Video Game / Meteos

"It was a dark time... The existence of all planets was threatened by one: the evil planet Meteo. A stream of phantasmagoric matter flowed endlessly from the planet. This matter — called Meteos — crushed life and stole the sparkle of the universe. World after world fell... But then, by chance, three Meteos of the same type aligned. Fusing together, they ignited, firing the other Meteos into space! A defense strategy was formed: the civilizations of each planet launched counterattacks by fusing Meteos in different ways. Thus the last, desperate stand versus Meteo began. The Metamo Ark — a warship made of Meteos ore — set off as a bastion of hope, with the fate of the universe resting on a lone civilization's valor."

— Introduction/Synopsis

Meteos is a Nintendo DS Falling Blocks Puzzle Game, released in 2005, created by Masahiro Sakurai, of Kirby and Super Smash Bros. fame. His first work as an independent developer apart from HAL Laboratories^note Barring some uncredited supervisory work he did in the interim between this and Kirby Air Ride, Meteos was instead developed by Q Entertainment. As of this writing, it is Sakurai's only work apart from Nintendo (who still published the game in the West). Despite the pedigree and similar feel and features to his past work (Music vs. SFX slider, Item Switch, multiplayer emphasis), it comes off as a wholly original project.

The game is set in a universe mostly populated with either Single Biome Planets or Planets of Hats, all inhabited by scribble-like races. The evil planet Meteo is steadily destroying the universe with a stream of 'phantasmagoric' meteors, called Meteos (Meteo being the Japanese transliteration for "Meteor"). However, by chance, three Meteos of the same kind align above a planet, launching the entire stream out of the victim planet's atmosphere. With this knowledge, a planet's civilization (you) sets out to defeat Meteo with their shape-shifting ship.

Like many puzzle games, the concept is to line up three or more blocks (Meteos) of the same color/kind, moving them once they have landed. However, instead of simply disappearing, the Meteos will then ignite, becoming burnt blocks and propelling the blocks above the burnt blocks into the atmosphere, where they are then launched either into deep space or at an opposing player's atmosphere (play field). In addition, most launches require you to match a trio again while the chunk is still in midair in order to clear the top of the screen, each subsequent ignition being more^note Or, on some planets, less powerful. Throw in various explosive items and the ability to speed up the gameplay, and you've got a diabolically tense puzzler. The only catch is that you can only move the blocks up and down.

Each planet (field) has its own traits, including width, gravity, block descent speed, and launch power. Each of the 40 planets (including Meteo) has its own civilization, music, and stage decor, all in a common theme, such as Firim/Ignius, the lava planet, or Globin, the red blood cell-shaped planet with breathing as its music's backbeat. Each planet's advantages and disadvantages make them more like characters than levels.

There is a Mission-Pack Sequel based on Disney properties instead of planets, which allowed enabled blocks to be moved horizontally on all but the highest difficulty.

A proper sequel, Meteos Wars, was released on the Xbox Live Arcade in 2008. It introduced online play, planet-specific special attacks, more planets and unlockable costumes for the aliens.

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This game provides examples of:

• Absurdly High-Stakes Game: One ending turns Meteo launching into a sport. Yes, with the threat of an Earth-Shattering Kaboom and everything.
• Aliens Are Bastards: ...to themselves, regarding the Suburbionites. Their original planet was destroyed due to constant warfare.
• All Planets Are Earth-Like: Except for Geolyte (and possibly Limotube and Florias), averted.
• Apocalypse How: Class X style on a Class X-4 scale.
• Apocalypse Wow: The opening cutscene of the original showed unnamed (and hopefully uninhabited) planets falling prey to the Meteos horde (and thus exploding).
• Armless Biped: Many of the alien races in this series take this form, including the Freazers, Wuudites, Hotteds, Jeljellians, Grannestians, Lumiousians, Limotubians, Forters, Hevendorians, and Lastarals.
• Artificial Stupidity: Some of the lower-level opponents are so stupid that they will lose the match without the player touching the DS
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: The Hevendorians did to become the Seven Sages — and despite this, they're still targeted by the Meteos.
