Re-release this: Tetris Battle Gaiden
The Japan-only Tetris sequel is a joyous puzzle battler that's long overdue for a revival.
This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
What Tetris is, well, that’s pretty well-established by now. There are variations, sure, loads and loads of little changes here and there that make each Tetris different than the last, that make quite a few of them unique pieces of the Tetris oeuvre. But they’re all still Tetris. Some of the earliest Tetris sequels, however, were all over the place with their design. Not in a negative way, not by any means, but they were more vaguely akin to Tetris than Tetris themselves, as the ideas of what Tetris was and could be were still being considered.
Tetris 2 is the obvious example, given it introduced completely new tetromino shapes to clear, and also, you were clearing sets of three tiles at a time instead of whole lines. This truly was Tetris in name only, as it was just as much Dr. Mario as Tetris, but not quite that, either. Tetris Battle Gaiden, on the other hand, is very much Tetris: you’re once again clearing full lines, the shapes are familiar, you can actually score a Tetris by wiping four lines from existence at once. However, it’s not designed to be a score-based puzzle game, but is a head-to-head battle puzzler. And to hammer home the battle elements, Tetris Battle Gaiden introduces not just playable characters, but powers exclusive to them that you have to earn the right to deploy against your foes.
Tetris Battle Gaiden was developed by Bullet Proof Software, which was the studio founded by Henk Rogers, otherwise known as the person who helped bring Tetris to the world in a partnership with Nintendo. It was published by Bullet Proof Software, as well, and remained exclusive to Japan on the Super Famicom. A huge shame for a number of reasons, like the fact that Tetris was a worldwide phenomenon, and that while there was text in Tetris Battle Gaiden, it’s not like it was a role-playing game with a lengthy script that needed an obscene amount of time for localizing. But also because there’s nothing quite like this spin-off out there, as anyone who has played it can attest.
Tetris has competitive elements to it, for sure, especially post-Battle Gaiden, but at the time of its release, the emphasis was much more on scoring and besting your past self. Attempting to survive as long as possible, with the “clock” of increasing speeds and heightened difficulty counting down to your inevitable demise. Tetris Battle Gaiden, though, made the focal point, well, battles. The game doesn’t even keep track of your score, for one, with the emphasis being entirely on surviving for longer than your opponent, a fate you can attempt to ensure by constantly attacking them with the powers at your disposal.
Contests between evenly matched opponents can go on for some time, especially with the extra layer of strategy required by Battle Gaiden. Do you use crystals — which are collected by clearing the blocks containing them — as soon as possible to lower your own stack of lines, or do you keep saving up for the biggest powers that will cause the most damage? It’s a constant back-and-forth that will require you’re able to adjust as needed, while also playing like you actually have a plan if you intend to win.
Basically, you don’t want to play the way you normally think of playing Tetris, or else you’ll run into trouble: don’t constantly try to make a big well to drop a long piece into to get a four-line Tetris at the expense of everything else, for instance. What you want to focus on instead is keeping your stack of blocks as low as possible, to weather whatever storms come your way with relative ease, and to clear as many lines that include crystals in them as you can, so you have a stockpile to call upon.
Whereas many head-to-head block-clearing games like Puyo Puyo focus on sending pieces to your opponent following a huge clear of lines or a combo, Tetris Battle Gaiden is more focused on planned attacks that will make a mess of your opponent’s board, or defensive plays that’ll make your own a little easier to deal with. So you don’t need to make complicated structures you’ll eventually toss long blocks into to clear four lines at once, as much as you just need to clear the right blocks to survive and build up a stash of crystals, which can then be used to ruin your friend’s day.
That’s not to say you should avoid trying to clear four lines at a time to score a Tetris, because it will impact your adversary’s board if you do. It’s just that this isn’t the only way to do things, so don’t fret, or don’t force yourself to focus on just that. The crystals are probably more important, especially since your board could be rearranged one way or another at any time, in a way that undoes any structural planning you had going on. You’re going to have a bad time if you’re pinning all your hopes on scoring a Tetris or two, and then your opponent uses a power that turns your board into Swiss cheese: problems like that are going to take time to fix, and if you’re stacking blocks up too high before tragedy strikes, you might not have the time to make the repairs you need to before you lose.
The powers… there are a whole bunch of them. There are eight different characters to choose from, each with their own four powers. They’re meant to be well-balanced, though, so no character is necessarily “better” than the others: the idea, as designer Norifumi Hara put it in an interview with the magazine Dengeki SFC in 1993, “…our main priority was making everyone equal and balanced against each other. People will probably be strongest with whichever character they play the most.” It’s key, then, to learn about the different powers each character has, in order to know what you have at your disposal, powers-wise. The first power, which uses just one crystal, is roughly the same for each character: the goal is to remove some blocks from your own side of the board, and fast. The rabbit-like creature, Mirurun, jumps up and down to squash four lines together and set them beneath the playing field. Aladdin takes a couple of rows from his side of the board, and slots them in underneath his opponent’s current rows. Shaman splits his board vertically, which pushes everything to the side and then fills in the holes in the middle, giving you a great chance of clearing some lines while also erasing some gaps you or your opponents made in your field.
