Puzzle & Dragons Z coming to the West

[Tek7]

Puzzle & Dragons Z, GungHo’s upcoming 3DS port of its hit mobile social RPG, will come to North America courtesy of the company’s U.S. publishing arm, CEO Kazuki Morishita has told Siliconera.

Source: Puzzle & Dragons Z coming to the U.S.

As someone who really enjoys the gameplay of Puzzle & Dragons but has major beef with gambling (and let's face facts, the Rare Egg Machine is a slot machine made of pixels), I'm very excited to read that the 3DS version of PAD, which chucks all the in-app purchase rubbish out the window, is coming to the West.

EDIT: And yes, I know the article I linked is from last May. I only started playing PAD recently (after first discovering Tetris Monsters on the Japanese iOS app store and reading it was a clone of PAD but with Tetris gameplay and different characters), so I wouldn't have sought out news like this before.

 

[Niniel]

After watching the teaser trailer linked to in that article, and having never heard of the mobile game.... Looks like Bejeweled meets Pokemon! Intriguing idea that is.

 

[Tek7@Work]

After watching the teaser trailer linked to in that article, and having never heard of the mobile game.... Looks like Bejeweled meets Pokemon! Intriguing idea that is.

Yes, which is probably why it's so insanely popular in Japan.

If you haven't watched gameplay videos of PAD yet, I recommend doing a quick search on YouTube. In short: PAD gameplay is match 3 but where you can move one piece anywhere on the board within 3-5 seconds, shifting other pieces as you go. It's a subpar summary of the gameplay, but it may give you an idea why it is, for many people, more enjoyable than your standard match 3 game.