Kzinssie
(she/her)
So I've finally been getting into Puyo Puyo due to the combined forces of Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 and discovering the Madou Monogatari series while looking for first-person dungeon crawlers, and particularly due to the latter, I have discovered the depths of this series's ridiculous lore. This has inspired not only a rare effortpost, but a series of effortposts. This series has an incredible depth and breadth of lore, so I struggled to even begin to decide on how to put it into posts, but I settled on character profiles. Time will tell if this bears out. Also, credit where it's due: most of this information comes from the Puyo Nexus wiki as well as this exhaustively detailed Japanese fansite, but a lot of it will also be personal research/memory of the games and discussion in the Puyo Nexus Discord. Many of the images used, especially from the Madou games, come from this other Japanese fansite. I'll try to cite sources on other things as well, where appropriate.
Before we get into the lore proper, a bit of explanation on the weird legal history of this franchise. Puyo Puyo actually began as a spinoff of a series of Japanese PC dungeon crawlers called Madou Monogatari, but quickly outstripped that source material in popularity (though Madou Monogatari games continued to be made). These games were all developed by Compile, which eventually got into financial trouble, causing them to sell the rights to Puyo Puyo to Sega before going under and being somehow absorbed into Compile Heart, noted producer of Z-tier titty RPGs (there are likely details I'm missing here, but I'm not a legal expert by a long shot, and it's not super relevant to the main thrust of this thread). Notably, however, Sega did not obtain the rights to Madou Monogatari! This leads to a fairly complicated legal tangle where Sega is allowed to reference material that appears in Puyo Puyo, but not Madou Monogatari. The precise details of this are pretty fuzzy, but suffice to say that a lot of the weirder stuff in here appeared in Madou Monogatari, not Puyo Puyo, meaning it's unlikely we'll see it mentioned in the modern games. Utako Yoshino, the writer for the series, is a Madou fan, however, and has talked about how she wants to reference that material more than she is allowed (Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 actually includes a pretty huge albeit subtle callback to Madou lore, but it'll likely be a while before we get there).
So, with that all out of the way, let's get into our first profile: the original series protagonist, Arle Nadja!
Arle Nadja is the main protagonist of the original Madou Monogatari release, Madou Monogatari 1-2-3 for MSX, and has appeared in some form or another in every single Madou Monogatari and Puyo Puyo game (I think - it's possible some of the Windows games starring Schezo don't have her, but I think she at least cameos in them). You'd think this would make for an overstuffed first profile, but in a lot of the Sega-era Puyo games she takes more of a backseat role to the other protagonists, and a lot of her involvement in Compile-era games is tied in with other characters (including possibly the most insane bit of lore in the entire series), so I'll save it for then.
Arle is a young mage-in-training in the Madou Monogatari games, and most of them involve her adventures in magic school. Something to note here - as strange as a lot of this lore is, most of the Madou Monogatari games are still solidly aimed at kids - the main impression I got from playing them is that they're what you get for your younger sibling who likes watching you play Wizardry or Megami Tensei. The original 1-2-3 is, as the name implies, a compilation of 3 smaller games. These originated on MSX, but were ported to various different systems with varying amounts of changes, in three parts on Game Gear. The first episode was additionally remade on Super Famicom, Mega Drive, and PC-Engine. In Episode 1 (titled Three Magic Orbs in the Game Gear version, The Fiery Kindergarten Graduation in the PC-Engine version, and Big Kindergarten Kids in the Super Famicom version), she is 6 years old, and climbing a tower to graduate from kindergarten. The precise details of this graduation vary by version, but she usually has to collect three magic orbs. This opens a path that leads to an illusion of her teachers and classmates fucking melting in a scene that likely traumatized a lot of Japanese children.
After dispelling this illusion, she fights the final boss, which differs by version: either a mysterious birdlike demon named Mamono (who later appeared in Puyo Puyo 2) or a rotting lich(?) named Fudoushi (who sadly never appeared in a Puyo game, and is therefore trapped in copyright limbo). Arle defeats either of them, and then graduates. Fun fact about Mamono, who is an extremely minor character in the series at large and therefore will not get his own post: his name simply translates to "monster" or "demon" in Japanese. Supposedly, this was originally a placeholder name for all monsters in the game, but they forgot to replace it for the final boss, so he's just Mamono forever now.
