Neopets Puzzle Adventure (Wii)
While the main focus of the Neopets website is taking care of a customizable virtual pet from a variety of fictional species, there is much more to it than just tending to it like a real animal. You could buy special items for your pet with the money you earn from a plethora of simple flash games, and the areas you head to in order to play these games often featured a bit of lore about the wider world of Neopia. The little extra details never got in the way of the simple fun but added some depth to this world where you raise your little companion. Adapting Neopets into a full game and not going with the pet simulation route doesn’t feel so unusual once you consider how much of the site was devoted to minigames and stories, but of all the minigame concepts that could have been the focus of the franchise’s only adventure on the immensely popular Wii system, it is rather baffling they decided to go all in on Reversi with Neopets Puzzle Adventure.
Now, Reversi is a fine enough game on its own. The objective of this ancient board game is to control as many of the tokens as possible by game’s end, players able to shift the opponent’s pieces to their color by sandwiching them between two of their own either horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. Played on a grid-like board, players are only able to place pieces in areas where they would be able to flip the opponent’s tokens, meaning that a good amount of strategy comes from not only trying to find the right places to place your tokens to flip as many of the opponent’s pieces as possible, but you can try and manipulate their options so they leave themselves vulnerable to your next move. It’s a simple game in concept but one that can be quite competitive because of how a player’s ability to think ahead can turn the tables in their favor, but such a slow strategic game doesn’t feel like the best match for a game about colorful cartoon pets, at least on the surface.
To make Reversi more exciting the game introduces plenty of gimmicks to the affair, and one of them is fairly decent in concept. A typical game of Reversi is on an 8 by 8 grid, but Neopets Puzzle Adventure has quite a few different board types that will require different strategies to prevail. Some are as simple as changing the overall size of the board, but some have certain squares blocked off so you need to play around the fact you have less room to set up the tile flips. Neopets Puzzle Adventure also makes it so that simply having the most tiles isn’t the path to victory, as you earn points while you play that will ultimately determine who wins the match. By flipping a bunch of tokens at once or making multiple lines of pieces flip all at once you will earn a lot more points, and certain spots on the board will provide extra points if you place your tiles there. Capturing most of the tokens on the board is usually a guaranteed win because of the point value inherent in doing so, but tighter matches can still wind up going to points. You can, however, also win a round of play by turning all the tokens on the board to your color, leaving your opponent unable to play any tokens since they can no longer perform any steals.
Whether or not these design choices would be able to carry this game on their own isn’t a question we’ll get to answer though, as Neopets Puzzle Adventure keeps shoveling on the gimmickry to the point it destroys the game’s difficulty and reliance on skill. Shockwave tiles will randomly appear on the board, the player able to activate these by placing their own token on it or capturing a token if one is already sitting on it. When a Shockwave tile is activated, it will convert one of the opponent’s pieces to your own color and quickly do any token flipping that piece would be capable of performing if it had just been played. This can mean a game you were winning with a well plotted plan can be upended by a random Shockwave leading to a ridiculous cascade of token flips, and since the Shockwave tile moves immediately after activation, it can be activated again in the same turn and keep up a chain of its wildly random influence. Sometimes it can be smarter to go for the Shockwave than playing the game normally simply because its incredible power to completely negate strategic play with a sudden reversal of fortune is hard to argue with, but it can also lead to a situation where both players are just constantly gunning for the Shockwave tile rather than trying to play the game with any real level of thought.
Shockwave tiles will always be an annoying presence, but both players are also allowed to bring special items into the board game battle that can have similarly overpowered effects on the action. Players are given two hand slots for weapons and three Petpet slots, with the weapons being available to use as soon as the game begins and the Petpets needing a few turns to wake up before they’ll lend their powers and go back to sleep for a few turns to recharge. In the first area of the game’s story you already are given a phenomenal Petpet in the form of Juma, a little critter that allows you to flip one enemy tile for free without ending your turn and making it easy to set up a full line for capture whenever you see fit. This isn’t the only Petpet with such a powerful ability with no penalty such as one that lets you place a piece wherever you like so you can then make a huge match with your next token while another Petpet can force your opponent to place a piece wherever you command so that you can make their next turn ruin their chances to steal or set them up for trouble. Enemies rarely have such powerful Petpets on their side but you can grab a good set of them in the game’s opening area without much trouble, and similarly you can buy some incredibly strong weapons as well such as one similar to Juma in concept but the tile flip is able to immediately make matches while Juma’s power is reined in by not being able to make matches on its own. Before you even begin to face foes who can put up a good fight you’ll be able to be equipped to easily wipe out the late game opponents, and these powerful weapons and Petpets almost invalidate points from the equation since you can easily win by taking all the tiles as long as you bring them with you.
