planet puzzle league/panel de pon DS

I feel like I need to make restitution with planet puzzle league. while I probably ended up playing it more than any other panepon release thanks to its free online play, looking back on its Y2K-coded aesthetic still trudges up memories of how I felt scorned that puzzle league seemed like it could only make its way back west with a sterilized look after we got passed over for the much more colorful nintendo puzzle collection. panepon, to me, was all about licensed franchises and cute magical girls — the SNES entry was one of the first games I ever emulated, so a new distaste for feckless globalization was likely still fresh on my tongue when I saw an entry that looked more like a techno operating theatre rather than having a character vibrancy I was already warm to. 16 years out from its release, I can confidently say I’ve washed that taste out, and I now think there’s nothing cooler than a puzzle game soundtrack that uses ADPCM samples of dial-up noise. panepon is not without core problems that a new release might have trouble solving, chiefly that matches seem to peak as stalemates of endless chains, but existing in the shadow of the more confident meteos aesthetic for a particular stretch of its existence certainly isn’t one of them. instead, I now harbor a guilt that I might have convinced someone at the time to never give it a chance. I shamed a series I love into a dry spell that it might never break out of, save for a token NSO release.