I am not much of a puzzles fan, but the mixture of puzzles and monsters in this game made it interesting and irresistible. Puzzle & Dragons has been around for about a decade. It was released officially on February 20, 2012. GungHo Online Entertainment developed and published it for iOS, Android, and Amazon Fire platforms.

Puzzle & Dragons is a puzzle video game with role-playing and strategy elements, which make it exciting. It is a match-three puzzle game, requiring players to move and match colored orbs arranged in a grid. The gameplay holds more adventure than your typical puzzle game. The game has spawned a franchise consisting of several video games and anime series.

So Many Monsters

Let’s talk about my favorite part of this game: monsters! Puzzle & Dragons combine two types of gameplay: tile-matching and a monster-collecting RPG. 

Players create teams by picking from over 7,000 monsters, which they can acquire within the game, and then play a dungeon where they solve puzzles. How they match these puzzles determines how powerful their monsters’ attacks will be.

Making Your Monsters More Powerful

You create monsters on your team to attack your enemies. Each monster’s strength is determined by the number of puzzle matches you make. Why do I love the monster part? It is filled with fantasy creatures, and I am a sucker for fantasy.

The fantasy creatures range from dragons, demons, ogres, and goblins to monsters based on deities and other figures drawn from various mythologies around the world. Players can collect monsters as rewards or buy them with their in-game currency. You can acquire in-game currency through gameplay or micro-transactions at the Egg Machines.

Organized Strategy That Keeps Your Monsters in Line

A major selling point of Puzzle & Dragons is its strategic element. One thing that adds to this element is the statistics of different monsters. One monster on the team is appointed as the leader. It will have a passive leader skill that affects your team’s offensive or defensive abilities throughout the gameplay in a dungeon.

Boosting Your Monsters’ Skills

Most monsters in Puzzle & Dragons have active skills that the player can use. However, a cool-down timer determines the use of this skill. Players can make their monsters more powerful by fusing them with others. This increases the selected monsters’ experience.

You can also feed certain monsters to other monsters, making the fed monsters evolve to become more powerful and giving them special skills. There are other amazing things you can do with your monsters. One great way to find out is by playing the game. You’ll love it if you love puzzles or dungeon crawlers.

Puzzles and Orbs

Before Puzzle & Dragons, I never thought I would like a puzzle game. So what makes these puzzles interesting and unique? Well, first for me is that the tile-matching puzzle determines the strength of the player’s monster attacks. This puzzle is found within the game’s dungeons.

Dungeons in Puzzle & Dragons consist of certain numbers of waves of enemy monsters, each with their offensive and defensive statistics. As a player, you must clear every floor of the dungeon without having your team’s collective HP drop to zero. The game screen is split, with the enemy monsters on the top half of the screen and a 6-by-5 tile grid appearing on the bottom, divided by the player’s team monsters.

Turn-Based Style Games Only Get More Interesting 

While in the dungeons, you and your opponents will play the game in a turn-based style. A player’s turn consists of activating any skills from the monsters on their team, if available, and then attempting to make a combo of three or more tiles or “orbs” on the board.

Manipulating Your Orb to Gain Victory

The orbs are of five colors representing the elemental attributes of the monsters (Fire, Wood, Water, Light, and Dark), and hearts representing life recovery. To begin your turn, you drag a selected orb to an adjacent position, swapping it with the orb that is already there. 

So long as you don’t let go of the orb, you can move it as much as possible within 5 seconds (which can be increased or decreased depending on the player’s monsters or the enemy’s skills). These allow them to arrange for several combos in a single turn. After completing your move, all matched orbs are removed from the board and counted as damage.

Victory At Last

Victory is attained when an enemy monster’s HP drops to zero. The monster drops out of the battle, and there is a chance it will leave a monster egg. It could also drop a treasure chest, which would become a part of the player’s rewards from the dungeon.

Once all the monsters in an encounter are defeated, the player moves to the next encounter until they reach the boss encounter for that floor. When the boss is defeated, the player earns various rewards throughout the dungeon.

Checking Out The Dungeons 

There are several dungeons within the game. As you rise in rank, you will begin with the normal dungeons and gain access to the other dungeons. The other dungeons include the technical dungeon, the special dungeon (which has limited periods of availability), ranking dungeons that appear at special events, and multiplayer dungeons.

Dungeons are generally aligned with one of the five elements or a combo of them, and each element has a counter-element in the typical rock-paper-scissors style. The alignment means that a certain combination of dragons in your team will give you an edge in certain dungeons.

Conclusion

It is no surprise that Puzzle and Dragons grossed $6 billion in 2017, and it was the first mobile game to gross $1 billion. It was the highest-grossing game of all time up until October 2018, when Monster Strike surpassed it. Once you start playing the game, it can be addictive as it has a lasting appeal. And yes, Puzzle & Dragons is not for everyone. However, it is deep and intriguing.