YMMV / Puyo Puyo!! 20th Anniversary

• Crosses the Line Twice: Yu & Rei's story in 20th is all about them offering to kill other characters in horrible ways (like trying to electrocute Maguro with a high-voltage power line), as if they were doing them a favor. The morbid aspect of the whole thing is all but forgotten due to Yu's constant ghost puns and overly happy animations.
• Even Better Sequel: From a purely gameplay standpoint, 20th is seen as a fine improvement over 15th Anniversary and a massive improvement over the divisive Puyo Puyo 7. In the eyes of a number of fans, especially those not fond of the artstyle of its spiritual successor Puyo Puyo Chronicle, 20th is still seen as the Puyo game that all others are measured against.
• Polished Port: The 3DS version adds extra polish to the game. New animations for characters are made in both the story cutscenes and the matches, and there is an exclusive mode that allows the user to create Puyo skins using the 3DS camera.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: 20th has an unfortunate amount of instances where this trope comes into play:
  • Amitie's story hints that her hat is actually sentient and trying to communicate with her in her sleep. However it's only shown talking to Amitie at the very beginning, and the situation was dismissed as being nothing by Ms. Accord by the ending.
  • At one point during Raffina's story, Lemres reveals that he is aware that Raffina turns her martial power into magic power, thanks to her pouch. Her reaction strongly hints that Raffina is actually quite insecure over her lack of natural magic power. This could have been used as a solid vehicle to explore aspects of her character that are otherwise never shown, but it never comes to pass, due to the fact that her very next encounter with Rulue ends up doing away with it, without any fanfare.
  • Sig begins to once again wonder about his anomalies for the first time since 15th, which leads to heavy implications that Lemres knows of his true nature, as well as the blue spirit that comes out of Sig's body and the demon in Klug's book being briefly discussed. Nothing comes out of any of it and none of the characters learn anything about Sig's demon nature, with Accord once again, refusing to give any straight answers.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • Alternate costumes were used in 20th Anniversary and nowhere else, as far as main games go. While on the surface costumes seem to be a purely cosmetic thing, the costumes come with unique AI patterns. The AI patterns for 20th's alternate costumes are higher-leveled patterns roughly comparable to the classic Schezo-Rulue-Dark Prince trio, giving more variety to the "strong, but not quite Perfect Play A.I." tier of CPU opponents. It really would've been helpful in Champions, where almost all of the high-level opponents outside of the aforementioned trio (like Lemres, Ecolo, and Accord) were excluded.
  • "Pair Puyo", despite being new to 20th and having its own menu option in Free Play, only ever got spotlight for one scene in Story mode, and was shelved from later games.