Magical Drop

About Magical Drop

Magical Drop (1995), released as Chain Reaction in North American arcades, is Data East's fast competitive puzzle game in which a clown grabs and drops coloured bubbles, the start of a series best known on the Neo Geo.

Magical Drop in Depth

A stack of randomly coloured bubbles descends from the top of the screen, and the player loses if a bubble reaches the bottom. The player's clown, at the foot of the screen, picks bubbles up and drops them back, and three or more of the same colour in a column vanish. Chains form when one drop sets off a chain reaction or when several groups are destroyed in quick succession, and chains make the opponent's stack descend faster. It is normally played by two, against a person or the computer. The series favours fast reflexes over careful planning; Next Generation said of the sequel that "there is no time to think, just time to do".

The characters are named after tarot cards, and each has a different attack pattern that makes the columns of the opponent's stack drop at different rates, breaking up the colours: with Devil all columns fall evenly, while with Sun the middle columns fall faster. The first game introduced the Fool, who always carries a cat, the narcissistic Magician, the bookish High Priestess, the fearless knight Chariot, the demonic boy Devil, the crybaby Star and the three-eyed goddess World, the final opponent.

Making Magical Drop

Data East released Magical Drop in arcades in 1995, titled Chain Reaction in North America, and Game Machine listed it as Japan's tenth most successful arcade game in its 1 September 1995 issue. Next Generation noted that it was "proving quite popular in Japan, despite the fact that this kind of game has been around now for at least five years", calling it neither brilliant nor new but fun. Mean Machines gave the Saturn version 84 out of 100, finding it addictive and full of options but frustratingly hard alone. Its Neo Geo sequels, Magical Drop II in 1996 and Magical Drop III in 1997, made the series better known, followed by versions for the PlayStation, WonderSwan, Neo Geo Pocket Color and Game Boy Color. The Super Famicom version of the original reached the Wii Virtual Console in Japan in 2007.