• Asteroid Miners: The tiny planet Mekks was originally a mine until its robotic inhabitants converted it into a networked metropolis.
• Asteroid Thicket: Arod.
• Big Boo's Haunt: Jeljel/Magmor is a Lethal Lava Land, but the sounds (in the first Meteos game) suggest a Haunted House-type environment, including a Ominous Music Box Tune for the main background, horror-type sound effects, and even some thunderclaps accompanied by a woman screaming when you lose.
  • And, in order to unlock it, you have to fuse together a few different kinds of Meteos. You need 666 of each of three of those types...
• Bilingual Bonus: Lastar and Globin's Meteos designs in the DS version feature kanji relevant to their elements. (Air Meteos have 空 (air or sky), Fire has 火 (fire), H2O has 水 (water), Soil has 地 (earth), Iron has 鉄 (iron), Zap has 電 (electricity), Herb has 植 (plant), Zoo has 生 (life), Glow has 光 (light), and Dark has 闇 (darkness)). The beta designs for the Rare Meteos indicate that, had Rare Meteos had different designs on different planets, Soul would be 魂 (soul) and Time would be 時 (time). Sadly, since neither Lastar nor Globin appeared in Meteos Online and Wars mostly did away with unique Meteos designs, we might never know what Ice and Poison/Dust Meteos would have looked like on those planets.
• Bonus Level: The Mini-Game Credits after Star Trip. There's a significantly increased chance of Soul or Time Meteos dropping, and the length of the game scales directly to the difficulty you chose.
• Button Mashing: In the original, it was all too easy to scribble frantically and get some free ignitions that way. No such luck on the analog-controlled Wars, though.
• City Planet: Grannest/Smogor, Mekks, Wiral/Neuralis, Suburbion, and Dejeh.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The different Meteo elements are color-coded. Air is white, Fire is red, H2O is blue, Soil is orange, Iron is purple, Zap is yellow, Herb is green, Zoo is pink, Glow is light green, Dark is indigo, Ice is cyan, Poison/Dust is mauve, Time is aqua green, and Soul is magenta (lavender in Online).
• Crapsaccharine World: As many people will tell you, this is a supposedly lighthearted game about preventing planetary annihilation. Not to mention you lose in some of the endings.
• Creator Thumbprint: The original game's menu consists of big colorful buttons, a staple of Sakurai's games.
• Death World: Some of the planets have extremely dangerous fauna. In some of these cases, it's the intelligent life itself, like with Gigagush/Vortinia, and in the others, it's simply the wildlife, like Boggob/Perilia.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • Planet Meteo, in the DS game, uniquely cycles through 3 different sets of Meteos each time you play as it. In Meteos Wars, the types are fixed, but they are the 7 rarest in the game. Either way, Planet Meteo takes heavy advantage of the game mechanic where burnt Meteos sent to other planets turn into types of their planet of origin, meaning opponents attacked by Meteo will have to deal with Meteo's types as well as their own. However, Planet Meteo has the widest playfield (though tied with some others), and its high number of types makes it difficult to find matches in the first place.
  • In the DS game, Brabbit is also rather beginner-unfriendly due to its fixed ignition height and extremely floaty physics. However, any columns with burnt Meteos will not give you a warning and thus not count towards Annihilation. This means you can ignite at least one block on every column, and it will make you effectively invulnerable until you make a mistake. Brabbit is the one planet most capable of doing this due to the long time Meteos spend in the air (they stay burnt until a moment after they land). Brabbit got a heavy Nerf in Meteos Wars with the Planet Impacts though, particularly Tempest, which slices the otherwise solid defense into ribbons.
  • The planets introduced in Meteos Wars all have some gimmick that requires quick thinking and mastery of the game's basic mechanics to even use properly. Ranbarumba's ignition strength is based not on number of blocks matched or even number of ignitions, but the total width of the cluster, Gelyer's ignitions move extremely quickly and require planning two or three ignitions in advance, Hanihula's ignitions are so weak that close to a dozen consecutive ones are needed to send blocks off the screen, and Darthvega is incredibly strict on the time given between when a column fills up and when the game declares a loss.