(if Fudoushi seems not safe for kids, that's because he's from the legendarily bizarre, edgy PC-98 port - some of its stranger creative liberties will likely come up in later posts)
There is then a 10-year time skip, and in Episode 2 (titled Arle, 16 Years Old in the Game Gear version) she first escapes from a dungeon she was trapped in by Schezo to drain her magic power, then enters Lyla's Ruins to find a magic jewel known as the Rubelcrack. At the bottom, she encounters the dark lord Satan (called the Dark Prince in English Puyo games for obvious reasons), who immediately tries to take her as his wife. This attraction is a recurring element to Satan's appearances, and is explained by quite possibly the most insane bit of lore in the entire franchise - but it's one I'll save for Satan's profile. I'm actually curious on speculation here - I want to hear theories on why Satan is so fixated on Arle. It probably goes without saying, but if you do know the lore here, don't spoil it! (Unfortunately, the explanation doesn't make the fixation any less creepy - it's definitely disappointing they haven't backed off from it in the more recent games, since the explanation is Madou-only anyway.) Anyway, Arle refuses Satan's advances, fights him, and then proceeds to the inner chamber where the Rubelcrack is kept, only to find that it is actually held in the forehead of a small, cute creature known as Carbuncle. Despite Satan's protests, Carbuncle takes a liking to Arle, and the two leave together.
Episode 3 (titled The Ultimate Queen in the Game Gear version) is more about Rulue than Arle, and the same generally holds true for most of the later games in both Madou Monogatari and Puyo Puyo, where the actual story is more focused on some other character and Arle is simply the viewpoint character. There are a few games I want to highlight here, however:
Madou Monogatari ARS for PC-98 is another three-in-one pack, this time with three episodes focusing on Arle, Rulue, and Schezo. Arle's chapter, which was released on Game Gear with the subtitle Heart-Pounding Vacation, is actually a prequel. Arle, age 4, is on a vacation to her grandmother's house before getting lost in the woods and having to be guided out by friendly fairies, fighting a vicious owlbear before escaping. It's fairly simple, and mostly serves as an introduction to Madou Monogatari gameplay to lead into the more complicated Rulue and Schezo chapters. The Game Gear version, the only port, expands the plot significantly to work better as a standalone game - in this game, Arle enters the forest on purpose to stop a mysterious foreman, later identified as Satan, from bulldozing it to build an amusement park. This leads her to travel deep into the high-tech ruins of an ancient civilization, where she repairs and then befriends a magitek robot named Socrates, who eventually sacrifices himself to allow Arle to escape an onslaught of monsters. With his dying words, he thanks Arle for allowing him to live, and tells her not to be sad - soon he will decompose, his metals seeping into the earth and sustaining the forest that had become his home. This doesn't really have much to do with anything, but is fucking wild, and nobody seems to ever talk about it even on Japanese fansites.
(yes, this is somehow the best image of Socrates I could find. no one fucking talks about this)
Finishing off this post for now is Madou Monogatari: Strange Wayside Story (usually referred to by its Japanese title, Michikusa Ibun, online). Credit to this Reddit post for a lot of the info here. This is an extremely short mini-Madou game released as a pack-in game with an official Compile magazine. It can be beaten in only 20 minutes, but it also connects the Madou Monogatari dungeon crawlers to the Puyo Puyo puzzle games. In it, Arle explores a small dungeon, and at the bottom discovers a forbidden spellbook containing the spell "Owanimo". This spell allows the caster to banish four beings of the same color to another dimension, releasing magic power which can be used to power spells. Shortly thereafter, multicolored versions of the Puyo slime monsters began to appear, and Owanimo began to be widely used to power all forms of magic (apparently it's more convenient than just using MP?), explaining why Puyo Puyo is so often framed as a magician's duel in-universe. The use of gates to another dimension also explains why dimensional travel is such a prominent, recurring part of the series - for instance, when Arle appears in the alternate world of the Sega-era Fever games, she mentions that she simply appeared there in the middle of a heated Puyo battle, likely due to Owanimo weakening the borders of spacetime.
