Puzzle and Dragons is insanely successful, it seems. I've decided to try it out as soon as it went live on the Canadian app store, and my god, it is a load of nonsense. The core mechanic of the game (moving gems on a board) manages to be mostly luck-based and somehow less refined than old match-3 games and/or Tetris Attack and/or puzzle quest managed to do years ago. The monster collection part is also completely nonsensical and random but at the same time, vital to progress through the game.
Instead of having one move per turn, you can have as many as you want as long as you move one piece on the board only for a limited time. You can setup as many chains or combos as you want as long as you plan beforehand. Enemies attack after a certain number of moves and your team of five monsters attack when you match gems of the corresponding element (and you heal when you match hearts). In theory this makes sense, in practice the controls are too imprecise to make most complicated plans work and the time in too short, still you'll get big combos with gems falling from the top of the screen, completely by dumb luck, that's not a strategy you can repeat at-will, why call the game "Puzzle" and dragons? What's the puzzle? Move gems around randomly to win?
Each map you do costs stamina and contains a certain number of battles. You gain gold, experience and monsters by defeating enemies (only if you win, even in a 10-battle dungeon if you game over you lose everything and are presented with the option to pay premium resources to continue ) the game is 'clever' in the way that at the beginning, you'll level up constantly and that refills your stamina, allowing you to play more, but after a while you just can't play that much, some special dungeons even cost all of your stamina to attempt, and they're usually too tough.
You can buy monsters from the lottery machine (both with free and premium resources) and you can get them from eggs during dungeons. Once in your party, you can fuse them together to level them up. I got so many fodder monsters that I don't know what to do with them, the party I use is all leveled up, am I supposed to fuse the fodder together? Sell it? Use it to level it up for some reason? Pokemon is great because you have a list of all potential creatures you can get and it's easy to see what's better, you also won't get five rattatas at once with no idea of what to do with them. This game should be simpler, you should have your five-monster party and level it up and maybe evolve it by finding special items (and maybe the lottery machine could give such items) so you have one monster of each element and you evolve it as you see fit (you still could have a billion monsters, but they'd be on a evolution tree instead of just randomly dropping by the dozen)
There is also a 'friend' system where you 'borrow' overpowered 'monsters' from 'Facebook' and get 'pal points' and you get bombarded by a million of little messages when you log-in about how Satan's castle is open and you can get the ultimate frozen steel dragon next week during the god's festival event. This game is pretty bad, you're bombarded with too many options too quickly and you just don't know what to do with them, the monster collecting is confusing and unclear and the puzzle part is not even a good puzzle game, I'd rather play Pokemon Puzzle League.