• Difficulty by Acceleration: As a match goes on, the frequency of meteos raining down increases faster and faster, burnt meteos restore themselves quicker, and the Annihilation Countdown Timer decreases.
• Difficulty Levels: Two of them that are on a scale of 1 to 5 stars. The Difficulty scale determines how fast Difficulty by Acceleration accelerates and the AI level increases how comptent the A.I.s are, with 1 defeating themselves sometimes and 5 being close to TAS levels of gameplay.
• Ditto Fighter: The Metamo Ark in both games is of the Dittomediate class, it's built from Meteo ore and designed to take on the appearance and properties of any planet it comes close enough to and its use would be to get close enough to Meteo and copy the Meteo creating ability to give the planet a taste of its own medicine. In the original, each civilization is implied to have a Metamo Ark and you could choose which planet your Ark comes from in the Star Trip mode. In Wars, there's only one Metamo Ark and hosts representatives from each planet it comes across and spars with in practice for the final battle.
• Dub Name Change: Even between American and European English, several planets had their names changed. Some (Layazero/Holozero) were subtle, some were total renames.
• Earn Your Bad Ending: Getting the worst ending in multi-path Star Trip requires you to let Luna=Luna survive for 1:30 before defeating it. This is significantly harder than it sounds.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom: The planet Meteo's main goal is to explode every planet in the universe.
• The End of the World as We Know It: The gameplay revolves around preventing this, and instead inflicting it upon your opponents.
• Endless Game: Deluge mode, in which you play as one planet by yourself until you get Annihilated. Alternatively, you can start a Stock game of Simple mode for the same effect (but with optional additional lives).
• Energy Beings:
  • Thirnovans/Trinovans are half-composed of energy.
  • Layazeroes/Holozeroes may count as well, being living holograms.
  • Wiralons are made of electricity.
• Eternal Engine: Grannest/Smogor, Mekks, and Wiral/Neuralis.
• Extremophile Lifeforms: Several aliens live in places that would give any biologist a headache, from the freezing temperatures of Freaze, to the insane heat of molten helions like Hotted or Firim, and the absolutley crazy absurd gravity of Gravitas to name a few.
• Falling Blocks
• Fire and Brimstone Hell: The volcanic planet Jeljel/Magmor definitely gives off this vibe in the original game, with its horror-themed sound set, fusion cost (666 Fire, Soil, and Zoo Meteos+3 Dark), and even the name sounds like "hell hell" if you pronounce the J's like H's as some languages do.
• Floating Continent: The inhabitants of Megadom live on one.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Meteo used to be a planet capable of supporting life, but was transformed into its current state after being struck by a meteor, and given that several of the various races in the Meteos universe live in places that would be inhospitable to most life as we know it, that's saying something.
• Gainax Ending: The crayon-drawn "Galactic Fork" ending.
• Genesis Effect: Wiral, Suburbion, and Darthvega are all artificial planets.
• Genius Loci: Given that Meteo is implied to have no inhabitants, this could be the case.
• Golden Ending: The best route in the Multi-Path Star Trip is the most difficult due to some of the objectives on planets to get there. It's titled The Ascent where, after planet Meteo's defeat, the meteos started to self-replicate as the Metamo Ark no longer needed to fight and the self-spawning meteos were fused to repair the damage to all the planets that were once besieged. The denizens of the Metamo Ark became like gods, that is if they weren't gods already in Hevendor's case.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: Meteo. Reptilian eyes, as well.
• Graffiti Town: Dejeh is a planet inhabited by space-gangsters and has a hip-hop culture. It is also apparently a place for other criminals to stay, though the biography implies they are hostile to other planet-controlling gangs.
• Gravity Screw: The aptly-named Gravitas. According to official materials, gravity is 10 billion times stronger there than on Earth. Try and ignite Meteos and they stay frozen in place… then get a second ignition going and they shoot off into the atmosphere at breakneck speeds. Hevendor also has weird gravity; blocks fall at a normal speed, are really floaty when shot into the air individually, and are whisked away with a single ignition (which makes for game-breaking fun when coupled with a Super Rocket but otherwise it scores fairly low due to being unable to perform secondary ignitions, step-jumps, or even screen clears if you're playing without items in the DS game).
