So, Puyo Pop was a pretty good game, so when I was at my local Best Buy and saw a game that featured multi-colored… somethings on a screen that you had to match up and eliminate. And that said game was made by the same people that made the Puyo games, well, I just kind of was obligated to get the thing.
Octomania is kind of the same as Puyo Pop Fever, sort of. Each follows some cutesy heroine on some quest or other. She runs into random people along her way and has to challenge them to the titular puzzle game to proceed, somehow. I don’t really understand how that’s supposed to work, but I’ve played games with flimsier premises before, so I just kind of go with it.
The game has you and your opponent taking control of a square field that fills up with random colors of octopi and grills that have different numbers on them. You control a two by two reticle that can rotate the four octos in it either clockwise or counter-clockwise, and the goal is to take the number on each of the grills and put that many of the same color of octopus on it. Then they turn into smoke that you can add more of the same color of octopus to create chains. Create long enough chains and you give your opponent some garbage.
I found the game kind of hard at first. This is mostly because I have a real hard time keeping track of what’s going where when I’m rotating them around. And that leads me to losing real quick. But that’s OK.
In single-player mode if you lose you can continue, yeah, nothing special, I know. But when you continue you get a powerup. A powerup that changes everything on your screen to the same color. So all you have to do is lose once, continue, let your screen fill most of the way up, use your powerup, clear the whole screen all at once, and then bury your opponent in unclearable garbage.
That might not work on hard mode, but on normal it was real effective, and made the game a whole lot shorter.