Hebereke's Popoitto

Overview

Hebereke's Popoitto follows on from Popoon, with Hebereke once again awakening on a strange floating island where he once again has to battle all his friends.

The game features characters native to the Hebereke franchise (those from Hebereke's Popoon and its earlier game Ufouria: The Saga). These include, briefly: Hebereke, a penguin wearing a blue beanie cap; Oh-Chan, a female cat (or cat-suited human); Jennifer, a male lizard and; Sukezaemon, a ghost with a pink cap and shades. Their faces represent the trash icons and have colors associated to each of them - these are the colors that the Popoons must match in order to eliminate them.

The game came out on the SNES, Sega Saturn, and PlayStation during the brief time when those three systems were the lead platforms for their respective brands, the then-current generation of consoles. All three versions were available in both PAL and Japan NTSC territories, but not in US NTSC.

Gameplay

The actual gameplay is a little different this time: Instead of removing groups of blobs (called Popoons, like in the previous game) in order to attack the opponent, the player has to remove all the trash items from each stage to continue. Like with Popoon, these trash items resemble the characters in the game - where the game differs is that these trash items are already on the board and the player must remove them by including them in lines of four same-colored Popoons. In that respect, it is very similar to Dr. Mario's match-four capsule and virus set-up.

Where it differs from Dr Mario is that these face icons tend to move about when not boxed in, so they can be hard to nail down with the same colored Popoons. The other, slightly more helpful, difference is that there are also rainbow Popoons that are wild cards. These make forming combos and eliminating the face icons much easier.