• Green Hill Zone: Geolyte/Geolitia, although it's not necessarily the easiest level.
• Gusty Glade: Bavoom is a planet whose atmosphere is incredibly turbulent. The Bavoomians have adapted to live in midair among the winds. They don't even have feet.
• Hailfire Peaks: Several planets throughout the series:
  • Jeljel: Lethal Lava Land+Big Boo's Haunt
  • Vubble: Under the Sea+Level in the Clouds
  • Dawndus: Always Night+Endless Daytime+Shifting Sand Land
  • Boggob: Jungle Japes+Bubblegloop Swamp
  • Grannest, Mekks, and Wiral: Eternal Engine+Skyscraper City, with some Polluted Wasteland in Grannest's case.
  • On a different level, the Hot & Chillies Multi grouping is the closest to the Trope Namer, consisting of the ice-themed Freaze and the desert/fire-themed Dawndus.
• Have a Nice Death: "ANNIHILATION!"
• Heartbeat Soundtrack: Globin, since it's based off of a blood cell.
• Heavy Worlder: Gravitans live on a planet where the gravity is intense enough to make a particle speck weigh like an ultra-dense dot.
• He Who Fights Monsters: In one of the DS endings, your Metamo Ark manages to copy and defeat planet Meteo with its own abilities, but it couldn't turn back into the original ship and became the new planet Meteo. The ending is even titled "A Spiritual Legacy".
• Hornet Hole: Hanihula is a planet whose civilization consists of bees. They travel through space looking for flowers on other planets to pollinate. Chances are Hanihulans and Florians live symbiotically in a strong alliance.
• Humanoid Aliens: Some of them, at least. A few examples would be the Geolytes, Starriings, Boggobians, Dawndusians, Gelyerns, Caviousians, Firimes, Gravitases, Thirnovans, and Suburbionites.
• Industrial World: Grannest is one such planet, with factories and refineries completely covering its surface, though the games have never specified what is made there. Its original, organic inhabitants all left the planet long ago, leaving only the factory robots behind who continue to work tirelessly manufacturing things.
• Insufficiently Advanced Alien: A few civilizations are not quite at their Space Ages yet but have become caught in the galactic conflict, such as the inhabitants of Boggob/Perilia, who are still in their Stone Age.
• Intelligent Gerbil: The bee-like Hanihulans, the jellyfish-like Oleanans, the snake-like Arodians, and the catlike Limotubians.
• It's Always Mardi Gras in New Orleans: Ranbarumba, with the Brazilian Carnaval mixed in too.
• Jack of All Stats: The initial four planets, Geolyte/Geolitia, Anasaze, Oleana, and Firim/Ignius, are all fairly average, toned-down planets for new players.
  • Oddly, Lumious, a planet introduced in Meteos Online promoted to an introductory planet in Meteos Wars, is not. Even experienced players have trouble getting it to work.
• Joke Ending: Ending E for the branched-path setting in Star Trip is called "The Galactic Fork". It features the Meteos fusing into a giant fork and cutting up Meteo like a delicious steak. The text is accompanied by a childish drawing of that happening and the ending name has kooky letter formatting unlike the rest.
• Jungle Japes: Boggob/Perila
• Lethal Joke Character:
  • Florias's ignitions after the first may seem weak, but that's actually because Florias's mid-air ignitions are much, much weaker than its ground ignitions. Hence, the trick to using Florias effectively is to wait for the cluster to land before starting the next ignition.
  • Arod's slowness and weak ignitions makes it difficult to keep up with most of the other planets in this game. However, this slowness is also its greatest asset: It has an easier time surviving pretty much anything than most other planets, and it can win battles of attrition like nothing else. Arod simply has to wait for its opponent to make a mistake, and then it can activate Gambit for a finishing blow. If the opponent survives the full 3 minutes, Arod is likely to have racked up a very large score, scoring the win anyways for Arod.
