Magical Drop VI Review (Persona Au Gratin)
Sadly, this Magical Drop really errs on the side of being bloated and padded out with things that shamelessly, flagrantly waste the player's time. If you play Magical Drop 3 you'll see that Live 2D or whatever is being used to trim the cost of animations for characters does not compare to the actual effort of actually animating the characters in a way that is worth a damn.
The major things that Magical Drop 6 does are just strive to have a lot of unlock conditions that are clearly made to check a block on a features list. "Dozens/Hundreds of Hours of Fun!" This game looks, sounds and plays like a horrible Mobage. If the sound seems like hyperbole, try playing Taito's Puzzle Bobble mobile games for the musical similarities. Which isn't a problem until you get to getting to spend your time on one of the most uninteresting and unfun Board Game modes where the CPU can get items that blow you back 7 spaces or just outright swap your position on the board. You have to hope that, in the completely incompetent designer's vision, that you land on VERY RARE coin spaces. You can't get coins by actually playing Magical Drop and being good at it, no, you have to get LUCKY while the CPU was given way more consideration for their ability to win.
This is just not a good game. It's cheaply animated, it refuses to err on the side of the player or even be remotely fun while putting unlock conditions for an online that, for whatever reason, did not even have the ability to invite friends.
The reason I'm being so scathing is honestly just the padding. Okay, you can't hire animators or have to use a crappy front end... to make modes like Survival or Puzzle or the "Road of Destiny" or Path or whatever... and just have them needle the player with very high demand tasks, and they are tasks cause they sure as hell aren't interesting or fun, is absurd.
The story mode is a bloated set of exposition that really lacks any of the fun of the original games, as perverse and horny as they were they at least had fun with the sublimation that was clearly going on with whatever BDSM and sexuality was running through the heads of the designers.
This game is just, in its current state, entirely too willing to make huge gameplay demands while being completely willing to waste the player's time with gameplay tasks design to draw out the game clock. Don't buy this game.