Puzzle games apparently go either "meeeeh" or "this is like crack" to me, with no in-between, this of course being the latter.

Similar energy to Super Puzzle Fighter, though with far less reliance on RNG. Between those two and Tetris Attack, I believe I have found my Holy Triad of puzzles and pick-up-and-play games. I finished one round of Survival, a full run of the Arcade mode, and the "Adventure" mode to call this "Completed".

Adventure mode has a couple of stages where the rate at which balloons fall is sped up, and holy shit those are fucking difficult.

Magical Drop V and VI are both on Steam but I'll be honest: beyond the HD aesthetics, I don't know what those could offer that would justify buying them instead of simply emulating this one.

And a "Magical Drop IV" apparently doesn't exist, brilliant.

Two design decisions contribute to this game's success:
- The block quota the player needs to fulfill to win the duel, which prevents stalling.
- Multiple groups of matching blocks affecting the speed of which the opponent's blocks start rolling down.

These two factors encourage the player to concatenate matching blocks in as few actions as possible. The key word here: Efficiency.

However, blocks rolling down threaten the player with a defeat, thus creating urgency to destroy blocks near the bottom. Urgency and efficiency clash with each other. It's a choice, except it's not just once, but multiple times per second, many steps ahead, while you desperately move your avatar to grab and throw blocks, and possibly mess up in the process. Then you blink once and your opponent is done with you.

Add to the mix different attack patterns according to each character for another layer of strategy. One of them pierces with multiple blocks at once on the center, another one spreads them evenly to overwhelm the opponent, and so on. It's all up to playstyle.

Here is another puzzle game that ive loved playing as a kid. Although it's the third entry (the best in the series, haven't played Vi enough to change that tho) to the 1995 Puzzle series of Magical Drop developed by Data East, the game doesn't have to be this specific game to be told how great the series is overall. Although some may say that some series depend on the game you're talking about, Magical Drop isn't the case for this one. With that out of the way, let's talk about it.

Magical Drop is a simple easy to learn puzzle game where it's similar to Puyo Puyo in terms of stacking the adjacent colors together. However, with MG, they DO change things up a bit: you have to be the diddly dark clown picking them from the board and placing it in a different spot where there's 2 of the same color (or the crystal of the same color to clear out the board with the color you've stacked with). This seems very simple but the game does have it's abillity to show up as an intense match in some cases. But not all of the time does it last for a while. In this game, there's a small counter in which that everytime you make a match, the number goes lower for you, and if it reaches 0, you've won. I assumed that they have this becsuse if you're playing against a difficult CPU or a d pro gamer, the matches wouldn't take too long. Think of it as the marjin time in Puyo: The mroe it increases, the more intense the drop rates go by.

Now for the story... I don't know it. You're gonna have to look that up again. But I won't end off tod paragraph with a disappointment: The characters in this game are pretty unique, and unlike Dark Witch, not a hundred percent of them are females to capture the essence of Touhou. The characters in this game are based on Tarrot Cards, and their designs reflect them too in some way (look at the Magician, daughter strength, star, and others) I personally like what they've cooked here because while they didn't want to hs r the characters solely the yarrow cards themselves, it's a nice little play on it that disguinshes the characters from others, making them life able. Thank goodness I don't have to see a "I think that [female character] looks hot with her mid drift exposed like that!" within this community. I know, this was a bit odd to have in this review if I'm talking about MG, but that's just a taste of the kind of people that I've met within the Dark Witch Community.

I know I've said for the above that it doesn't really matter when explaining each and every entry and whatnot, but then again, I've could've been saying this on MG 1, MG4, OR MG 2. So if you're ever wondering why I've picked this one over the others? It's simply because the controls are the best, the one with the more characters, and the one with the most content (like I said, I need to play 6). Every other game is also solid but it doesn't have the same amount of characters, and the controls were 1 were difficult as hell (why do I need to stack 3 crystals of one color to take out the others on the board? 1?1?111?1??

And that's pretty much it for Magical Drop.. This one also had an impact on me simply because of the characters, and the simple easy to learn hard to master form of gameplay. It's like Puzzle Bubble all over again.