YMMV / Puyo Puyo~n

• Awesome Art: Yo~n's artstyle has received lots of praise and is one of the few things that even the game's detractors enjoy and wish to see more of.
• Character Tiers: The Super Attacks in Yo~n caused huge discrepancy in character tiers (with Arle and Doppelganger Arle being far better than Kikimora and Draco, who are in turn bounds ahead of everyone else), which was part of the reason the game was so maligned when it was first released.
• Common Knowledge: Much of the "lore" surrounding Doppelganger Arle that is attributed to this game, most notably that she is half of Arle's soul, is not stated or implied by the game itself. It is instead taken from the musings of Pocket Puyo Puyo~n's scenario writer, who had nothing to do with the console game and didn't even officially propose their ideas out of fear of Compile disliking it. Their blog post on the subject was then Wrongfully Attributed to the equally-dubious Madou Monogatari Chronology, which had a period of being taken extremely seriously by international fans, and it spread from there.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: Puyo Puyo~n is widely considered to have aesthetics that are nice and gameplay that isn't, with individual opinions often coming down to how bad the gameplay is and if the art and story are worth sticking through it.
• Funny Moments: Arle's group makes it to the ruins, to which Draco takes notice of a sleeping dragon. Serilly is understandably afraid, Arle tries to find a way to sneak by, Witch finds it as a golden opportunity to harvest some dragon snot for a potion. She then makes Arle try to tickle its nose to make it sneeze, which inevitably breaks into a squabble over Witch's selfish stupidity. The bickering wakes the dragon anyway. Panic ensues. The cherry on top of it all is that Draco, who is usually the hot-blooded one, is completely calm and nonchalant about all this.
• Game-Breaker: Yo~n is rife with game-breaking Super Attacks. Compile's attempt to balance the moves by way of unique starting levels and charge rates completely falls flat, as many of the faster-charging powers are situational at absolute best.
  • In the console version, Arle's and Doppelganger Arle's super attacks block your Nuisance Puyo from falling for 15 and 30 seconds, respectively. Kikimora's attack completely gets rid of Nuisance Puyo, with Draco's doing the same if a Nuisance Puyo is the highest-placed Puyo on the field.
  • In Pocket Puyo Puyo~n, Arle's barrier might actually be more broken: the time is much shorter, but it actually "clears" Nuisance Puyo instead of simply holding them off. In addition, Skeleton T's and Panotty's powers lock rotation and manual drop respectively, and Dragon can turn all of the opponent's Nuisance Puyo into Hard Puyo.
  • Kikimora's special attack in Pocket Puyo Puyo ~n removes a chunk of your Puyo stack and gives it to the opponent. This means you can barrage them with nuisance for free, whenever you want.
• Polished Port: Pocket Puyo Puyo~n, instead of trying to emulate its console counterpart's unique gameplay traits, goes for a Mission-Pack Sequel route, grafting Super Attacks and Yo~n aesthetics to its Game Boy Color predecessor. Said Super Attacks tend to be more offensive in nature instead of pure Comeback Mechanics, and aren't bound to specific characters. It's still considered something of a mess as having both Super Attacks and Sun Puyos makes the game too chaotic, but the changes in this port are better received than the console versions.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The console versions of Yo~n have three or four quirks that would individually fall under this trope; together, they combine to make for a painful slog with a gameplay flow that is more comparable to the series' Porting Disasters than most other console Puyo Puyo games. The drop speed is very slow, the effect of "splitting" a Puyo pair by hanging one off of the edge of a column also takes a very long time to resolve, Super Attacks are incredibly unbalanced with the only ones worth using either clearing the field or holding off Garbage Puyo making for even longer matches, and the single player mode has multiple field gimmicks that slow the game down even further, such as dropping Garbage Puyo one row at a time instead of five, or water-like gravity.
• Sequelitis: The console versions are only acclaimed for its Art Shift and storytelling approach. Otherwise, it's usually considered the worst mainline game for being a bag full of Scrappy Mechanic, from the inexplicable gravity changes that make the game a slog to play to the thoroughly-awful character balance. Compare that to predecessor, Puyo Puyo Sun, which is also seen as having an irritating Scrappy Mechanic but more than enough style to make up for it.
• Vindicated by History: Y~on was seen as a floaty, boring, badly-balanced game with great art back then and still is now, but the aesthetics and story have received more attention over time. Yo~n digital artbooks go for hundreds of dollars online versus other Compile artbooks, which tend to be sold much more cheaply.