Never before seen Picross? Yes please!
As part of a recent “leak” where someone nabbed a bunch of roms from Nintendo’s servers, suddenly a handful of legendary rumoured or cancelled games became available to play. One of those was Jupiter’s original Pokemon Picross, completed and submitted long before the 3DS game of the same name, but the release didn’t go through for whatever reason. Of course I can’t condone piracy… in fact my uncle works at Nintendo and let me play this.
As I’m a Picross hound, this immediately caught my eye from the leak. This game had got to the stage that it was previewed in magazines, so we knew it existed; Benimaru Itoh is in the in-game credits for manual illustration too, but of course the manual was never made… I would love to see those artworks. Anyway I’ve played this way too much over the last couple of weeks, again causing myself physical discomfort due to my logic grid addiction.
As a nonogram game it’s very much a close follow-up to Picross 2, the Japan-exclusive Mario/Wario-themed puzzler on GB. This would have been the fourth Picross game, assuming it beat the Picross NP series to market in 1999. To make larger pictures, Picross 2 was almost all four-part puzzles; this has lots of them but mixes in many single-screeners as well, up to 15x15. Your character “progresses” across screens illustrating locations from Generation 1, solving puzzles based on the 151 Kanto Pokemon. After this an additional 51 “Safari Picross” puzzles are unlocked, which mostly feature scenes of multiple Pokemon, maybe doing some activity or other.
Like Yellow Version or Pokemon Puzzle League, it takes cues from the Pokemon anime, with Misty being a prominent companion and certain puzzles calling back to specific episode events, or anime-exclusive concepts such as the Squirtle Squad, Jigglypuff’s texta, or the “preview“ appearance of Togepi. As such the art is very clean and on-model, and it’s nice seeing these pixel art versions of Pokemon that are higher res than they’d been in a game before.
Which brings me to the big weirdness of these puzzles. Normally a Picross grid will prescribe the shape of an object or character; in this case, the grid squares correspond to areas of the final illustration that are partially filled. It’s hard to explain! It’s kind of like the Amiibo puzzles in Picross 3D Round 2, where an orange block could be arbitrarily filled with any shape. This means you’re not really drawing Pokemon, you’re just revealing broader squares that have a drawing inside them. It lets them make more detailed art as a resulting prize for solving the puzzle, but makes them feel much less satisfying to actually solve. It’s an odd decision and affects 100% of the game; perhaps it’s even the reason the game was cancelled, as no other Picross game is really like this.
Despite this admittedly significant stumble, the puzzles and the game itself are perfectly cromulent. This isn’t a beta; the game is ready for release, it just wasn’t. So it’s a full Picross experience of the era; timer counting down, row and column markers can only be manually checked, hard borders, mistakes incur a time penalty. The timer is generous for clearing a puzzle, but to advance from a “Poke Ball” clear to a “Great Ball” clear can be demanding, and in the normal campaign you need 8/14 Great clears in a world to unlock the 15th puzzle. A nice touch is the companion Pokemon which can be swapped out to a handful of choices, giving you a new background music track in the process. Anyway if you can stomach the controls and systems of these older games this is a fine example with a lot of charm, with the caveat that the illustration style may be a turn-off. Pirate it today!