To balance out some powers like Shaman’s easily abused level one power, though, comes a weak level four, which is theoretically supposed to be the strongest one for each character. Shaman will use another characters’s level four power at random, and since you don’t know what it’s going to be, it’s tough to strategize around its deployment. See? Balance! Knowing this is the case lets you use more of the low-level powers for someone like Shaman without having to stockpile enough crystals for the level four power, but the opposite can also be true: some characters have weaker early powers, and game-dominating late ones. You have to survive long enough to save up the crystals to use those, though!
Some powers turn out the lights, so you can’t see your board anymore, other than through the light that’s coming out from under the piece you’re currently playing with. Some poke holes in your existing playing field, which makes clearing those lines either exceptionally difficult or, without some power usage of your own, impossible. Some can steal crystals for themselves, or transport random pieces of blocks over. Some rearrange everything to make a board very top heavy — the bottom half will be mostly clear, but you have to survive long enough to get back to it for that to matter. Experiment with the various characters, as you’ll eventually find one that fits your strategy, or you’ll discover it’s worth adapting your strategy to fit one of the characters.
In addition to the powers, there’s another wrinkle to learn. The two players share the pool of incoming pieces in Tetris Battle Gaiden, and there is no button to press to automatically fling a piece to the bottom of your playing field as fast as possible. You’re in a race to use — or not use — your current piece, in order to get the next piece that you want, with the next three always displayed, visual information that also includes whether or not they have crystals contained within them. Since this is an old-school Tetris where there’s no “wall kick,” no ability to spin a piece until it’s just right before it’s locked into place, and no ability to “hold” a piece until later, it’s even more important that you keep an eye on what’s next so it’s something you can use. Pieces lock into place in a hurry, and you need space to rotate a piece in order to rotate it: ending up with a bunch of pieces you didn’t need in a row, that are just going to make winning more difficult for you, is something to avoid... especially if they show up after you misplayed a couple of previous pieces thanks to the lack of kick and spin to help you maneuver. So, play as fast or as slow as necessary in order to secure the pieces you do want and need, but know that your opponent is doing that, too.
You can tell that Tetris Battle Gaiden started out as an idea for the Famicom not just because the game’s developers have said as much, but because of the control scheme: it’s designed as if you only had so many buttons to work with, which in the case of the Famicom, would have meant two face buttons and a directional pad. To use your powers in Battle Gaiden, you press Up on the Super Famicom’s D-Pad, instead of by pressing one of the unused face buttons — Y and X (and the L and R shoulder buttons) didn’t exist on the Famicom’s pad, after all. This also isn’t necessarily a criticism of Bullet Proof Software’s process or decision: it might have been the right call to keep things the way they had in mind for the Famicom version of Tetris Battle Gaiden, to avoid accidental usage of a power when you mean to flip a piece. This sets it up so face button presses always mean flipping a piece, while powers are engaged with your other hand to avoid any in-the-moment confusion.
Tetris Battle Gaiden has a hell of a soundtrack. It’s far removed from Tetris’ roots, with a heavy emphasis on the bass that the Super Famicom and SNES could showcase so well, and the kind of fun, lighthearted sounds you’d often hear in Japan-developed puzzle titles of the era as well. There’s only about 24 minutes of music in the game, but it’s super catchy, and helps add to the experience. That experience being Bullet Proof Software’s attempt at making a Tetris game with the same level of cute kookiness as a Puyo Puyo or a Magical Drop. They succeeded in every way, too, as Tetris Battle Gaiden, 30 years after its release, still stands out among Tetris’ many series entries. The powers were a new thing at the time, and they remain not exactly Tetris-like, but in a very positive way more people should get the chance to experience.
Regrettably, Tetris Battle Gaiden never saw a second life. It released in ‘93 on the Super Famicom, and that’s it. There’s no real reason why it can’t, at the least, be included as an import title on Nintendo Switch Online for the SNES channel. That hasn’t happened as of yet, which, get on that, The Tetris Company. Surely you’re busy eradicating Tetris clones from existence, but spare a moment for a re-release, will you?
Maybe that will never happen, but at least more unofficial means of playing it exist. An unofficial translation patch of Tetris Battle Gaiden, by DDSTranslation, released in late-2020. The game doesn’t need a translation, but since there are story elements and options and such, it doesn’t hurt to have it. The above video, as well as the non-title screen screenshots in this feature, were taken from a patched version of the game. SNES emulation is pretty straightforward, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Still, though, it would be much better if an official release existed, as it’s been 30 years since the original one, and exclusivity and time have made this something of a forgotten — or even never known — gem for most Tetris players. A real shame, that, as Tetris Battle Gaiden stands alongside the best the series has to offer.
This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.