YMMV / Magical Drop

• Awesome Music: There are many...questionable aspects of V, but one area where it shines is the music. Just check out this game's rendition of Final Battle.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: Most people who know anything about this game remember it for The World, her ribbon, and her energetic win animation. Many hentai and ROM sites back in the aughts would use ripped animations of her (without Data East's permission, of course) to plug themselves.
• Character Tiers: III, being the only Magical Drop game to really have a Metagame, has a tier list. Characters are generally placed based on how disruptive their attack patterns are. For example, a character who drops extra balloons on the opposite sides of the field is considered better than characters whose extra balloons are bunched together due to the opponent being unable to cover both ends quickly enough. Typically, Father Strength and the secret characters sans Temperance are considered overpowered, Empress/World/Daughter Strength/High Priestess are considered the best of the normal characters, and everyone below them is significantly less effective with Fool and Devil being Joke Characters (unless the players are doing mirror matches, where the strategy to win with Fool/Devil becomes quite different).
• Game-Breaker:
  • Father Strength in III has an attack pattern on par with final bosses Tower and Fortune.
  • Several of the items in Magical Drop F. Magician's power is a notable one, completely randomizing the player's held balloons.
  • Death in Magical Drop V, according to NakaTeleeli, though one could argue that this is more of an A.I. Breaker. Either way, a patch overhauled the characters' attack patterns.
• Macekre: Somehow, the horrendous dialogue from the English arcade versions of II and III manage to be the least of their worries; the localization cuts and/or neuters gameplay modes from both games for no easily-discernible reason. Diehards generally advise playing the Japanese versions over the English versions even if you completely lack knowledge of Japanese.
• Memetic Mutation: The World has a distinctive bouncy animation that has become very, very widespread on the Internet.
• Obvious Beta:
  • The arcade version of Magical Drop II obviously intended to have pre-battle banter between characters that was cut at the last minute, as each battle starts with chibis of the competing characters that do nothing for a few awkward seconds before transitioning to the battle screen. Indeed, unused sprites of the characters' mouths moving are in the game, and both the Super Famicom and Saturn ports add conversations to these screens.
  • Magical Drop V had a whole host of issues, from the mundane (control issues, crashes, glitchy AI) to the bizarre (the game randomly failing to recognize that you're playing a purchased copy instead of the demo).
• Popular Game Variant: One noteworthy house rule that has emerged among the competitive community is mandating that all matches are Mirror Matches, as Character Tiers are rigid enough that banning the likes of Tower, Hermit, Fortune, and Father Strength still leaves only a fraction of the cast viable. This changes character selection to something closer to selecting a stage or gameplay mode, with high-tier characters creating an environment more favorable to winning via knockout while low-tier characters create matches that are decided by Quota.
• Porting Disaster:
  • For all of their extra features, the Super Famicom ports are frustrating to play for anyone used to other versions because of the reduced chain leniency. The first game's port makes it so difficult to add to a chain that you might be better off sticking to "guaranteed" Puyo Puyo-esque clears, while the second game's port is slightly more lenient (in the sense that adding to a chain in real time is actually possible) but nowhere near close to the arcade version.
  • The Game Boy Color Magical Drop has no 1P vs CPU mode, which is a staple of virtually every other game in the series; players have to make do with Endless and Player vs Player. It also has horrendous audio, plus slight readability issues due to how small the balloons are.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • This game was one of the first games Tony Taka, a famous eroge illustrator, worked as a character designer when he worked for Data East before going bankrupt.
  • The JPN voice cast include people like Nobuyuki Hiyama (Chariot in II), Takehito Koyasu (Chariot, Hanged Man and Hierophant in III), Yuichi Nagashima (Magician in III), Haruna Ikezawa (Death and Lovers in III), Mina Tominaga (Judgement, Temperance and Wheel of Fortune in III), Yuko Mizutani (Justice in in F), Satomi Koorogi (Lovers in F), etc.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop:
  • Magical Drop F reduces difficulty by downplaying character-specific traits outside of Limit Breaks, reducing the playfield by a column, and using much simpler color patterns.
  • Magical Drop VI, outside of the frustration-laden Path of Destiny mode, is by far the easiest game in the series. The fact that the CPU doesn't warp (or move particularly fast in general) means that intermediate and above players will easily breeze through CPU battles.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike:
  • Not only does the AI in Magical Drop III start bending the rules sooner than its predecessor^note Teleporting is exclusive to Black Pierrot in II's default difficulty, but the AI will start using it much earlier in III, the fact that less balloons are sent in general means that it'll take much more to down the opponent.
  • In Magical Drop V (at least after the final update), as despite the rampant Artificial Stupidity, attack power is nerfed so much that it takes expert-level chaining to win matches via clogging the opponent's field.
• Sequelitis:
  • Magical Drop F and V are generally seen as vastly inferior sequels to II and especially III: the former for its overpowered character abilities, and the latter for (among other things) launching with a variety of Game Breaking Bugs and only having a few of them fixed before the plug was pulled on support.
  • Magical Drop VI is seen as better than V, if only because VI doesn't have the showstopping bugs that V has, but is otherwise viewed as a miserable game that fumbles everything except the actual puzzle gameplay. For example, single-player uses the Magical Drop II ruleset, with the more popular Magical Drop III ruleset being locked to a "competitive" multiplayer option. Fake Longevity is everywhere, from the obnoxious number of unlockable characters (on launch, Lovers was the only character that you start with for multiplayer battles) to having to separately unlock the characters for the standard 1P vs CPU gauntlet. Then there's Path of Destiny, an obnoxiously-long, Scrappy Mechanic-laden corruption of III's board game mode that the game expects you to clear dozens of times for its unlockable art. To top it off, the CPU is worthless, meaning that battling AI opponents isn't even particularly exciting. The game was enough of a bomb for the physical Limited Edition release to be cancelled outside of Japan.
• Surprise Difficulty: Don't let the charming character designs and easy-to-understand gameplay fool you. The skill floor is up there with the likes of Panel de Pon, demanding lightning-fast reflexes and execution to get far in the game.
• That One Boss:
  • Father Strength in II is notorious for having particularly strong AI, resulting in many runs getting cut short right before confronting Empress.
  • Hermit in III has a drop pattern that forces the edges down further than the center, forcing players to move across their board from one edge to the other to try and even out the field, often to no avail.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Yup, Strength looks and acts like a boy in Magical Drop III but is a young girl.
• Woolseyism: The Aeon Genesis translation of the Super Famicom Magical Drop 2 is easily the best translation the series has seen, being night-and-day from the long-lost Data East translation that is every bit as butchered as Magical Drop III's arcade version. It remains mostly faithful while deviating in certain areas to retain the spirit of the original script, such as interpreting the characters' Verbal Tics into equivalent speech quirks, changing a mention of a first-grade learning book to Hooked on Phonics (which, for bonus points, was aggressively advertised in North America around the time that a actual SNES localization would have released), and translating Hirameki^note Hirameki means "flash", but in the context of the game mode is closer to "flash of inspiration" Mode to "Ah HA!" Mode instead of simply Flash Mode or Puzzle Mode.