It really is a unique experience compared to pretty much any other puzzle game out there, but it’s kept feeling accessible and interesting by its presentation, which very much conforms to the idea of the “waifu puzzler” popular in the late ’90s. It’s a game less about stroking your chin thoughtfully and coming up with an effective strategy and more about blasting columns of bubbles as quickly as you can if you manage to squeeze in a bit of strategy along the way in order to set up some formidable chain reactions, so much the better. We’re not talking “fast” in the same way as Tetris pieces fall unmanageably rapidly as you advance in level, but rather the fact that Magical Drop III’s gameplay focus requires you to constantly be on the move, making matches without a break and without stopping to think. Speed is very much of the essence if you want to obtain high scores or defeat a versus mode opponent quickly, and one of the things people find most immediately striking about Magical Drop III is just how fast it plays. You can pick up balloons of the same colour in several “steps”, then release them all back into the wall at the same time to create a huge match, but the real skill in Magical Drop III comes from rapidly creating Chains.Ĭhains can be created in two ways: firstly, by setting up (or accidentally creating) chain reactions of balloons, and secondly, by rapidly creating additional matches while another one is still disappearing from the screen.
The basic gameplay involves controlling a little clown-like character called a “Pierrot” and picking up balloons from a column at a time. In this case, balloons slowly descend from the top of the screen a line at a time, and you need to line up three or more in a single column - there are no horizontal or diagonal matches in Magical Drop.
MAGICAL DROP V EMPRESS PLUS
Magical Drop III got released on all manner of platforms, but today we’re primarily concerned with the European PlayStation release, which includes a port of the Saturn version, itself somewhat rebalanced from the arcade and Neo Geo versions, as well as a port of Magical Drop Plus 1!, an enhanced version of the first game in the series that was originally released in the West as Chain Reaction.įor the unfamiliar, Magical Drop III is a variation on the usual puzzle game theme of “match several things of the same colour to make them disappear”. The series as a whole is noteworthy in that it provides a distinctly more fast-paced take on what is typically regarded as a relatively sedate genre, but Magical Drop III took the core mechanics established in its early incarnations, polished them to a fine sheen and created one of the most addictive puzzle games of all time… not to mention the origin of the “Fairy Bounce” meme. Magical Drop III, first released in 1997, is widely regarded as the best installment in Data East’s series of frantic puzzlers.
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