters do damage to other monsters (or regain health if you match hearts). You select what monsters you have before going on a route. In the Z game you go through dungeons and continue till the end while in the Mario version you select them from a Mario Brothers 3 esc world map.

I assume a draw for the mobile game was all the monsters you could unlock and use in your team. These all have different abilities and elements so you would want to pick ones that match the elements shown on that level. They like a JRPG get experience and level up as you play the game but you can also sacrifice others to get experience, a must when you pick up something later and want to add it right away to your party.

Difficulty on levels tends to spike a lot when you have areas that use all the different elements. Even using special abilities to freeze time for better control of the orbs these ones always were the hardest and would often have me have to get full lives to complete them on the hard difficulty. (I’m not sure why a lot of games never seem to understand the addition of more often makes things exponentially more difficult)

Of course since there are 2 very similar games in this there is a lot of things to do even before you got into the post main game hard modes (which includes things you can only get in that difficulty if you want some waif monsters in Z or the big villain characters in Mario) and that did give me stuff to do last year during the first lock down when I picked it up again.

I don’t know, maybe I’m not too great at these sort of puzzles but those difficulty spikes rubbed me the wrong way especially when right after there’s a mission that they seem to think is harder but was actually far easier to accomplish since it was a lot easier to chain stuff thanks to the fewer orb varieties… also grumble for Z not letting be join the bad guys when they asked.

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