  • Hanihula's incredibly feeble ignitions means the player has to do ten or eleven consecutive ignitions to clear the screen. However, because of the scoring system used in Meteos Wars, where Hanihula debuted, Hanihula is also one of the highest-scoring planets in the game and can win by time-out, where the planet with the higher score wins.
  • Globin has a wide playfield and 6 colors of roughly even frequency. Combined with its strict annihilation countdown (the time between when a column fills up and the game decides you lose) which decreases over time, it can be tough to survive with Globin. However, Globin has the highest garbage block output in the game and is the quickest at building up the Planet Impact Sentinel. These two traits combined means Globin also has, by far, the deadliest garbage block attack in the game, and skilled use of Globin turns every match into Rocket-Tag Gameplay, where either the opponent or Globin gets annihilated quickly.
• Lethal Lava Land: Firim/Ignius (fast-flowing lava/magma), Jeljel/Magmor (slow-flowing lava/magma), and Hotted/Pyros (molten iron) all count.
• Level in the Clouds: Yooj/Gigantis is a giant thunderhead, while Brabbit and Hevendor are more sci-fi spins on this, being nebulae.
• Limit Break: Meteos Wars introduces super moves called "Planet Impacts", which vary from planet to planet:
  • Gambit: Increases number of Meteos falling on opponent's field; decreases number falling on yours.
  • Tempest: Clears columns of blocks from opponent's field — its usefulness can vary.
  • Sentinel: Bombards opponent with garbage blocks.
  • Armageddon: Sends a cluster of slow, unchainable blocks to opponent's field.
  • Guide Dang It!: Each of the Planet Impacts has a secondary effect that greatly increases its effectiveness:
    • Gambit: Garbage blocks are also affected by Gambit. The Gambit user is not only shielded from heavy attacks, but can also deliver massive, annihilation-inducing garbage block attacks to the opponent.
    • Tempest: The Tempest beam follows the opponent's cursor. Most of the time, it will strike within three columns of the cursor. When timed right, this can completely wreck an opponent's progress and momentum.
    • Sentinel: Burnt blocks under the effects of Sentinel, whether garbage or by the player, will restore themselves into random colors, making it harder for the opponent to find matches. The burnt blocks that Sentinel rains down are also much heavier than normal garbage blocks, slamming launched stacks back to the ground on most planets.
    • Armageddon: Armageddon blocks are much heavier than normal blocks. They kill any ignitions when they first drop down and will inhibit any ignitions made underneath while still present.
• Living Gasbag: There's a few: The puffy inhabitants of Yooj, the sentient colorful gas clouds of Brabbit, the umbrella-like fellows from Megadom, and the creatures of Bavoom that drift endlessly in the planet's fierce winds. All of these civilizations live in either nebulae or gas giants and must float by necessity.
• Long Song, Short Scene: Gravitas' "descent beat" never plays during normal gameplay.^note This is because of the way Gravitas' gravity works: Either blocks don't launch (instantly creating ignited Meteos) or they disappear immediately. However, it does have one programmed, and can be heard if you purchase its sound set. "HELL NO!" "HELL NO!" "HELL NO!"
• Luck-Based Mission: Heavendor Realm. It's you against three other Heavendors. Your objective? Win within two minutes. Due to the nature of Heavendor's instant launch clears, combined with the fact you have to defeat three of them, you're gonna have to pray that the opposing Heavendors are struck with a bout of Artificial Stupidity, else all the effort you spent getting a chance to fight True Meteo will go down the drain.
• Match-Three Game: With a twist. Matching three doesn't erase the Meteos from the board, merely igniting them for a rocket boost. You'll need to do that a couple more times to send them out of the field, save for Hevendor who can launch them out immediately.
• Mechanical Lifeforms: The people of Grannest/Smogor, Mekks, and Wiral/Neuralis are all robots. The people of Lumious might also fit.
• Mini-Game Credits: The original game lets you play a small game with absolutely tiny Meteos during the credits.
• Mordor: Meteo. It's practically the Eye of Sauron.
