Puzzle and Dragons review: making puzzles violent

There have been lots of perfect combinations throughout the ages. Peanut butter and chocolate. Peanut butter and jelly. Ok peanut butter and anything really, but now I’m both side tracked and hungry. What I mean to say is that GungHo Online Entertainment has brought two unexpected genres together to form one titan of a game, Puzzle and Dragons.

Chances are even if you only occasionally dabble in mobile games, you’ve heard of Puzzle and Dragons or even its Japanese nickname Pazu Dora. The game has been downloaded over 22,000,000 times and is easily the highest grossing iOS game to date. What makes Pazu Dora so popular?

The magic formula

Pazu Dora combines puzzle games with an RPG battle system which makes for an addiction more powerful than crack. As you dungeon crawl with your monsters you must defeat opponents by creating as many matches in one swoop. Swoop? That’s right you don’t just move one orb at a time to make a match, you drag one orb across the board trying to knock other orbs into a position to make a match. The more matches the higher your attack. It is a beautiful twist on the match 3 component.

The matches you make will automatically go towards powering up the attack with your corresponding monster. For instance, if you connect several blue orbs, your water monster will deal out a certain amount of damage. If while dragging you happen to make red match, a green match, and a yellow match, your fire, earth, and light monsters will all attack. This is a fantastic twist on the RPG battle system.

You keep dungeon crawling until you come to the boss at the end of the dungeon. You fight, win, and get a new monster to use. Once finished you head back to the home screen to choose a new dungeon, work on your monster team, or check out any collaborations that are going on.

Collaborations?

Pazu Dora may just be the king of collaborations. The game has seen over 15 collabs in the past year including one with Angry Birds, Batman, and there is even a Hello Kitty collab going on right this very second. With each collab you get chances to unlock special characters related to the collaboration. You could be crawling through a dragon infested dungeon battling with Batman, the red Angry Bird, and Hello Kitty. What a team right?

Gatcha!

Pazu Dora is also well known for their gatcha and their Godfests. You can get monsters by dungeon crawling, but you won’t find any good ones this way. To get yourself a halfway decent team of dragons, you are going to have to use a form of currency called rare stones in Pazu Dora’s gatcha egg dispenser in hopes of getting something rare. You can get these stones by fully completing dungeons or of course by spending your own money.

You can use these stones at any time to boost your team’s strength, but it may be best to wait for one of the almost monthly Godfests where your chances of getting rare monsters increase significantly.