FMV business-men disappointed in your performance, a seven-eleven where you can buy upgrades between runs, a combo-ball and token system that promises exponential numbers… Pop! Pachinko has all of these things.
At this point I can almost guarantee that you’re aware of Balatro or one of the many, many games that it has influenced; That you’ll be familiar with the incremental, chaos-engine style gameplay where your target increases each round, but you have the chance to ‘break’ the system through modifiers that can be combined in unexpected ways. Well, Pop! Pachinko is that, but (as you might imagine) with Pachinko, and (as you might not expect) Japanese ‘City Pop Vibes’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4cbvCvBwl4 In this case, City Pop Vibes means fantastic electronic pop music, pant suits and grading from a passing businessmen. That, and the fun metagame about collecting a Chibi Pop collection – which in turn earns you money for upgrades and unlocks – are absolutely fantastic. However, and this is a big however, there is very little consistency in the art, and it makes me feel like I’m playing a hacked game, or perhaps a prototype. That’s not something that I’d normally complain about with games, but seeing blurry textures next to sharp digital-style screens and stylised backgrounds is incredibly jarring and feels like a betrayal of the rest of the fantastic work that has gone into the theming. Visual issues aside, there’s a lot of fun to be had with Pachinko! Pop and it’s incredibly well balanced – so much so that I had a few runs where I was regularly saved by a floating spirit ball combining with vine paths on the final ball. It lacks the wackiness of its lively contemporary, Ballionaire, instead having you only change the balls that are fired into the machine, rather than the machine itself, but this actually makes it feel a lot closer to you building a chain rather than Ballionaire’s ‘engine’ building. 
Here you’ll add new balls to the end of your collection, these might be things such as fire balls, which ignite the pins, or the previously mentioned spirit balls, which recombine at the top of the field for a final hurrah at the end of play. They interlink with each other two, seed balls might spread vines which lead future balls, while other combinations can see things such as void balls that send ones they catch back to the top. Add to this that you can collect keychain-style modifiers which power-up and alter how these balls interact with each other, and you can get onto a winner with a little bit of luck. Levels don’t follow the rules of normal Pachinko, instead featuring bonus windows that you can activate as well as moving objects. You’ll want to focus on the windows as that’s the best way to unlock the currency that you need to complete the meta-game collection of gacha minis. It’s harmless, randomised and silly, but the best thing about it is that your most valuable little Chibi Pop will serve as a mascot as you keep playing. 
As it stands, Pop! Pachinko is perfectly serviceable, and very enjoyable as long as the conflicting visuals don’t eat away at you. Pop! Pachinko is available for PC.
