Amitie has a dream about the mysterious cat-like Meena, guide of the Dream World, who manages bring Amitie and her friends into the World of Dreams. At first, the world seems to be a patchwork of familiar worlds where anything can happen, but there's one issue: Meena can't take them out of the Dream World, having borrowed her power from another and just runs off without a word. Without much of a lead to get out, Amitie, Arle, and Ringo split up to find said higher being to be able to wake from the dream they're trapped in.
The game features four main stories and five side stories to play through, with many more to come in later updates. Side stories can be unlocked with keys obtained from the main stories, allowing you to play as them in all other modes on unlock. The first update wave on April 25th adds in Schezo and Ms. Accord as Main story characters, with Draco, Lidelle, Risukuma, and Ally as Side story characters, as well as the Challenge Dungeon mode.
Puyo Puyo Puzzle Pop provides examples of:
- Achievement Mockery: There's achievements for losing battles. One of which gives you a "Test with a Score of 0" decoration for losing ten battles.
- Alliterative Title: Puyo Puyo Puzzle Pop repeats the letter "P" four times.
- Another Side, Another Story: Similar to 20th's storytelling, the story is told through multiple perspectives, with notable a distinction between Main Story and Side Story. Main Story characters are directly involved in the plot, while Side Story characters do their own thing. The game initially begins with Amitie, with Arle, and Ringo following after. After clearing their sides, Lemres' opens up, where he investigates Meena instead. Following him, Schezo looks into Meena's power, but for his ulterior motive to take it for himself only for it to get sidelined when he learns Sig's power is growing uncontrollably stronger.
- Art Evolution: The models are Chronicle's models, but retexured and reshaded with a more cartoony look to them, making them much more vibrant. The manzai scenes have also been upgraded from the two-person standard from 15th Anniversary, allowing a much larger cast to fit the scene, positional awareness, background characters reacting to situations.
- As You Know: The characters get a short introduction with their name and a short description of them when they first appear in the story mode, despite almost all of them having appeared in a game at least once before, to introduce new players to them as soon as possible.
- Breaking Old Trends: This is the first game in the series to use the English logo globally instead of having separate Japanese and English logos. According to producer Mizuki Hosoyamada in an interview
, this is to signify that this is the first Puyo Puyo game to be developed with a global audience in mind, rather than a Japanese audience like previous games. - Cerebus Rollercoaster: Enforced, as characters' stories are fractioned into "Main" and "Sub" stories depending on how relevant they are to the overall plot. The sub-stories are naturally more comedic in nature, featuring sub-plots such as Feli getting Easy Amnesia and becoming a lot friendlier (and sporting a Scottish accent, for some reason), whereas the more dramatic main story has Sig strangely leaning more into his demonic side out of nowhere and potentially be on track to suffer a Death of Personality.
- Dream Land: The main setting of the game, which appears to be Primp Town and Suzuran stitched together to be traversed with little trouble at all.
- Hard Mode Perks: Among the assist items, there's a couple of items that increase the difficulty, such as having a higher garbage multiplier, or giving you a fifth color. If you win with these items in effect, it gets you extra points for challenging yourself.
- Look Behind You: Klug invokes this on Schezo, claiming some never-before-seen creature was there to make a break with his book that Schezo demanded. Schezo ends up falling for it, if only because he thought Klug saw Meena.
- Mirror Match: Meena makes Amitie fight a duplicate of herself to demonstrate the more whimsical laws of the Dream World. She later does this to Lemres when she learns he is close to finding out she's been using Sig's demon powers for her magic. Ms. Accord eventually has a taste of this when Meena gets desperate to fix the mess she's done.
- Photo Mode: The aptly named Photo Mode allows you to make your own cutscenes, with a custom amount of characters on the stage, and blank speech bubbles for any sort of dialogue you want to insert.
- Trapped in Another World: Meena is unable to bring anyone out of the Dream World due to borrowing her power from somebody else, and it becomes the game's premise for Amitie, Ringo, and Arle to go find who is giving her the power so they can stop it.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Towards the end of Lemres' story, "Sig" abandons Meena as more of his demonic powers becomes accessible, with Meena trying desperately to hold on to their supposed friendship.