• Multiple Endings: Star Trip has twelve of them, to be exact.
  • Straight:
    • Ending A: Invisible Bonds. The default ending. The Metamo Ark struggles to finish off Meteo, and are backed into a corner. The Ark is suddenly assisted by beams from other planets to help finish the job.
    • Ending B: A Miracle Reborn. Achieved by scoring 500,000+ points or playing on Brutally Hard. Meteo is destroyed, but planets were still lost in the war. The Meteos were then used to perform a mass fusion to rebuild the universe.
  • Branch:
    • Ending A: A Spiritual Legacy. The Metamo Ark fused itself with the essence of other planets to match Meteo's might, but becomes a new Meteo after the ensuing battle.
    • Ending B: A Sport is Born. Meteo is destroyed and peace returns. The gameplay itself becomes a sport among the planets, down to the risk of annihilation.
    • Ending C: The Galaxy Embarks. The Meteos, having lost their master in Meteo, follow the Metamo Ark instead. The Ark then wanders the universe.
    • Ending D: The New Utopia. Meteo is destroyed, and a utopian dream is now realized, no longer under the planet's threat.
    • Ending E: The Galactic Fork. The Meteos fuse into a giant fork to impale the planet, with the Metamo Ark finishing it off by cutting it like a steak. Probably. It Makes Just as Much Sense in Context.
    • Ending F: In the Angel's Halo. The Meteos have scattered and formed a radiant ring, giving birth to new planets.
    • Ending G: A New Universe. Meteo is destroyed, but there was no universe left after the war. The Meteos fuse to become new planets, birthing new life.
  • Multi:
    • Ending A: The Ascent. Meteo is destroyed once and for all, and the Meteos have become self-spawning. No longer needing to fight, the Metamo Ark and its pilots have become like gods in the rebuilt universe.
    • Ending B: The Great Battle. The Meteos prove themselves to be a nigh-infinite enemy, requiring a fleet of other Metamo Arks to fight the endless war.
    • Ending C: The Limitless Eye. Meteo is destroyed… but it was only one of them. An entire legion of Meteos reveal themselves and attack the Metamo Ark, their fate unknown.
• Musical Gameplay: Much of the music is generated by ignitions, the blocks floating, or stacks landing.
• Nerf: Forte got the heaviest nerf from Meteos to Meteos Wars. Because its physics make it such that a skilled Forte player can pretty much clear the screen at will, its garbage block output was severely reduced for Meteos Wars. Whereas any other planet will send at least 6 or 7 rows of garbage blocks if a full screen gets pushed off the edge (unless there is a huge size difference between playfields), Forte can only do about 3 or 4.
  • Brabbit received an indirect one in Meteos Wars as well. Because Brabbit's strategy is mostly about long, uninterrupted chains of ignitions, and all four Planet Impacts are about interrupting the opponent, Brabbit has a tough time dealing with them. As explained above in Difficult But Awesome, Tempest in particular messes Brabbit up a lot, as it splits up large clusters into many small ones, making it virtually impossible to keep them ignited or to connect them back together.
• Numerological Motif: Some of the Meteo costs to fuse planets.
  • Lucky Seven: Hevendor requires 777 of Air, Fire, H2O, Soil, Iron, Zap, Herb, and Zoo, as well as 77 of Glow and Dark, alongside 1 Soul and 1 Time.
  • Number of the Beast: Jeljel requires 666 of Fire, Soil, and Zoo, alongside 3 Dark meteos.
• Object-Shaped Landmass: Geolyte has a continent shaped like one of the planet's natives in Meteos Wars.
• Ominous Music Box Tune: Jeljel/Magmor
• Omnicidal Maniac: Planet Meteo
• Outlaw Town: Dejeh is a planet-sized version of this trope, run by a massive gang as its central authority. There are apparently other planets like Dejeh, which go to war with each other, with Dejeh being one of the few remaining ones. The criminals who live on Dejeh form an Enemy Mine when the Meteos blocks target them for planetary annihilation, though (but not an Enemy Mine enough to ally with most of the galaxy's other civilizations for the mission to destroy the Meteos threat once and for all).
