Magical Drop F is a game that I know many have been waiting for in the western world. You don’t see puzzle game RPGs every day, right? It’s not near as fancy or complex as the fantastic and flash animated opening movie would lead you to believe, but it is cute and worth checking out. The “battles” are played out on a Magical Drop game board instead of some silly turn-based affair. It plays like a little role-playing game, and has lovely art. If you’re not that good with Japanese but are feeling adventurous, check out the main story. Otherwise, it’s the same frantic puzzler that importers have been bragging about for years. They still have the sexy, busty Tarot girls, but they’re more serious looking this time around, and maybe a tad bit less anime-ish. Another slight difference is the character art. In this outing you’ll actually pick power-ups prior to battle, letting you do some kind of preventative planning going in. The basics are the same: you pick up any number of same-colored gems from a game board, move left or right, and then drop them to make three in a row, clearing them. This version of the match-three puzzler changes things up a bit from previous games. My eyes were brilliant red with dryness in this marathon session, but it hurt so good. It was the not-blinking eye burns, which is felt when I’m in deep concentration playing 2-player matches in Magical Drop. Last week I felt a very familiar feeling, one that I hadn’t felt in awhile.

Besides, MonkeyPaw has a web translation of menus and key game aspects.

There’s still plenty of that classic Magical Drop action packed inside this download. Beyond that, the game’s main attraction, the adventure game, will be totally inaccessible for non-Japanese speakers. For most of their releases up to this point the language barrier is not an issue, but I could see how someone not versed in Japanese would get lost in the menus of this title. MonkeyPaw brings these virtual imports over without translating the text.

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