Firey, eway was actively and fully arguing in bad faith there. I've talked to eway about this exact topic before and they just 100% backslid on everything we talked about. By giving them an inch/benefit of the doubt, you are allowing your own reading of the text to become less coherent in the process.
A lot of this stems from the direction SEGA has taken Puyo Puyo these days. Obviously I'm not saying they're doing all bad, or that they're going strictly to child friendly, but these are some observations I've made. Whether they're true or not is up to interpret.
You're already so much better faith here than eway, tbh. Like, you're not arguing on the same level, you are actually trying to properly read the text as it exists and leave a margin for error.
SEGA has been going a bit more kid friendly with Puyo Puyo as of late, especially compared to the direction that Compile did. Let's comprae some;
Compile's version of Puyo Puyo stems from their original dungeon crawler series, Madou Monogatari. This is not new news to most people, in fact it's very common knowledge. However, I'm bringing this up to display the tonal shift SEGA and Compile has. Madou Monogatari was an RPG dungeon crawler, it was gritty, it was gorey, it was less 'kid friendly' and more 'a kid could play this if they really wanted to'. In fact, the majority of Compile villains listed above where from Madou Monogatari games instead of ones released under the Puyo Puyo title.
That's not really true, though.
I've played all of the Madou games, most of them are extremely kid friendly (sometimes more so than the Sega games by a huge margin) and the only real "not child-friendly" stuff in them is in 90% of cases sexual jokes/content, not dark storytelling or gore.
The PC 98 ports of Madou 1-2-3 are extreme outliers that were so badly received by the games' fanbase in Japan that Compile immediately backtracked on them and went back to cutesy art and kid-friendly text pretty much permanently. There's an actual interview in a compile magazine about this that I should probably translate at some point. The idea that Sega Puyo is "more kid-friendly" is something of an urban legend that exists solely due to people seeing screenshots of the PC 98 Madou 1-2-3 ports and misreading them as the norm.
The Count was a villain in Madou Monogatari R.
Runelord was a villain in Madou Monogatari S.
Yoggus was a villain in Madou Monogatari (Saturn).
I sure this doesn't need to be pointed out, but Compile kept a lot of their more irredeemable villains in their Madou Monogatari series. One exception to this is Doppelganger Arle. Doppelganger Arle, while she originally appears as a doppel through the Madou series, a trait not strictly bound to Arle as Schezo also encounters doppels, has her most prominent appearance in a Puyo Puyo title.
That is *PARTIALLY* true, but it's not because Madou Monogatari is "darker", it's because Madou Monogatari doesn't have a need for a large recurring cast, because most of the characters are just mook encounters. All the villains that aren't "redeemed" as Eway calls it (that verbage is so loaded, I dislike it immensely tbh) are characters who never appear again and aren't actual "characters" so much as obstacles for Arle, Rulue, Schezo and Ragnus to smack down. They're glorified natural disasters, basically.
Sega Puyo, on the other hand, wants to keep guys around, so they need to be more interesting and have more depth than "this thing that we cast Jugem on reaaaaaally hard that one time".
Like, think about it, do we care about Runelord in isolation? No, we care about what he MEANS to Schezo's ongoing character development and how his presence ties into the latest developments, such as the bunch of stuff that happened with Schezo in Puzzle Pop.
Does anybody ever draw/write anything about the Count or Yoggus? I drew a SINGLE Yoggus-related commission once for a person I'm not even in contact with anymore, and even that was more of an OC than the actual monster from Madou Saturn.
These 1-time obstacles just aren't characters. They're facilitators. That's a big distinction.
Doppelganger Arle appears as the overarching villain in Puyo Puyo~N (Puyo Puyo 4), and while the non canon light novels give her a more tragic backstory, she doesn't have a concrete one in Puyon. She's simply a scary villain, and she does a good job at it. Due to her ties with being a Puyo character, this means SEGA can use her as they please.
This is also a misunderstanding. Doppel's "backstory" isn't in any of the non canon lightnovels either. It's in a blog post made by a former Compile writer in the early 2010s, of which the original isn't even online anymore, because the social media said blog was on shut down. So in the Compile era, people didn't even KNOW that writer had that headcanon, because it wasn't out there. So this isn't even a Compile era thing, this is a "a single writer had an idea he never used" thing.
As SEGA has taken over, such things have been watered down to make it easier to digest for children.
Uhh, that's not really true either. What Sega did was make the characters more *consistent*
Compile had a HUGE issue where the franchise had no series bible, to the point every single writer would write every single character differently. Even some of the Puyo Puyo Tsuu manuals made FUN of that by pointing out how Arle's character and lore are insanely inconsistent and wondering if that means there's multiple of her running around. So a lot of "traits" people think the characters had in Compile are traits they only had for a single game, then never again, and that directly contradicted what came before/after. This extends across all of Madou and Puyo (and Nazo Puyo)
When Sega came around, the writers there immediately started "clean up" by solidifying what each character is and isn't in a series bible, as is standard in the entertainment industry for any sort of narrative media. So if any traits you have seen anywhere in Compile Madou/Puyo is absent, it's because that trait didn't make the cut for the series bible during the clean-up phase, which served to make everything consistent and coherent.
But, it's also rather frustrating when you want to see an evil villain. SEGA is, of course, capable of doing such a thing, but at the end of the day they do need to make money, and it's easy to make money off kids games.
This is really a bit of a misunderstanding of how Puyo is marketed. It's really not a kids game (in fact, Quest has a disclaimer that you should only play it under the age of 14 under the supervision of an adult, because, it's, well, a gacha game, and gacha games are not made for kids at all), but a "nostalgia bait" game, aimed at millenials primarily. Kids are actually just a SUB-SECTION of Puyo's market, which, yes, Sega is happy to get into the fold to, but are not the primary focus. The primary focus are millenials who grew up with Madou/Puyo in the 90s, which is heavily reflected in the merchandising and the character polls. There's a reason why Arle, Schezo, Witch and Draco dominate the polls and merch the way they do.
The reason we don't get Madou 95 type stuff anymore is, again, as I said above, there was a HUGE backlash against Madou 95 back in the 90s. This is NOT what the Japanese fans want. They want cute slice of life shit with these characters, and they want jokes. I actually had a discussion about that with a Japanese fan a week or so ago, where said fan outright said they don't WANT Puyo to go harder on the lore, because it would ruin so many fandom-wide headcanons, it would be more of a hindrance than a help.
Puyo/Madou was never perceived as a plot-heavy franchise by Japanese fans, and plot-heavy installments always tended to be far less popular than plot-light, which makes it a miracle modern Puyo goes as plot heavy as it does and is a testimony to how much the writers care about writing plots with these characters. Back in the compile days, the most plot heavy entries in the series, such as Saturn Madou, tended to be sales failures that contributed to Compile's bankruptcy. The primary reason why Madou Saturn is such a rare game these days is because it sold very poorly.
I'm not well versed in Aya and Klug's lore, though I know the basics. I'd be delighted to see Aya stay irredeemable, or at the very least difficult to sympathize with. We'll just have to hope I suppose.
And, as I said in my response to eway, this is just eway completely misreading the contents of all the games.
Aya was never portrayed as "evil".
Fever 2, from the very beginning, made it outright clear they are just a desperate victim of racism that stole their life away and that their ruthless actions are a result of wanting that life back, not of "evil".
Thanks for being such a level-headed person in discussing this, but I kinda feel you gave too much effort here... and so am I. >_>
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