So, that's a brief summary of Arle, as well as some of the basics of the series. A lot of the really crazy stuff is connected to other characters, but hopefully even this should be a teaser for how ridiculous the lore quickly gets for a game about matching colored blobs - I'm excited to do writeups for other characters as well. I'll likely do either Satan or Schezo next time, but if anyone wants to know the deep lore about anyone else, let me know. Obviously not every character can have huge writeups like this, but just about everyone has something interesting to dig into.
Before we get into the lore proper, a bit of explanation on the weird legal history of this franchise. Puyo Puyo actually began as a spinoff of a series of Japanese PC dungeon crawlers called Madou Monogatari, but quickly outstripped that source material in popularity (though Madou Monogatari games continued to be made). These games were all developed by Compile, which eventually got into financial trouble, causing them to sell the rights to Puyo Puyo to Sega before going under and being somehow absorbed into Compile Heart, noted producer of Z-tier titty RPGs (there are likely details I'm missing here, but I'm not a legal expert by a long shot, and it's not super relevant to the main thrust of this thread). Notably, however, Sega did not obtain the rights to Madou Monogatari! This leads to a fairly complicated legal tangle where Sega is allowed to reference material that appears in Puyo Puyo, but not Madou Monogatari. The precise details of this are pretty fuzzy, but suffice to say that a lot of the weirder stuff in here appeared in Madou Monogatari, not Puyo Puyo, meaning it's unlikely we'll see it mentioned in the modern games. Utako Yoshino, the writer for the series, is a Madou fan, however, and has talked about how she wants to reference that material more than she is allowed (Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 actually includes a pretty huge albeit subtle callback to Madou lore, but it'll likely be a while before we get there).
So, with that all out of the way, let's get into our first profile: the original series protagonist, Arle Nadja!
Arle Nadja is the main protagonist of the original Madou Monogatari release, Madou Monogatari 1-2-3 for MSX, and has appeared in some form or another in every single Madou Monogatari and Puyo Puyo game (I think - it's possible some of the Windows games starring Schezo don't have her, but I think she at least cameos in them). You'd think this would make for an overstuffed first profile, but in a lot of the Sega-era Puyo games she takes more of a backseat role to the other protagonists, and a lot of her involvement in Compile-era games is tied in with other characters (including possibly the most insane bit of lore in the entire series), so I'll save it for then.
Arle is a young mage-in-training in the Madou Monogatari games, and most of them involve her adventures in magic school. Something to note here - as strange as a lot of this lore is, most of the Madou Monogatari games are still solidly aimed at kids - the main impression I got from playing them is that they're what you get for your younger sibling who likes watching you play Wizardry or Megami Tensei. The original 1-2-3 is, as the name implies, a compilation of 3 smaller games. These originated on MSX, but were ported to various different systems with varying amounts of changes, in three parts on Game Gear. The first episode was additionally remade on Super Famicom, Mega Drive, and PC-Engine. In Episode 1 (titled Three Magic Orbs in the Game Gear version, The Fiery Kindergarten Graduation in the PC-Engine version, and Big Kindergarten Kids in the Super Famicom version), she is 6 years old, and climbing a tower to graduate from kindergarten. The precise details of this graduation vary by version, but she usually has to collect three magic orbs. This opens a path that leads to an illusion of her teachers and classmates fucking melting in a scene that likely traumatized a lot of Japanese children.
After dispelling this illusion, she fights the final boss, which differs by version: either a mysterious birdlike demon named Mamono (who later appeared in Puyo Puyo 2) or a rotting lich(?) named Fudoushi (who sadly never appeared in a Puyo game, and is therefore trapped in copyright limbo). Arle defeats either of them, and then graduates. Fun fact about Mamono, who is an extremely minor character in the series at large and therefore will not get his own post: his name simply translates to "monster" or "demon" in Japanese. Supposedly, this was originally a placeholder name for all monsters in the game, but they forgot to replace it for the final boss, so he's just Mamono forever now.
