Alternative Title: "Tetris, But It's Rigged In Your Favor".

Decent enough competitive Tetris game, though the central gimmick means that if you have any Tetris know-how, you really can't be stopped. Basically, instead of your opponent dropping garbage blocks down your well on successful line clears, the game will sometimes drop really weird pieces, much larger and oddly-shaped compared to your usual Tetrominoes.

This has the potential for abuse, overwhelming a know-nothing player. But in execution, you run into the opposite issue where this makes the game too easy. See, the weird pieces will always slot neatly into the holes currently on your gameboard. So if you have decent pattern recognition, and you can move quickly enough, you can turn the tables on your opponent and waste 'em. Maybe that's more interesting in competitive, but in singleplayer, it just results in a quick campaign.

The Big Bad Wolf's one of your opponents, tho. Always nice to see him.

Secretly the best Tetris game.

The only Tetris game by Capcom. It also has Disney characters for some reason.

Main appeal here is "Magical Tetris", which is probably one of the most enjoyable 'versus Tetris' modes I've played. Rather than having garbage pile up (which is also in this game, called Updown Tetris) or having annoying power-ups (looking at you Puyo Puyo Tetris), Magical Tetris opts for sending your opponent increasingly awkward bricks to use.

This ranges from sending them 6 o-pieces in a row, a 3x3 cube, pentominoes, and absurdly large cubes. It's a great system that forces you to change your Tetris strategy frequently. This is packaged in a single player arcade mode, with some very light hearted and silly scenes in between. Being able to play as 4 different characters gives it replay value, but its Tetris, that is enough replay value there.

There's also a co-operative mode, but I have no friends willing to play Tetris with me. Will update this review when I make friends.

The music is also absolutely stonking. Masato Kouda from Marvel vs Capcom 1 on this thing (not the one who did Wolverine's theme) and seems to been given free range to make some PHAT choones.

Overall, this is the best Tetris that doesn't have Grand Master, DS, 99 or Effect in the title.

Magical Tetris is a neat spin on the classic formula but it's unfortunately pretty bad in single-player. The pentraminos that get sent to you as attacks can make your board impossible to work with in some scenarios and it can feel overly luck-based. Thankfully, standard Tetris is here too, so you can vibe out with the good atmosphere without worrying about the party game bull. Giving Pete a drum and bass final boss theme was also a great power move.

And oh yeah, the GBC version's cool too. I played that one as a kid and it had an adventure mode in place of the arcade mode, with some puzzle boards and things to collect. Neat little oddity.

i wish my adjectives had been a bit more varied, but i was indeed fascinated by the minutiae of Magical Tetris Challenge. forgive me for blazing through the story, as it's uninteresting to me. i do believe that the base difficult dipswitches for arcade mode were much easer than the settings for the n64. there's a story somewhere about why the NAOMI system hosted such gorgeous games with 3d environments, and why the aleck64 seemed to be like mostly okay -- why SEGA poured more money and devs into it. the TAS confirmed for me that 4-widing is the meta, i just wasn't able to properly execute here. we also didn't see the high-clock magical pieces, which are n-minos for larger and larger values of n, as well as disconnected shapes. does the multiplayer format really support someone getting to that clock level? who knows. the shared next piece was apparently cribbed from Tetris Battle Gaiden (1993, BPS), which i'll have to investigate. i truly wish for a demonstration of the wallkicks possible with the strange kickmaps, but i don't know of such a video. i would encourage those interested to check out @Oshisaure, who i believe wrote the kicktable map and has streamed MTC a few time. fuck disney, but this stuff is cool. is this on fightcade?? 8/10

Playing this game feels kinda odd. It's a Tetris game that clearly precedes whatever insane "guidelines" the Tetris Company came up with by the 2000s. The game feels like it's balanced around gobbling up quarters with it having some absurd difficulty levels even on "normal mode" (could only imagine the hard mode).
The game loves handing you piece after piece after piece of the same one at points (even in the endless mode where there's no "battles"). It feels like the random number generator isn't as forgiving as "modern" Tetris. But wow this game looks visually incredible. Not bothering with any sort of 3D gameplay allows the power of the 2d graphics to pop. The soundtrack is kinda crazy at points going in a lot of directions. The story felt a little nonsense but apparently the Mickey one is last chronologically and I'm not playing all 4 campaigns.
Apparently this shares a director with Zelda's 2D Capcom games and also Breath of The Wild and Tears of the Kingdom?? I didn't realize this before playing and huh it's his directorial debut. I'm a sucker for puzzle games so I enjoyed this. Shame it didn't get an American release on PS1 so I had to play this at 50 FPS due to Mickey Mouse (haha) "PAL" monitors. Running a game at 50 Hz makes you not a real country.
7/10

This one features the newer over-sized blocks, and so may present a challenge to players only accustomed to traditional format tetrominos. But oh MAN this game is startlingly good. It's stylish, it's challenging without feeling cruel, and the music, as noted by other reviewers, is INSANE. They popped all the way off with this soundtrack. I'm still listening to it a month later.

It's tetris! You know if you'll like it! But I have a suspicion that if you give this one a try that "like" is going to shift to a "love"!

When it comes to Tetris games, there’s not much to say in terms of gameplay, since most of them are just Tetris with a new coat of paint. This game is no exception, but that definitely doesn’t make it a bad thing. It’s Tetris with mickey mouse characters, but even then, the presentation and audio are really solid, even on the N64. The soundtrack is easily the highlight of this game, a lot of funky tunes that I could listen to for hours. Seriously, give this soundtrack a listen if you haven’t already, it’s enough to make this otherwise simple game worth your time.