Best Games - Money Puzzle Exchanger / Money Idol Exchanger
If you’re like me, you think about Magical Drop 3 more than a person really should. Almost immediately after thinking about Magical Drop 3, you think of Money Puzzle Exchanger. It turns out, Face, the developer of Money Puzzle Exchanger, might be like me.
The similarities between Money Puzzle Exchanger and Magical Drop are maybe what you might call legally actionable. Both games play very similarly. Circles that march down from the top of the screen and you as the player have the ability to grab one, or a similar group of those circles, pull them down to the bottom, move them to a new column and fire them back up to the top. If you make certain combinations of circles touch at the top, they will clear, or in the case of Money Puzzle Exchanger, they will be replaced by a circle of a different value.
That’s the biggest difference here. In Magical Drop, making a line of three or more of the same color bubble will cause those bubbles, and any other similarly colored bubble touching them, to pop. In Money Puzzle Exchanger those circles represent coins and matching, say, five coins with a one on them will convert them all into a single coin with a value of five. Two fives make a ten, five tens makes a fifty, two fifties makes a hundred, and five hundreds makes a five hundred. Match two five hundreds and they will disappear, clearing them from the board permanently.
While that all sounds sort of straight forward, imagine trying to make several matching patterns like that at high speed. Magical Drop can be difficult, but matching colors is trivial compared to that.
On the surface, the gameplay of these two games might seem extremely similar, so similar that Data East may have sued Face over it, the experience of playing Money Puzzle Exchanger is very different from Magical Drop. There is so much more strategy and planning involved. The action is not as fast paced, but maybe even more hectic. More mentally stressful. In a good way.
For a moment I thought that Money Puzzle Exchanger might have the wackier cast of fun characters, but they both post up a good showing in that department.
So, Money Puzzle Exchanger is a lot like Magical Drop. And that’s great. But it also plays differently, and maybe is a bit more difficult. And that’s also great.
It’s a lot like one of the other best games, but I don’t think that’s disqualifying. Money Puzzle Exchanger is different enough that I think it stands on its own as one of the best games.