Pre-Order Update - Puyo Puyo 7 (Nintendo DS) - 7/30/09 - Now Open!

Price - $49.99
Release Date: 7/30/2009
UPC: 4974365910716
Genre: Puzzle
Company: Sega
Version: Japan
-from wikipedia-

Puyo Puyo 7 is the next upcoming game in the Puyo Puyo series.

Currently, the characters confirmed to be in the game are: Amitie, Ringo, Arle, Carbuncle, Satan, Rulue, Draco Centauros, Skeleton T, Suketoudara, Raffine, Sig, Lemres, Feli, and Klug, along with new characters Maguro and Risukuma.

The release date is July 30, 2009 for Nintendo DS and winter 2009 for PlayStation Portable and Wii.

Starting on about February 12, Sega created a little teaser site promising information about a new game of theirs. Being that the only information given were silhouettes of a girl throwing an apple, most people didn't speculate much about what the new game would be. Still, the extreme similarities between the way the silhouette and PPF-style characters was enough to get some people hoping for a new Puyo game. The teaser promised more information at a later specified date.

Of course, as can be expected of SEGA, the big "reveal" ended up being another trailer teasing a few more graphics, the phrase "What's 247?", and another date to watch out for. This blue-balling cat-and-mouse game went on all the way until March 24th, when they released a final trailer showing distinctively Puyo graphics and characters, and a set date for a formal announcement in the April 3rd issue of Famitsu, and on its own website.

• Arle and Carbuncle are now available as separate playable characters again (their tiny 16x8 icons can be seen in the screenshot on the left); it is reasonable to assume that Popoi will also be re-available in a similar fashion.
• There is a new Daihenshin (Great Transformation) mode available which looks to be the staple of this game. It allows the player to switch into the Big Puyo or Small Puyo modes from Puyo Puyo~n for a limited time. Big Puyo halves the board size (in both directions) to 3x6 (as opposed to 6x12) and Small Puyo nearly doubles it to 10x20. The timers are also now allowed to go above the previous 30 second maximum as seen in the right screenshot. The Fever gauge has also been redesigned into a straight vertical line instead of the curved series of dots, though this is specific to Daihenshin mode.
• The game looks set to be called Puyo Puyo 7 for its actual release.
• Characters are available in two different styles: a highschool uniform style and a style based on previous games. Arle's outfit in this game is a combination of her YON and 15th outfits.
• Carbuncle's design has reverted to his Madou design.
• Skeleton-T is in the game. It's therefore likely that other Madou characters will also be brought in, just like in Puyo 15th, though only 6 characters from the Madou series were available in said game; recently, Draco has been confirmed to be in the game as well.
• The shilouette seen on previous teaser sites is revealed to be a new character known as Andou Ringo, though this was revealed earlier in the fourth teaser.
• There is one more style featuring the characters as infants.