It's bizarre that Puyo Puyo was put into Sonic before Sonic was put into Puyo Puyo. Mind you the worst bit of Sonic the Hedgehog is when he opens his mouth, and in Puyo Puyo... that's pretty much the only thing you're going to notice. I guess all those Flash-esque motion tweens you're not concentrating on will be blue now. Hurray. Dunno, I'm a huge fan of the Puyo Puyo gameplay, but... I just wish the characters would just shut up. I've been spending an unhealthy amount of time in Yakuza 6 recently, and it has a stripped-down version of Puyo Puyo that's wonderful, precisely because it's missing half the fluff. Mind you it's missing different music and backgrounds too, but I suppose you can just get up and punch someone in the face if you've had enough. And you can do that in the game too.
I don't remember the first game to do it, but you could use Sonic shaped Puyos as an option. I usually use the classic ones from the original Arcade release because I'm a boomer.
Honestly, this is kind of how I feel as well; I've had friends in this community over the years that were big into Puyo Puyo and I kept meaning to check it out beyond playing Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine, but I never delved deep into it until I tried to play Puyo Puyo Tetris. The gameplay was fun and mixing the two styles was neat, but the story was awful. I was almost hating the characters after a few hours of playing, the only thing stopping me being that I recognized them as the people in avatars that old friends used to use on forums such as this one.
While I don't really like the voices, I can accept them as important and distinct auditory feedback for whatever my enemy is doing. With more than two players it's just hell, though.
So you still can't just turn the voices off in the options like I was hoping you could this time? Too bad. I had to turn all the sound effects off in the first one for that reason.