A few months ago I made my voice heard on the addictive nature of Square Enix’s flash based puzzle game, Yosumin, at the expense of Bioshock. The story was completely true. I pulled no punches, fabricated no information, and took no prisoners. Yosumin was truly that addictive. After untold hours, countless game overs, and bleary dry eyes, I finally closed the browser window, intent on forgetting the game ever existed.
Then came the release of the DS release. With games like Mass Effect, Dragon Quest IV DS, and a host of other quality titles on my plate at the time of its release, Yosumin was easy to ignore. It was not out of hate of malice, but rather an act of practicality and for sake of my own sanity and productivity. Sadly, I’ve become far less indisposed. Yosumin is calling, and I am answering its shrill siryn cry.
Yosumin’s premise is simple enough. The play board is a 10×10 grid, with each square filled with a colored piece of some type, each adorned with a hilarious expression (jealous green, sorrowful blue, angry red, etc.). The player’s job is to create rectangular borders, the corners of which match in color. The pieces that lie within that newly created border all become the same color, and the pieces are removed from the board. The void is then filled with a new set of randomly colored pieces, and the time gauge refills a little.
The genius of the game really is its simplicity. The game starts with three colors: fake smiling yellow, sorrowful blue, and angry red. Since the game requires that players adjust the way they look at the game to be successful, the ramp up is fairly slow. The learning curve makes the game not only accessible, but also rewarding very quickly. Yosumin is no school of hard knocks, but its subtle increase in complexity and difficulty is what really ensnares the player.
As players dig deeper into later levels, the game adds additional pieces (jealous green, happy orange), as well as several curve balls to the gameplay, like switch pieces (winged pieces which can be switched once with any other piece on the board), kami-yosumin (“god” pieces which can be used as the corner in a border of any color), waru-yosumin (evil pieces that cannot be used in a border with any piece), and deka-yosumin (super sized pieces that can take up anything between 4 and 16 squares on their own).
Just like the flash game, levels in the DS game have requirements that must be met in order to clear the stage. For instance, some levels require that the player clear 10 red, 10 blue, and 10 yellow pieces to complete the stage and move on to the next one. The key to a high score, of course, is to continually make borders without fulfilling your goal, padding your score until you have the chance to make a yosumin (a border that encompasses the entire board). The DS release is a lot more vicious in regards to this strategy. While the flash version just reduced the amount of non-mission specific borders available to the player as the stage stretched on, the DS release further penalizes the player by not counting them towards the game’s timer.
The DS release is also much expanded over the original flash game. While the flash game was a simple multi level game, the main single player mode in Yosumin (called Yosumin for one), has a single yosumin piece travelling up a spiraling tower to reach the top (for a purpose unknown until the end of the game). As the piece travels to a new level of the tower, a new board appears, and the player must achieve a specific objective to proceed. Unlike the flash version, though, Yosumin for one saves the player’s progress every five levels, making it ideal for 10-15 minutes of playing during a lunch break. As players reach the upper levels of the tower, they will find that the tasks are not only getting harder, but the gameplay is becoming faster. Some levels require that players create chains of five or six borders in rapid succession just to keep the timer going. It’s these levels where players’ ability to see borders on the screen will truly be tested.
The game also has a host of excellent peripheral features, including a 2 player mode (Yosumin for two), a wifi based present exchange service (Present Campaign), a collection of individual yosumin challenges (Yosumin Garden), and even an achievements section (Yosumin Gallery).
You did indeed read that correctly. Taking a page from the newest gaming trend, Yosumin offers players a chance to unlock trophies by doing specific things in the game. Rewards range from “Clear 2000 sorrowful blue pieces” to “Cumulative score over 100 million” and beyond. Even if the game had cut the Yosumin Garden from the final game, the trophies alone would have been enough to keep players coming back for more, even after finishing the relatively short 45 level single player mode.
Despite a short (but satisfying) single player mode, the game’s sheer number of options and collectibles, coupled with a price tag of under 3000円 makes it one of the best values on the DS in ages. The game is not only one of the best and most accessible puzzle games on the system, but it’s also one of the most addictive and rewarding. Missing out on Yosumin is not against the law in Japan, but it really should be.
Finally some information on Yosumin!
Kinda cleared up what I thought and helped me with a couple of things
Do you know what the egg pieces that sometimes show up are for? What’s the condition to form deka-yosumin?
Many thanks!
As far as I know, Deka-yosumin are random.
As for eggs, they are hidden yosumin that gestate until they are included in a yosumin. At which time, they hatch, and do not disappear until cleared in a subsequent move.