PS3

Chain Reaction

PuzzleSimulatorStrategy

Overview

Magical Drop is a 1995 puzzle video game developed and released by Data East in Japanese arcades. It was later ported to Super Famicom, Sega Saturn, and PlayStation. It is the first entry in the Magical Drop series. In the game, the player takes control of one of six characters, battling against computer-controlled opponents before facing the goddess World in a final encounter. The objective is to clear the screen of constantly advancing colored 'drops' via a character placed at the bottom of the playfield, which can grab drops and make them disappear by putting them as a column of three or more drops of the same color. Two players can also participate in a competitive versus mode. It ran on the Data East Simple 156 hardware.

Data East wanted to make a puzzle game due to their casual nature and came across during their research with Moscow Nights (1993), a collection of puzzle games from Russia published by Black Legend for MS-DOS and among them they liked a title programmed by Russ called Drop-Drop (1992), which they found uninteresting to play but enjoyed its basic core mechanic and started thinking ways to make it more interesting. Data East chose Drop-Drop and signed a contract with Russ to produce their own version and the game's graphic designer led development in a direction that would appeal to female players, with the team creating a visual design that could fit its rules by using tarot cards as a motif, serving as basis for Magical Drop. The game proved popular among players due to its design and characters, but both the original arcade release and console versions garnered average reception from critics, some of which reviewed it as an import title. It was followed by Magical Drop II (1996).