Sunday, November 17, 2013

Puzzle & Dragons: Colour VS Combo Spike Leaders

Colour matching and combo making are the 2 essential parts of the gameplay of PAD. You need to do those even if you are not using the colour or combo spike leaders. Those leaders just make your skilled play more rewarding. A lot of them are also essential for clearing the harder dungeons in the later part of the game. Yukine of PAD forum has come up with a nice writeup on the different leaders in the game. You can also use the other leaders but my favourite ones are those 2 and I gathered some notes on my experience using them:

Colour Spike Leaders

Sunday, November 10, 2013

PAD and Rerolling

Please note that some of the information below is as of 2013! Refer to this 2 later posts for latest tier and evaluation list from GameWith website.

Update #2: I managed to try out an account with Great Valkyrie. Now is a great time to get light monsters like Kirin as they are hard to level up and with the current Carnival of Light, they come out at level 30. I find the Healer team to be a little weaker than the spike teams (maybe I'm spoilt by the multiplier damage!) and although her team members are mostly farmable, I think it is going to take a longer and tougher time with her.

Update #1: "Found another useful guide in the PAD wiki talking about starting rolls and other useful starting information. The monsters are displayed in pictures and categorised so it is very easy to read and see everything in one glance. I agree with it except:
- Isis being in the top tier as her multiplier is quite low compared to the other spike leaders and her active skill is not that useful.
- Kushinada not being in the Challenge tier as high combos is required to get the higher attack multipliers to put her on par with the x3.5 and x4+ leaders.
- Echidna being in any category at all because she is farmable!

There are also 2 new Godfest-only monsters like the Odins, Red and Green Sonia. Each give x2.5 attack and recovery (RCV) to devil and dragon respectively and changes the whole board to their colours as their active skill. They have a very high cost (over 30) so you cannot put them in your team early but the Red one seems very strong base on the PAD forum discussion. This is what Goody has to say. It looks like she will make a good starter whereas Green will probably be more of a sub for Balanced team."

*The US version is currently in the midst of a 24hr God Festival so now is a good time to start the game as well as to reroll. Egyptian and Indian Gods have 3 times chance to drop from the Rare Egg Machine (REM)*

One of the most important part of the game is the first monster you get from the tutorial. For starter dragon, going with red is the best as a mono-red team is farmable from dungeons. If you did not get a good monster (mainly the god types), it might be a good idea to redo the tutorial from scratch again until you get a good monster to start the game. Refer to this reddit forum on how to reroll. It is mainly talking about iOS. For Android, it requires the phone to be rooted.

As to what monsters to aim for, there are 2 good resources from 2 different forums:

Saturday, November 9, 2013

Puzzle & Dragons (PAD) - A Short Review

This game has been around for over a year but I only recently started playing, mostly because the game was only available for the US market and I did not went for the Japanese version. A friend was actually looking for a game to play on Android and I suggested this game. I also went ahead and download the iOS version from the US iTunes App Store. It turns out that the game was very good and also addictive!

A lot of people are calling this a Bejewelled-meets-Pokemon. I think the game resembles Pokemon in the aspect of the monsters (called cards in-game but this is not a card game) but the match-3 gameplay is actually more like solving a 2D Rubik Cube. I think the challenge of solving the puzzles (as you will deal more damage when you match many combos) is one of the things that attracts players to the game, as well as frequent events where you can get more magic stones, the in-game currency, and limited chances to get more monsters.

The game is free and supported by in-app purchases but there are many people who played without spending anything. This game is the only one other than Clash of Clans that is making millions per day and interestingly, it was reported that both game companies are "combining" (GungHo of PAD acquiring Supercell of Clash of Clans) A 3DS version of PAD is also coming soon, launching in Japan in December.

I like this game a lot and am still playing it. I've also done a lot of research on the game and will be posting them on upcoming posts.

iTunes App Store link (English): Puzzle & Dragons

iTunes App Store link (JP App Store): Puzzle & Dragons (Japanese)

Android Google Play Store (For US region only): Puzzle & Dragons
(You can get the installer apk file directly from this forum thread)

Note: If you the above iTunes link takes you to GungHo's page with a Korean-named PAD, that is not the full game but instead allows you to try out the game in a short time attack version. The game is in Korean though but there are not much options so you will not get lost!