Hatsune Miku Connecting Puzzle TAMAGOTORI Deluxe Review

I Now Know What A Tamagotori Is, But I Never Need To Play One Again

I have a soft spot for the Hatsune Miku puzzle collections that occasionally drop onto the Xbox Store. It’s not because of anything sordid: they just tend to be polished compendiums of familiar puzzles with an absolute shedload of content, plus they have the added benefit of a decent soundtrack.

The gargantuanly named Hatsune Miku Connecting Puzzle TAMAGOTORI Deluxe is some of those things, but not all of them. It’s definitely well-presented. This is as slick as they come, with a clean UI and various shouts and jingly sound effects as you move through the menus. It’s also absolutely massive, with 250 puzzles across 10 different categories. Considering each puzzle takes upwards of 10 minutes, it’s a ridiculous prospect. 

My issue with Hatsune Miku Connecting Puzzle TAMAGOTORI Deluxe is that it doesn’t do the rest. The puzzles aren’t familiar, nor are they particularly engaging. And the music aims at the cutesy, low-energy end of Hatsune’s discography. The result is a puzzlebox that’s definitely one of Hatsune Miku’s weakest.

Not, As We First Assumed, A Kind Of Tamagotchi Game

You might wonder what a TAMAGOTORI is when it’s at home. I’ve not come across a puzzle quite like it – and, looking it up online, it seems to be unique to this collection. 

If there’s a close cousin it’s Mahjong. You are given a large grid of squares, and in those squares are variously coloured and patterned eggs. Most of the time, there are four of each variant. Your ultimate objective is to clear these eggs, leaving an empty grid that you could eat from. 

To clear the eggs, you have to match them. To match them, you need to satisfy a few criteria. The first is that the eggs have to be identical. The second is that you need to have an unobstructed path from one egg to the other. The third is that the path between the two eggs must have no more than two deviations. If the path is U-shaped, that is fine: the path only changes direction twice. But if the path is S-shaped, then it’s no good: the path has four points of deviation. 

Zig And Zag, But Don’t Zig-Zig-Zag

That last criterion is not the sexiest or most immediately understandable, which ends up being something of a problem. At least in the early game, you’re mentally checking off the number of twists in the path, and that’s fiddly. You also need to quickly learn about edge cases, like being able to connect eggs by using spaces that are off the board. There certainly isn’t the quickfire removal of tiles that you get in a Mahjong game. It becomes a little more like second-nature as you play, but the clunkiness doesn’t quite go away. 

As more and more eggs get removed, the paths open up. More matches become available. But there’s also a risk: since there are four eggs of each type, it’s entirely possible to be left with two eggs that are distant from each other, or are many long and winding paths away. Success in Hatsune Miku Connecting Puzzle TAMAGOTORI Deluxe is often about finding the more viable matches first, before taking a punt on the riskier eggs later. In that way, the Mahjong influence shines through. 

As the puzzles progress, some additional obstacles get stirred in. Null blocks appear, and they can’t be removed. You just have to form paths around them. Numbered eggs need to be removed in order, with 1s going first. Keys and locks appear, but they might not work how you think: you don’t match a key to a lock, you match two keys together. Heaven knows why Hatsune Miku Connecting Puzzle TAMAGOTORI Deluxe did it this way round. 

What Do You Mean I Have To Play All 250 Puzzles?

The puzzles sound good on paper, but I found them to be pretty interminable. It’s fascinating to me that they don’t work. I found myself trying to dig around in an effort to understand why they bounced off me completely. 

Part of the problem is that the puzzles are just so large and crowded. The grids are awash with eggs, which is visually very hard to parse, and whittling them down takes an age, since you’re often looking for the pattern that is the least dangerous to match NOW. 

You can very easily reach a point midway or even later where it becomes clear that you have failed (Hatsune Miku Connecting Puzzle TAMAGOTORI Deluxe doesn’t tell you that there are no more moves, which I find profoundly odd), and that feels deflating. It can take a good ten minutes before you realise that you’re going to have to start afresh. 

I also don’t find the puzzles to be all that varied. The grids are all the same size, and while there are varying obstacles, they can only do so much. Hatsune Miku Connecting Puzzle TAMAGOTORI Deluxe can’t help itself and opts for LOTS of eggs, rather than subtle patterns. I understand why – the biggest obstacle to matching eggs is other eggs – but it really does damage variety. 

Disconnecting From The Connecting Puzzles

Thanks to some cocktail of all the above problems, I find Hatsune Miku Connecting Puzzle TAMAGOTORI Deluxe exhausting to play. It’s so long-winded, so overly familiar after a medium-sized session. I don’t think I have ever played more than five layouts in a given day. I had to break them up into bitesize chunks, just so that I’d done enough to write a review. 

Hatsune Miku Connecting Puzzle TAMAGOTORI Deluxe does have some nice touches. It’s exquisitely presented, as I’ve already mentioned (but even then the music is cloyingly lullaby-like rather than a bop. I was surprised how much the soundtrack didn’t resonate with me). I also like the Birds’ Square, which is a space where you can take berries – the rewards from each puzzle – scatter them, and see which birds you attract. There’s a kind of Pokedex for these birds, so it’s neat to pop in on occasion and see if there’s anything new. But they don’t have any gameplay effect, so you have to be motivated by the appearance of a blue bird in a party hat. 

Thumbs up to Hatsune Miku Connecting Puzzle TAMAGOTORI Deluxe for coming up with a completely new puzzle for their latest compendium. Thumbs down for it being slow, drawn-out and fiddly. To my eyes, it’s the weakest of the Hatsune Miku puzzle anthologies, and I can’t foresee a situation where I’ll ever return to complete all 250 puzzles.

Important Links

Hatsune Miku Connecting Puzzle TAMAGOTORI Deluxe Launches On Xbox, PlayStation, PC – https://www.thexboxhub.com/hatsune-miku-connecting-puzzle-tamagotori-deluxe-launches-on-xbox-playstation-pc/

Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/hatsune-miku-connecting-puzzle-tamagotori-deluxe/9mwp9jhj3rhp