• Planet of Hats
• Planet Spaceship: Darthvega is an octahedral ship thousands of kilometers large, and as far as the Meteos are concerned, counts as a planet. Suburbion is also a colony that floats through space, though it's more a planet-sized fleet.
• Plant Aliens: Floriasians and Wuudites/Arboreans. Possibly Anasazeans as well.
• Playable Epilogue: The credits sequence in the original DS version features a massive arena based off of the aforementioned space ship. The blocks are small enough that you should probably switch to button control over the stylus.
• Regional Bonus: See the notes on Woolseyism in the YMMV page.
• Retraux: The theme of Gigagush, with repetitive beeping music and 4-bit meteo block sprites.
  • Meanwhile, Mekks' soundset in the DS game is even called "Famicomic", some instruments even sound like the kinds exclusive to the Famicom versus the NES.
• Single-Biome Planet
• Shifting Sand Land: Anasaze and Dawndus, with Anasaze being more of a rocky American or Mexican-type desert and Dawndus being more of an African or Arabian desert.
• Skill Gate Characters:
  • Low-gravity planets, like Oleana and Starrii, are good for novices because their slow movements give them time to think. At higher levels of play, however, they start falling behind against higher-gravity planets that can score and attack faster than they can. Most low-gravity planets can still win matches through flawless or near-flawless play and, in Meteos Wars, well-timed Planet Impacts.
  • Lumious can come off this way as well, due to its unusual Speeder mechanic. Someone new to Meteos will probably not use the Speeder much; they'll have a tough enough time keeping up without increasing the blocks' fall rate. However, using the Speeder on Lumious increases ignition speed and fall speed out of proportion with everything else and renders Lumious near-unplayable without learning to turn off the Speeder at critical moments, making Lumious both a Skill Gate Character and Difficult, but Awesome.
  • Hevendor launches Meteos out of its atmosphere as soon as they're launched, which makes keeping up with an onslaught relatively simple, but makes scoring combos or full screen clears next to impossible.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Freaze/Polaria
• Songs in the Key of Panic: The third background loop on every planet in the DS game is meant to serve such as the Meteos are dangerously close to the top of the screen. Wars gives many planets five loops and the fifth often takes away the white noise usually present in the background (Gravitas, Bavoom, Grannest/Smogor, etc.) when the field is effectively full.
• Starfish Aliens: Roughly two-thirds of the planets lack anything remotely resembling a human.
  • And that's just the shape; the official website for the first game showed that their size ranged from the one-millimeter Layazeroes to the forty-meter Freazers. How they all communicate with each other and live together on the Metamo Ark is not explained.
• Starfish Language: The aliens on Lastar/Candelor communicate with each other by reflecting sunlight off their bodies.
• Stock Scream: The Howie scream can be heard on Gravitas in the DS version if you launch a huge stack of meteos off the planet.
• Sugar Bowl: Limotube is a world that is always sunny and is populated by peaceful cat-like aliens. The bee-like Hanihulans are also an incredibly happy and worry-free race.
• Sugar Apocalypse: However, Limotube and Hanihula are both under threat of annihilation by the Meteos, and, like the other planets, have dedicated themselves to not die.
• That's No Moon: Darthvega, a very large space station keeping in nature to the Trope Namer, down to it being a very powerful foe if not for the fact that it only gives you a second when a column fills up before you lose, much like the Death Star's exhaust port weakness.
• True Final Boss: Completing the hardest route in the Multi Star Trip path, by clearing enough missions reach the topmost star, will end with the player pitted against True Meteo — a final fight with three Planet Meteos at the same time.
• World Shapes: Some unusual ones as viewed by the select screen. Oleana resembles a bone, Grannest/Smogor is a concave cylinder, Hotted/Pyros is cube-shaped, Firim/Ignus is shaped like a lightning bolt, and Globin is shaped like a blood cell.
• World Tree: Wuud/Arborea is one giant tree, with a civilization of sentient trees growing on it.

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You Lose!
ANNIHILATION!

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