| | | Pretty near identical to the Saturn version (see entry 962) as far as I know, although I suppose I wouldn't be that surprised if the PS1 version had slightly less animation or something. It's got a lot, though, and loading times on a PS2 with fast loading enabled are near instantaneous.
I had time to poke around with the different modes. The first menu, with three options, still kind of baffles me. The first option goes into a limited set of modes, including Adventure mode. I'm not sure what the purpose of this is--it seems like a cut-down version of the game.
The third option has an art gallery and stuff like that.
The second option--the default--takes you to the main part of the game. You've got Story, Vs, Puzzle, and Adventure modes.
Story lets you pick from one of 16 characters (and I've read there are eight more hidden characters that I haven't even seen yet), to go through a series of tougher and tougher bubble-dropping battles against the other characters. There's a cute little conversation between super-deformed versions of the characters before each battle. During battles, the characters shout and scream a lot as they get big magic chains, or receive the brunt of one in the form of additional bubbles that threaten to overwhelm their half of the screen.
Vs. mode is just what you would think: a head-to-head battle mode:
Puzzle mode seems to be an endless (or very high) number of levels of escalating speed of descending drops, and you just keep clearing them as quickly as possible. As you get to higher levels, more weird powerups and things appear to complicate your task.
Adventure mode pops you on a boardgamish-looking map, where you and your opponent take turns rolling a die to see how many spaces you can advance toward the end of the map. There are various branches, and you have to choose your way at intersections. Depending on where you land, you may get kicked back to your starting spot, have to battle someone, play for coins, etc. The map is huge, and without any mid-game save, you could be at this for a long time (I played vs the CPU).
The PS1 version seems pretty much as zany, frenetic, and packed as the SS version. Magical Drop III, at heart a very simple block-matching game, feeds you super-colorful gameplay at breakneck pace, and even though I now feel like I've seen pretty much everything the gameplay has to offer, the twitch play of racing left and right to snatch up drops and then throw them into matching drops to clear the screen (momentarily) is extremely addictive here. |
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| | | | Whoops, I think that was Empress, not Death, in the movie. |
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