Game:

Magical Drop III (1996)

Duration: 12:41

2,654 views

15

And, as if you hadn't already been buried under all the takoyaki, I've picked another funky puzzly fixation to take up. This is Magical Drop, an old game series from the long-bankrupt company Data East.

Basically, all the characters are all based on Tarot cards from the Major Arcana, with the small exception of one bonus stage encounter called the Black Pierrot, and the fact that there's also a secret second character to represent Strength, the apparent father of the regular Strength character. The suits from the Minor Arcana make a small cameo in the special symbol pieces which will clear all pieces of that color from the field.

Magical Drop, to summarize in one word...is fast. Like, "fast" may be an understatement sometimes. If you're not quick on the draw, you can forget about chain reactions.

I'm surprisingly not as bad at this as I would've thought, but the precision and speed required to pick up (down?) and slam down (up?!) a set of pieces for a successful series of clears is pretty boggling to behold.

Plus, that speed only really comes into play if I'm seeing a pattern that I'm able to use...I've got to build up a little more speed in my scanning the play field, because it's the thinking time that will get you taken down on this one.

This game's predecessor, Magical Drop II is now available on the Wii Shop Channel in both the PAL and North American territories, while Japan actually has all three games in the series on its Shop Channel.

More to the point, this version is actually available now on the compilation disc Data East Arcade Classics, but I'm not sure when the PAL region might be able to expect a release of that one.

This footage is recorded from the compilation, at any rate...the only part that I can spot that's not quite authentic to the original version is that the Game Over jingle stops a few notes early. This is also true for several other games, like with the stage finish jingle on Caveman Ninja, and probably a couple other places, too.

There are a few things that bug me about the English versions, though:

The voice-over work is "simplified" to a massive extent...and not really in particularly logical ways.

There's like...a generic male voice, an old man voice (sounded Italian sometimes), a "ta da!" female voice, and a female (maybe?) voice which is for whatever reason in Spanish, and a standardized announcer.

The Spanish voice is for whatever reason used for "The High Priestess," "The World," and "The Empress," among others, I think. Spanish is a "magical" language for these characters, maybe? I don't get it, and it's pretty disconcerting.

Besides that, I think that The Fool got to keep his original voices, because The Fool doesn't actually speak, he just makes gibberish sounds.

But I mean, this is what gets me the most...it's all so inconsistent and smacks of complete laziness. I wouldn't even mind as much if it was a bad dub that tried to recreate the feel of the original, but this game's English version is utterly devoid of personality, which actually brings me to another big factor.

The story is gone! Boom! You get nothing interesting to read, just two randomly-used pairs of exchanges between each set of characters, and severely pared-down and generic villainous taunts from The Tower and The Wheel of Fortune at the end...

The adventure mode is rather pared-down, and an entire difficulty setting is missing from the now story-less story mode.

Ah, I know it'll never happen, but the number of souls I'd sacrifice to the Shadow Realm for an "import" release of this game on the Virtual Console. Well, they only accept Wii Points, so maybe I'd settle for those instead.

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