The randomness of the Shockwave panel and the enemies having their own weird Petpets that can turn a sure win against you makes it so you’ll hardly want to play fair anyway, but the game could have definitely done more to impede your ability to get so strong so quickly. You need money to buy the good weapons and you can earn it through sidequests, but these are mostly just going to spots on an area map unopposed or fighting a weak opponent or two for the cash. Petpets can be bought as well, but they’re more likely to be acquired by finding them in the wild where you need to beat them in Reversi and then head over to a special location to beat them at a game of Memory where the Petpet almost never remembers any previously revealed cards. Matching cards in Memory is better than the almost pointless food system though, the player meant to match ingredients to make special meals to benefit you during a Reversi match but the game is already so skewed that adding the small effects of food to the mix don’t have the impact needed to justify interacting with this feature at all.
As for what this Reversi playing adventure even entails, Neopets Puzzle Collection kicks off with you creating a creature from one of the 12 Neopet species featured. These can be creatures like the ant-like Ruki, the Mynci monkey, the dragon Scorchio, and the Tyrannosaurus inspired Grarrl, although you’ll see plenty of other Neopet species as unplayable characters you encounter during your adventure. Each of these Neopet types will be given some starting stats and an outfit to match the fantasy world they’ll be thrown in, but stats only really matter for the points that quickly become irrelevant once you’ve acquired the good equipment. Your Neopet is actually able to speak and act on their own so they’re not really a pet in the context of the story, and they can actually have a bit of a personality when interacting with the world that makes them likeable, but the story is incredibly generic and can’t make up for the fact that all of its action takes place on Reversi boards.
Your Neopet of choice ends up joining the crew of the flying ship known as the Cyodrake’s Gaze after the city it was docked in is attacked by creatures seeking a powerful amulet. Seeking an answer to why this amulet motivates such animosity you head off in search of a companion amulet abroad, the trip causing you to run into bandits and monsters who are all defeated by way of easily won Reversi matches. There’s a lot of running around map screens that are much too large and the game seems to hitch often when it’s loading the next opponent you’ll be facing, but if the quest completion and actual gameplay wasn’t so tedious then the simplistic story could at least be a good fit for the intended younger audience in addition to having some amusing ideas like the ship’s chef mistaking you for a cooking rival and thinking your attempts to persuade him otherwise are born from humility or deliberate attempts to deceive him. It’s certainly full of simple plot progression conversations more than it is cute personalities, but despite the lack of voice acting, the plot would still at least support an inoffensive kids game if it wan’t based around quickly trivialized games of Reversi.
THE VERDICT: There’s a little bit to like in the story of Neopets Puzzle Adventures, but its confused attempt to make Reversi more exciting only lead to the game invalidating the appeal of the board game. Rather than strategic play and big token steals being prioritized, the player is incentivized to chase after the random benefits of the all too powerful Shockwave space, and the introduction of weapons and Petpet powers means you either embrace them for quick wins or earn repeated loses against AI opponents who utilize them for random boosts or unpreventable shifts in fortune. The game gives you the tools to win most rounds of play early on so you can at least invalidate much of the challenge rather than growing frustrated with the influences of random chance, but setting up a quick win certainly isn’t as fun as Reversi’s usual focus on a battle of wits.
And so, I give Neopets Puzzle Adventures for Wii…
A BAD rating. Neopets Puzzle Adventure essentially taps into that old moral question about how to play a game where everyone else is cheating. The Petpets, Shockwave tile, and weapons aren’t cheating even if they can give unearned advantages with ease, but if you try to push away these incredible boons, you’ll find yourself rematching an opponent who has no tactical mind or skill at Reversi just because they keep whipping out the trump cards. To be prideful leads to repetition on top of any win you squeak out being hollow because your computer-controlled opponents aren’t often playing intelligently beyond how they utilize their special abilities. There is an option to play Reversi against another human player where you can try to avoid the special boosts, but beyond the extra board types you’d be better off just playing real Reversi if you want to tap into that strategic side of this board game design. Neopets Puzzle Adventure’s application of its brand may be a little strange since Reversi isn’t the most popular of games with younger audiences, but it probably comes out as the best part of the experience because the appealing character designs and occasionally amusing personalities add some life to this game that otherwise feels repetitive, unfairly skewed away from skillful play, and even a little cobbled together thanks to some hitching as it loads what should be simple Reversi battles.
Even if the puzzle battles played fine, this odd publishing collaboration between Capcom and Neopets’s then owners Nickelodeon still wouldn’t be all that interesting. It’s hard to see Reversi as the strong backbone this game’s puzzle action needed without the gimmickry, but the gimmickry that works is either too small in its impact like the board types or completely shifts how the game is played in a way that removes much of its appeal. Perhaps having minigame types like the Memory and ingredient matching pop up more frequently and evolve in their own way could help the game avoid growing stale, but this Neopets adventure’s puzzling approach to gimmickry means you either use the tools provided to you for something boring or avoid using them and grow frustrated with the unfair outcomes of the otherwise simplistic Reversi battles.