I opened a Tarot Pack in Balatro and the only card inside was the Black Pierrot from Magical Drop 2 ;_;
"My dude, I described you to Akinator and his first guess was the Fool from Magical Drop" – deadliest gamer burn, forbidden to all but the most heartless keyboard warriors
It's kinda funny how I keep trying and bouncing off Magical Drop because I can't grok the "match 3 only vertical" rule + the ice orb conversion rule, but am quite happy with Money Idol Exchanger, the shameless clone, because it only has "match 2 or 5 any way" like in Petal/Puyo.
Like, this sort of thing is not really possible for most fighting games that have more than a few characters, and super not possible for trading card games, so I'm glad it exists in the versus puzzle niche, but… it says a lot about how their asymmetric multiplayer is designed.
The fact that non-fighting versus arcade games like Magical Drop are even capable of being run as forced-mirror-match tournaments, because each character has no actual "moveset" at all and does exactly the same game actions, is quite funny to me.
Magical Drop forced mirror matches would absolutely be its "no items, Final Destination" if the game had literally any casuals at all
When both players receive the same garbage pattern, but can select one in particular each round, these games feel like racing games, with each pattern as the course. "Character knowledge" becomes course knowledge, and is rewarded about as deeply as it would in asymmetric rounds.
In addition to all this, I still feel like asymmetric multiplayer is pretty overrated for competitive games. The "forced mirrors" of Magical Drop and Money Idol Exchanger tournaments sound like a regretful compromise, but actually give a different and rare feeling to competition.
The fact that so many of these 90s versus puzzle games went with this very limited kind of character asymmetry feels like a disappointing lack of game design imagination, especially since there are so many other approaches they could have used.
In Money Idol Exchanger and Magical Drop, the exact opposite happens: because character patterns are so deep, and so much material is sent from even just medium chains, the game eventually becomes thoroughly unbalanced by even minor differences in patterns.
Trying to work but I just spontaneously imagined a Magical Drop clone with gijinkas of Mussorgsky's Pictures At An Exhibition instead of major arcana. Promenade is the protagonist. Baba Yaga is top tier. Bogatyr Gate is the secret 1CC boss. Unhatched Chicks is the joke character.
Magical Drop and Panel De Pon really do have so many design similarities… it's remarkable how their evolution was seemingly completely parallel.
In that respect, I feel like those versus puzzlers with items embedded in the stack (such as Magical Drop and Money Idol Exchanger), which are used to perform supers/limit breaks, are more in keeping with this spirit than versus puzzlers with raw meters (such as Pac Attack).
I feel like one of the big philosophical aspects of the versus puzzle genre is "physicalising" what would in other genres be raw numbers. Your "board health" is how high and how cluttered your stack is, instead of a HP value, and your damage and status effects are garbage blocks.
Ah, right… I forgot the other major exception is Magical Drop (1995) and its inspirations (7-wide).
*no one mentions Magical Drop* Look… I'll get to Magical Drop… in its own time… please… have mercy on my misdrop-riddled body…
*tries to write a sophisticated tweet succinctly analysing the design similarities and differences of Magical Drop and Money Idol Exchanger* ……Uhhhhhhhh………………………… um………………………… errrrrrrrrr…………………… a Fool and his Money are soon parted?????
This cast makeup of fairies led by a goddess is also, I should mention, the same as in Panel De Pon (although, as I've covered previously, there isn't likely to be a causal link between these similarities due to release timings).
Important information regarding the prevalence of fairies in versus puzzlers: according to the SNES version of Magical Drop 1, every character in Magical Drop 1 except The World is taxonomically a fairy (妖精).
Today's Fashionably Obscure Puzzle Game Character Of The Day is Doctor J from StarSweep (1997, A- *suddenly realises this character is literally just The Empress from FREAKING Magical Drop* Gdhhghhbhgkl
OK so… they were only released 4 months apart, so it's possible but highly unlikely.
By the way, here's how to find when in the year of 1995 Magical Drop 1 for arcade was released:
❌Wikipedia
❌MobyGames
✔️MAME title bar
*stiffens, twitches nose, and starts hurriedly opening Wikipedia tabs* Was Cordelia in Panel De Pon a riff on The World from Magical Drop?????
