Pelted with 500-yen coins for calling Exchanger and Debtmiser "the Cheetahmen of versus puzzle game characters"
The voice-actor fell down a trapdoor part 2
*tries difficulty level 8 with Exchanger instead of Debtmiser* Christ almighty Debtmiser is just so freaking worse than Exchanger
HEY! I have now 1CC'd this game FOR A THIRD TIME, but now on max difficulty!!
My observations are that the difficulty levels only really serve to make the earlier stages much harder, with little noticeable difference later on. Still very time-consuming!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KuqrqljsYU
🔟⛓️
New PB
YAHOO!! It's another 1CC with the other playable character! It's a full-cast sweep!!
😸
👆
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GT7NQC5Ad8w
Money Idol Exchanger is actually pretty fun once you can go just fast enough to stay in the chain window… Much less stressful than Panel De Pon, mainly because it's not possible for matches to go longer than 1 minute unless both sides are either doing 12+ chains or 0 chains.
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.
Doing 1CCs of arcade games (in contrast to ports or arcade-inspired home games) really pushes the core design of these games outside their intent, by finding and creating consistency out of something designed to be inconsistent (both in the game, and in availability of the game).
Taking arcade 1CCs seriously is pretty funny when you think about it… like, for Money Idol Exchanger, the difficulty curve is truly absurd and the final boss fight is deliberately incredibly unfair, but… you can, with effort, just "learn the matchup" and become better than it.
*think's with a grocer's apostrophe about the name "Coquetry Bouncer"* Brilliant. Exquisite. Exactly what people mistakenly think Touhou names are like.
New 1CC!!
🌷
👧
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIGJ3h_I7Kw
Gaming mystery solved! I've now figured out why in Money Idol Exchanger I kept sometimes accidentally unlocking the haniwa from Hany In The Sky (1989)! Turns out the secret is to enter the score attack mode, then hold down 1P Start before dismissing the explanation demo!
Losing last
Yeah! A legitimate 8-line attack!!
No idea what the CPU was doing in this one
Attack lines ("A-Lines") are only related to how many coins are cleared in a chain (similar to Petal Crash) so stockpiling and preserving groups is relatively important in contrast to actual chain length.
Practicing
"Money Puzzle Exchanger" is easily the most egregiously awful of these changes. It just decimates the name of the main character. It's like if they did "Card Anime Sakura" or "Revolutionary TV Show Utena".
I like (←tone of voice indicates I actually mean "revile") how the JP Wikipedia page for Money Idol Exchanger has a description of every character, tie-in product, port AND a plot summary of the manga, while the EN Wikipedia page contains an entire paragraph beginning with this:
Me: "I feel like Money Idol Exchanger is a 'discount Puchi Carat'–"
Figurative Plato-style interlocutor named Euthyphro or some crap: "You mean, because it has a grid of small change descending from the ceiling instead of gemstones?"
Me: "…You know, yeah, that's what I meant."
Money Idol Exchanger's game balance is very funny to think about because it's outrageously obvious they literally only balanced the game around single-player. The tier list, modulo a few swaps, looks like you just plotted the arcade single-player stages on a Y axis.
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.
A 6-chain, and the points for it, entirely during the victory screen?
Now that's what I call implementation details.
My feelings about the Columns "magic gem" in versus puzzle games are very deep and complicated.
OK, seriously, what in god's name is this "Here comes a new challenger" fanfare
Parallel Evolution
Eldylabor (Money Idol Exchanger character) saying "mission complete" in phoneme-perfect Melee Fox McCloud voice will never cease to be charming.
Asahi (that's Debtmiser (the sidekick in Money Idol Exchanger for the Neo Geo and PS1)) has such strong Luigi energy. She would absolutely slowly walk around a haunted mansion while shouting "S-Sakura-chan…" completely ineffectually for several hours.
:3
Mightdealer just does her 3-second ojousama laugh for basically every game action in this version……… disgraceful.
I want to watch Money Idol Exchanger tournament play… but most of it uses the English localisation, which cut out the voice lines that were obviously Japanese – a move not even Puchi Carat's localisations did – thus having the characters endlessly repeat 2 grunts for everything.
Waching top-level Money Idol Exchanger. (2:21:14 to 2:23:31) https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1768513195?t=2h21m14s
My basic read of Sakura and Asahi from Money Idol Exchanger, based only on readily piratable materials plus my diseased imagination, is that they unconsciously hate each other but even more unconsciously want each other. They grow up and have 7 divorces together.
One other thing I still have to work out is that Mightdealer's name is "Bank" ("Note Bank" –compare her brother Coquetry Bouncer, "Bill Bank") so I'm not sure from the PS1 game's text whether she actually runs banks, businesses NAMED "Bank", or if it's to be interpreted as both.
I have NOT been able to examine the Money Idol Exchanger drama CD's contents (where most of the characterisation is) but I think the secret society she leads is meant to simply be American/Western-coded, despite being called a kyoudan (教団, lit. "religious organisation").
Live footage of me trying to work out if Mightdealer being an evil banker who secretly controls the world is still intrinsically antisemitic even though her actual character design is just "sexy American woman bare thighs"
I was watching a Money Idol Exchanger stream VOD, and someone in chat instantly disintegrated Everyworker by saying her hair looks like Mt. Fuji
Money Idol Exchanger really is remarkable, insofar as they made a versus puzzle game where half the pieces are match-2 and the other half are match-5, AND they leave behind new pieces after matching, and made it work entirely off the strength of their theming.
Versus puzzle game localisations that awkwardly cram the word "puzzle" into the original title, so people would know it was a versus puzzle game, are just cowardly. That's all I need to say about that. #PuzzleStarSweep #MoneyPuzzleExchanger #PuzzleLeague
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.
*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?????