Game:

Tokimeki Memorial 2 (1999)

Duration: 30:01

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13

"Happiness Drops!" is a simple throwaway drop-style puzzle game for fans of the "Happiness!" franchise and is a derivative of better games before it (Puyo Puyo, Columns, Puzzle Dama , etc.). If you're not familiar with "Happiness", it's one of many adult visual novel games by the company "Windmill" in association with "ARES Inc." that started out as a PC title in 2005. It's apparently one of their more popular titles, having spawned an anime series as well as a manga, various novels, an adult fan disk, a PS2 port and a few Doujinshi. It competed in the Japanese popularity polls with titles like "Tokimeki Memorial 2", "Tsukihime", "Welcome to Pia Carrot G.O." and "YU-NO: A girl who chants love at the bound of this world", so it's a pretty big deal, for what that's worth. Either as a thank you for continued support or as a means to re-invigorate a dwindling presence, "Happiness Drops!" was released some odd twelve years later in 2017.

I couldn't tell you much about the plot as I've never played the original game and only know that it's a mostly standard harem story about a guy who deals with these girls on his campus who have been displaced due to an accident and these girls are special because they're studying MAGIC and now everyone has to adjust to changing circumstances, but if this game is anything to go by, you haven't missed much. The game has English and Japanese as language options, but you're almost better off going with Japanese because the English translation is so bad that it is almost incoherent. It's not like there's much dialogue anyway and while you can more or less make the story out, it has pretty much nothing to do with anything (junior has a friend who looks up to senpai but senpai is mysterious and won't be defeated or senpai has a one-sided rivalry with other senpai, but why won't senpai notice me!!?!... things like that). It's not even a stretch to say that you could get a better result by mixing and matching various machine translators. Since we've established that nobody is here for the plot, let's move on.

The game uses a match-three system. As you are attacked or eliminate junk, you raise your special (magic) meter and when it's full, you can unleash an ability unique to each of the game's five main characters to turn the tables. The one slightly notable trait is that when a character pulls off a large combo, junk is dropped "in waves", and the closer you are to defeat, the more your special meter scales in an attempt to help you make a comeback. As such, there is a strong counter element to the game. While the wave drop mechanic isn't unique to this game, the match-three system combined with the magic system add just a tiny smidge of diversity as you have to re-evaluate how you play if you're more familiar with the match-four system or games with a higher learning curve and more object variety.

Reading the Steam reviews, I thought I was just going to cast this game aside and never play it due to the "difficulty". Apparently, the game just drags and it takes a while to defeat the opponents even on the lowest difficulty, but when I finally started it up, it was like I was playing a completely different game; this title is ridiculously easy for the most part due to its match-three system and limited amount of drops and I'm not a professional puzzle game enthusiast (I've played many puzzlers over the years, but I'd get curb stomped on the higher levels of more difficult games like Puyo Puyo, Puzzle Bobble, etc.). The hardest thing on my end is figuring out why I can't unlock "Super Easy" difficulty and get the last two Steam achievements.

For what it's worth, the audio/video side of the game is inoffensive to say the least and there are a few rather nice, hi-res CGs to unlock for completing various said achievements. The game is also cheap, costing about as much as a large coffee at Starbucks ($5), so in spite of my hang-ups, I can't fault the game too much. If the goal was to give fans a little treat in the form of a drop-based puzzle game, it works as intended. You can also upload your scores to the Internet Leaderboards and play against another person (locally). This game, as far as I know, has none of the lewd content from its main entry and is just meant as a casual playing experience.

This is a video of me slamming drops with no rhyme or reason (???) and showing one of the endings, a few CGs, and some battles in the Endless Mode. You can get the game at:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/763050/Happiness_Drops/

Enjoy.

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