Tiny Toons Adventures: Wacky Stackers! - Servicable Irrelevence

11/03/25

Imagine it’s the early 2000s, you’ve got your brand new Game Boy Advance, and you crave something akin to Tetris. Not Tetris, Tetris - that’s played out. How ‘bout Puyo Puyo? Ehh, it’s the vibe you’re looking for, but the cutesy, anime aesthetic isn’t really your thing. You wander down the store aisle, and your eyes fall upon the result of combining two things that (apparently) were always meant for one another. Puyo Puyo. Tiny Toons. Together at last! You throw down your $30 USD and run home, ready to dig into literal *hours* of repetitive, unsurprising puzzling content. This opening paragraph is my vain attempt to find something particularly entertaining to say about Tiny Toons Adventures: Wacky Stackers, a game that whilst providing a perfectly serviceable reproduction of the Puyo Puyo/Tetris experience, but never once really inches above the bar of utter, average, mediocrity, and as I’ve said before, sometimes boring is a lot worse than bad.

It’s crazy to think how much the popularity and cultural relevance of Looney Toons has waned. This isn’t to say they don’t have their fans - I still have an affinity for Bugs Bunny - but in the 20th Century I think you could maybe make the argument that characters like Bugs or Daffy Duck were in the same ballpark as Disney’s most iconic creations. But whilst there’s the odd show, game, or whatnot, it really feels like the 21st Century has left these characters behind, with the odd television series, movie, or game really failing to penetrate the greater cultural zeitgeist. I’m still mad about Coyote vs. ACME, though. Fuck Warner/Discovery. Then again, I don’t think the quality of Looney Tunes projects in the 21st Century have really helped rebuild the brand - and Tiny Toons Adventures: Wacky Stackers might be the most mediocre of all said projects.

Wacky Stackers, on the surface at least, is a pretty unabashed reproduction of the classic Sega puzzle series Puyo Puyo, which in itself is a unique take on the classic of classics, Tetris. For those uninitiated, where Tetris has you trying to create unbroken, horizontal lies, Puyo Puyo tasks you with creating ‘groups’ of four or more, which aren’t restrained by their orientation or position. You have four red ‘orbs’, they’ll be cleared if they’re in a vertical or horizontal line, or even a T-shape - all that matters is that they’re connected. In modes that are essentially endless, like Survival, the more points you earn, the faster and faster the game goes, forcing your reactions and strategy to speed up alongside it. Basic stuff Otherwise, Puyo Puyo - and by extension, today’s game - are fairly similar to Tetris in overall structure. Clear as many items as you can, stop the stack from reaching the top, and all that classic jazz. It’s the classic format that’s been a classic for decades now, the kind you’ll recognize and understand with a glance.

Wacky Stackers, however, does take the innovation (at least to my knowledge - I’m not particularly well versed in the genre) a little bit further than just being a clone. Rather than just getting points from earning combos - clearing chains of eggs from a single clear - you’ll start to earn coins that’ll appear on the left side of the screen. Tapping one of the shoulder buttons whilst in possession of a certain amount of coins will spawn one of the Tiny Toons cast to affect a pretty decent change upon the game board. One will have Taz clearing out the entire bottom two lines of the screen, or another will totally annihilate the two middle columns. The amount of coins you need for a specific character to help you is set, so there’s no randomness to mess around with This addition not only helps you survive against the ever-speeding up pace of the endless game modes, but also gives you good reason to go for those big ass combos beyond just the points of your score, and with how run of the mill the game feels, anything it can use to stand on its own is greatly appreciated.

Like I said, the biggest issue with Wacky Stackers is the fact it feels so run of the mill for a Puyo Puyo/Tetris clone. Sure, it’s got a handful of bells and whistles to prevent it from being worse than just mediocre, but they’re not enough to make me question why anyone would really pick this up over… well, anything else in it or its sister genres. Sure, it’s satisfying to hit a lot of combos, but you can feel the same when you play any Puyo Puyo game - the assists (besides how satisfying it is to see the coins CA-CHUNK in the HUD) are exciting a handful of times… but I eventually found them kind of annoying. Generally the most satisfaction I feel play Tetris-like games is managing to escape from near-fail states by sheer skill and whatnot. Having the game, in a way, clear those out for me via the assists is charming at first, but it really doesn’t help me feel like I’m actively getting better at the game, rather than the game bailing me out.

