

Magical Drop II has a reputation as being pretty ridiculous in its challenge factor, which is perfectly fine if you're a hardcore puzzle genre aficionado and can handle it - but that's not the majority of Wii owners out there. Both of them will send you to the Game Over screen far too quickly, too, even with the in-game difficulty selector set to its lowest level. That Versus CPU mode is your only extra single-player option, too, beyond the normal "endless" Puzzle mode. There are also these silent face-offs in-between rounds where you think some bit of dialogue would be exchanged between the foes about to do battle, but no. You choose from different tarot-themed cartoon characters to be your champion as you play, but they just appear in the background of your playing field in the Versus mode - the actual playable character is always the same little clown. The presentation is nearly nonexistent, and that's especially odd on the character select screens. Those issues I mentioned earlier, though, catch up with it quick.

It's nothing too different from what other puzzlers have offered before, and it's a fairly fun and frantic design.

Lining up three or more in a vertical row pops them all.

The idea is to grab a few of the same color - say, blue - then find another open blue to launch them at. Then, using the 2 Button, you can launch them back toward the ceiling. Using the 1 Button on the Wii Remote, you're able to pull down bubbles from above and hold them in your hands. Magical Drop II casts you in the role of a kooky clown, juking left and right at the bottom of a screen that's getting constantly filled with multi-colored bubbles. That's all fine back in the '90s arcades, but not too much fun here today. You can tell that the difficulty factor was set to be pretty brutal in the hopes that gamers paying 25 cents to play would lose quickly, freeing up the Neo Geo cabinet for the next paying customer to come along. It's incredibly light on presentation, has very few options to choose from and, worst of all, it's way too hard. This version of the game doesn't feel like a home release at all. An immediate issue with Magical Drop II, though, is that it betrays its arcade origins right away.
