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One of the most popular pass-times for cute creatures seems to be playing with bubbles; doesn't matter if they're a princess, jester or cute dinosaur, the allure of matching groups of coloured spheres into threes when it's offered is just too strong to resist. And at a cursory glance it might appear that Magical Drop is a straight Bust A Move variant since it has all the hallmarks; a grouping of the aforementioned brightly-coloured bubbles at the top of the well, a cute character standing at the bottom, Anime girls on the presentation screens... but on playing, there is far less similarity and it bears more resemblance to Klax than anything. The player's character stands and aims a targeting line upwards like a laser pointer. Left and right on the joystick do the obvious, whilst pressing one fire button will grab a bubble and the other launches them back up; the objective is to move the contents of the well around to form bubble columns of three or more with the same colour. Getting a column causes it and any surrounding bubbles that match to pop, removing them from the screen and making a bit more space. Things are made more difficult in that whilst you can carry as many bubbles as you like, they must all be the same colour and you have to dump them to start moving another colour.

What Magical Drop does is done reasonably, but at the same time it feels rather limited. Granted, the enjoyment for two players during this kind of game is usually to be found in the interaction between them (and indeed the swearing at an opponent's particularly jammy move) so, despite being a little sparse, it fares pretty well there, but the single player mode doesn't feature any kind of computer-guided opponent to get mad at. Although not every action puzzler needs an AI, in cases like this generally and the original version of Magical Drop in particular, it's a pretty major omission because removing the challenge of playing against the AI makes the game far more linear since it pretty much always becomes too hard to continue around the same level each time and there isn't a sense of getting any further with subsequent games. Similarly, there are levels of play to be progressed through, but the actual transition between them isn't marked in any form apart from the on-screen counter so there's no feeling of getting somewhere from that either.

As with the game itself the graphics are reasonable, although they're mostly converted from the original Magical Drop series and the aspect ratio in one or two cases is somewhat out of kilter, the loading picture for example. The in-game graphics themselves get the job done, the player sprite based on the Fool character from the original game and the bubbles are passable if not particularly remarkable and it's at least easy to make out the different colours, always important in this type of game. An indicator showing which colour of bubble the player is currently holding would have been a useful feature, but not required to play the game and it's usefulness is probably limited to people like myself who have incredibly bad short term memories. Sound on the other hand doesn't fare as well as the visuals, the in-game effects aren't intrusive but certainly won't set the world alight, whilst the title tune has simple, crashing sounds and no real length or depth to it.

To be honest, that lack of depth sums up the entire game for me really, there's simply too little to it so under most other circumstances there simply isn't enough meat to the single player mode to warrant playing more than a couple of times. Taking on a friend is going to be about as much fun as the two of you make things, so perhaps it would be best to consider Magical Drop as a two player title with a single player practice mode rather than a game with one or two player mode, but even under those circumstances I'd have to say that the long-term playability is pretty low.