Puzzle mode is the meatiest section of the game, roughly serving as the game’s loose ‘story mode’. Again, it’s fairly self-explanatory; you’ll be presented with a board already filled with a certain amount of eggs, with set pairs of eggs ready to drop from the get-go. Your job, either through clearing, combos, or Assists, is to clear all the eggs in a certain amount of turns. Easy. Well… Sorta. Joining the category of games that are way harder when you don’t have easy access to a manual, there were a few early puzzles that stumped me because I had no idea how to bring out the Tiny Toon character assists. For ane example, there was one puzzle, the last of the Coyote’s, where I just couldn’t work out how to clear a few isolated eggs; I just had to tap a shoulder button, and baby Taz (at least I think that’s baby Taz) would spin away everything on the bottom two rows. Once I had that information, most puzzles become a one-two process of clearing whatever eggs I can, and then identifying which of the numerous Tiny Toon assists I needed to call in to clear the remainder. Whilst I didn’t like using them in the other modes, I do like how the assists feel a lot more thought out as a part of the game’s mechanics in the puzzle mode.

The mode’s hardest difficulty, where you go through all eight sets of puzzles in one life is genuinely quite grueling, as running out of continues will kick you all the way back to the very first one, an element I felt was sort of unnecessarily punishing… until I discovered that instead of clicking ‘restart’ when you screwed up, which will trigger the continue screen, clicking ‘quit’ *then* ‘restart’ will do-over the level, without taking away a precious continue. Now, I don’t know if this is intended or just an oversight, but it turned a grueling slog into a relatively pleasant experience. I did start to get bored towards the end of the gauntlet of puzzles, but at least it gives the game a bit more depth than just ‘play survival’ and that’s it.

Beyond that, it’s got the normal selection of alternate modes to mess around with, namely an endless ‘survival’ mode with a number of different difficulties, and a vs. CPU mode which feels more like the traditional head-to-head Tetris/Puyo Puyo mode I’d expect the majority of us have played at least once. Most notably, though, is the game’s ability (via the ever-fantastic Link Cable) to play with up to three other players in head to head competition. Sure, that always comes with the caveat that you need four GBAs, four copies of Wacky Stackers, and a link-cable (and one of those dood-dads that allows four players to connect up). It’s a massive ask, especially for a title as mediocre and forgettable as Wacky Stackers, but I think there’s something beautiful about the developers believing they’d get the kind of traction to facilitate such multiplayer gaming. Obviously, I wasn’t able to engage with that part of the game, but felt it was fun enough to shout out.

Outside of the puzzle mode, which serves as the game’s de facto ‘story mode’, Wacky Stackers doesn’t really have a lot of staying power that isn’t provided elsewhere in a better format - it’s a fairly mediocre Puyo Puyo clone, even with it’s additions, and nothing in the presentation nor the content really sticks out in any memorable way, outside of perhaps the little assist animations, which are quite cute. Depending on your skill with the genre, or just this game, you might get a few hours out of puzzle mode, which features a few dozen boards to deal with, but I can’t imagine someone just playing the general survival mode in this when there are so many better versions of Puyo Puyo, or Tetris for that matter, available on so many different consoles and formats. This extends to the audio and visuals, the former of which is just forgettable. The latter, though, isn’t really that bad, if perhaps a little uninteresting and ‘blotchy’ if you get what I mean. It really looks like a really nice GBC game, if I’m being honest, but considering I expect this game was made on a shoestring budget, I can’t be that mad.

Mediocrity personified, Tiny Toons Adventures: Wacky Stackers does provide a decent reproduction of the classic Puyo Puyo format with it’s own bells and whistles, but at the same time doesn’t really provide much of a reason to stick around on it’s own merits. Puzzle mode is fun for an hour or two, and does a good job of showcasing how Wacky Stackers has it’s own ideas, but beyond it, it’s just a fairly generic experience through and through. Hell, I can’t even say it’s worth it for the Tiny Toons fans (how many of those are there, even?), as the characters themselves barely appear beyond the assist moves you’ll be using. There’s nothing really particularly wrong with Wacky Stackers, but there isn’t anything memorable, and so it’ll stick in my head only as a standard of what a truly average game looks like.

Thanks for reading my review of Tiny Toons Adventures: Wacky Stackers. Nice and easy, if a little short. Sorry for the lack of reviews lately - I’ve been dealing with sickness, but more excitedly, I got engaged last weekend, so that’s obviously been taking up a lot of my time, ahaha. Hopefully we’ll get back to a schedule soon, but I think it’s better if I stop promising that! As always, you can find me over on Bluesky @GameBoyAbyss, on Twitch under the same name, or email me at cckaiju@gmail.com or mgeorge7003@hotmail.com if you have any questions or requests. Thanks again for reading, and I’ll see you next time!