Atlus is a company I love to follow, from the awesome Disgaea, the never ending stream of DS RPGs, to the mixed rhythm game Ontamarama, Atlus has been one of the few companies that I blindly trust, their logo alone can make me get a game regardless of knowing things about it or not.

For the longest time I thought my love for Atlus was set in stone with Disgaea, born with Thousand Arms, but a few years ago I was looking through my SNES games and I found Pieces, the real first Atlus game I played and loved.





Pieces is a puzzle game... literally, the game is about putting together puzzles before your opponent does, which as expected can be either an AI one or a friend in VS mode. Once you start a match you get a few seconds to look at the image the puzzle forms, then you start putting it together from the pieces that appear on top of your side. Every time you set a piece correctly within 15 seconds of the last one you fill part of a POW bar, when you fill that you get a power up, which can go from offensive, like sweeper (removes some opponent's pieces) or mirror (inverses opponents control's), to support, like radar (arrow guides to the right way) or helper (grabs pieces and puts them itself).

Single player would be a sort of story mode where it's just you against different characters that get progressively better, among them there is a rice bowl crab, a delinquent boar, a robot and a mermaid. There are three difficulties in single player, but those actually just mean skipping levels (as in choosing "medium" would make me start on the third level l if I had picked "easy").






But the best part Pieces is the multiplayer, I used to play it all the time with my cousins and the rate at which you can get power ups and the variety of them would lead to crazy Mario Kart like battles, especially once we had played it for a while and already knew all the puzzles. And for those that aren't so competitive, there's also an "all play" option that could get up to 5 players in a relaxing "let's just put puzzles together" mode.


I know this might sound like a crappy Wiiware game, but the cute character sprites, the fun power ups and the amazing music make it one of my favorite SNES games and I title I would love to see brought back to DS or XBLA.