Written by Hockeyrama

A puzzle game developed by Square Enix, Yosumin! Live delivers some fun quadrilateral action, but not to its full potential.

The game play is fairly simple and straightforward, create squares and rectangles with the four corners being made of the same color yosumin, meeting the quota for each color erased, or number of square sets, etc before time runs out. Of course there’s plenty of special pieces such as wildcards that give a time boost, movable pieces, pieces that shuffle the board and more. Two different modes of play are offered endless and battle. In endless mode you go through fifty stages completing the task for each on before you begin again at stage one, while in battle mode, two players vie to create sets on a shared game board in an attempt to force each other’s time bar to reach zero while maintaining their own. This review will focus largely on endless mode.

While there’s little challenge early on, later stages will test your perception with fast timers and tough quotas. Overall the game has a pretty good difficulty curve, getting more challenging each stage without taking any radical jumps to get you stuck more than once or twice at any given quota.

Much like the difficulty curve, the achievements for this game are a good spread. There are easy achievements such as clearing the whole board in one set, difficult achievements such as clearing battle mode against the computer within thirteen minutes and no continues, and time consuming achievements such as clearing a total of 100,000 yosumin cumulative.

Like most games, this is not without its flaws. The first, and immediately noticeable one is very minor, yet speaks quite a bit. The menus cannot be navigated with the thumbstick, only with the d-pad. While you may think this is a joke or hairsplitting on my part, take a second to think about what this is saying. This simply coding omission, being that most menu navigation nowadays is done with the stick and not the d-pad, makes me think that they rushed this game and/or they just didn’t care enough. It’s like opening a book and seeing a glaring typo in the first sentence. It sets a bad vibe that I just can’t shake.

Another flaw could not really be avoided due to the medium. I immediately felt that this would be much better played with a mouse. After doing some minor research, I found what I had suspected, that this was in fact from a flash game, no surprised there really, but also it has been ported to the Nintendo DS which could be quite the good time. Fortunately the DS isn’t region locked since it’s only out in Japan.

While I said the difficulty curve is fairly sound, from about stage thirty onward though the randomness can really start to get to you since large shuffle pieces just show up out of nowhere instantly changing everything, destroying any strategy you had in mind and eating up a good three or four seconds which could make all the difference. Large yosumin will also randomly appear sometimes taking up nearly a quarter of the field and really hampering your options. Sometimes these appear right before you select a piece, which has more than once caused me to retry a stage.

Graphically the game is vibrant and crisp with bright colors and fun backgrounds. Musically the game is average, but it’s a puzzle game so what do you expect. The background music is decent but I find myself turning iTunes on every time same as most other puzzle games.

All in all Yosumin! Live provides some decent puzzle fun in a unique way, but hardware limitations keep this from being all that I can imagine it is on the PC or DS. Obstructive randomness also keeps this game down earning it a 3/5.

Hockeyrama also has a blog with more reviews which you can read here.