(if Fudoushi seems not safe for kids, that's because he's from the legendarily bizarre, edgy PC-98 port - some of its stranger creative liberties will likely come up in later posts)
There is then a 10-year time skip, and in Episode 2 (titled Arle, 16 Years Old in the Game Gear version) she first escapes from a dungeon she was trapped in by Schezo to drain her magic power, then enters Lyla's Ruins to find a magic jewel known as the Rubelcrack. At the bottom, she encounters the dark lord Satan (called the Dark Prince in English Puyo games for obvious reasons), who immediately tries to take her as his wife. This attraction is a recurring element to Satan's appearances, and is explained by quite possibly the most insane bit of lore in the entire franchise - but it's one I'll save for Satan's profile. I'm actually curious on speculation here - I want to hear theories on why Satan is so fixated on Arle. It probably goes without saying, but if you do know the lore here, don't spoil it! (Unfortunately, the explanation doesn't make the fixation any less creepy - it's definitely disappointing they haven't backed off from it in the more recent games, since the explanation is Madou-only anyway.) Anyway, Arle refuses Satan's advances, fights him, and then proceeds to the inner chamber where the Rubelcrack is kept, only to find that it is actually held in the forehead of a small, cute creature known as Carbuncle. Despite Satan's protests, Carbuncle takes a liking to Arle, and the two leave together.
Episode 3 (titled The Ultimate Queen in the Game Gear version) is more about Rulue than Arle, and the same generally holds true for most of the later games in both Madou Monogatari and Puyo Puyo, where the actual story is more focused on some other character and Arle is simply the viewpoint character. There are a few games I want to highlight here, however:
Madou Monogatari ARS for PC-98 is another three-in-one pack, this time with three episodes focusing on Arle, Rulue, and Schezo. Arle's chapter, which was released on Game Gear with the subtitle Heart-Pounding Vacation, is actually a prequel. Arle, age 4, is on a vacation to her grandmother's house before getting lost in the woods and having to be guided out by friendly fairies, fighting a vicious owlbear before escaping. It's fairly simple, and mostly serves as an introduction to Madou Monogatari gameplay to lead into the more complicated Rulue and Schezo chapters. The Game Gear version, the only port, expands the plot significantly to work better as a standalone game - in this game, Arle enters the forest on purpose to stop a mysterious foreman, later identified as Satan, from bulldozing it to build an amusement park. This leads her to travel deep into the high-tech ruins of an ancient civilization, where she repairs and then befriends a magitek robot named Socrates, who eventually sacrifices himself to allow Arle to escape an onslaught of monsters. With his dying words, he thanks Arle for allowing him to live, and tells her not to be sad - soon he will decompose, his metals seeping into the earth and sustaining the forest that had become his home. This doesn't really have much to do with anything, but is fucking wild, and nobody seems to ever talk about it even on Japanese fansites.
(yes, this is somehow the best image of Socrates I could find. no one fucking talks about this)
Finishing off this post for now is Madou Monogatari: Strange Wayside Story (usually referred to by its Japanese title, Michikusa Ibun, online). Credit to this Reddit post for a lot of the info here. This is an extremely short mini-Madou game released as a pack-in game with an official Compile magazine. It can be beaten in only 20 minutes, but it also connects the Madou Monogatari dungeon crawlers to the Puyo Puyo puzzle games. In it, Arle explores a small dungeon, and at the bottom discovers a forbidden spellbook containing the spell "Owanimo". This spell allows the caster to banish four beings of the same color to another dimension, releasing magic power which can be used to power spells. Shortly thereafter, multicolored versions of the Puyo slime monsters began to appear, and Owanimo began to be widely used to power all forms of magic (apparently it's more convenient than just using MP?), explaining why Puyo Puyo is so often framed as a magician's duel in-universe. The use of gates to another dimension also explains why dimensional travel is such a prominent, recurring part of the series - for instance, when Arle appears in the alternate world of the Sega-era Fever games, she mentions that she simply appeared there in the middle of a heated Puyo battle, likely due to Owanimo weakening the borders of spacetime.
So, that's a brief summary of Arle, as well as some of the basics of the series. A lot of the really crazy stuff is connected to other characters, but hopefully even this should be a teaser for how ridiculous the lore quickly gets for a game about matching colored blobs - I'm excited to do writeups for other characters as well. I'll likely do either Satan or Schezo next time, but if anyone wants to know the deep lore about anyone else, let me know. Obviously not every character can have huge writeups like this, but just about everyone has something interesting to dig into.
Last edited:
