Retro Review - Magical Pop'n

And I continue with the reviews of the platform genre games. What I like about this kind of games is that besides being quite fun, they are games of short duration and in a few hours or even in an hour you can finish it. And if you are a very tryhard pro-player, you can do a speed-run of some game of this genre and finish it in a few minutes. But the topic of speed-runs is something I would like to talk about in another post, today I will talk about a platform game with a quite childish aesthetic, since it is a game with a quite striking color palette. It is a pretty nice game that will give us great moments of entertainment.

Today's Retro Review is about: Magical Pop'n.

I think everyone knows what I'm going to say and that is that this game has a very simple plot (if they gave me $ 1 for every time I say this sentence, I would have a lot of money), but it is a fact quite accurate that the games of some years ago and especially games focused on platforms, have a plot too simple and only explain what is necessary for our actions are justified. The story of this game focuses on the princess of a kingdom, which is a young girl with magical abilities, she lives in a kingdom, when suddenly it is attacked by an evil wizard, which steals a magical object of great power. Thus, our protagonist embarks on an unparalleled adventure in which she must defeat the evil villain and recover the magic object.

Magical Pop'n is a video game that stands out greatly for its colorfulness, the color palette is quite striking and gives this game a "childish" style, but this "childish" style does not take away your desire to play it, as it is still a very good platform and action game. Besides having that childish style and with many colors, it also has certain anime elements, and this can be seen more clearly in the "cinematics" of the game, where this style is more visible.

The scenarios have good details, it is not a game that stands out for its great graphic quality, but despite its limitations, the developers of this game made an effort to create a game whose graphic style is quite nice to see. The wide variety of scenarios, each with a very different theme and style, makes for a much more entertaining gaming experience.

The characters also present good designs, they maintain a "chibi" drawing style, which, as I have mentioned many times, consists in that the characters present a drawing in which their head is bigger compared to their body, thus increasing that "childish" style. However, in Magical Pop'n this style fits very well, besides having character designs, mostly original, and with very fluid and varied animations, especially that of the main character of the game. The pixelart work in this game stands out a lot, and has aged very well over the years, which is a merit that few games from several generations ago can fulfill. It also has very expressive animations that add humor to the game. Magical Pop'n is a game especially focused on children, but it is still a game that can be played by anyone of any age.

The sound aspect of Magical Pop'n is very good, its music is able to transmit that "magical atmosphere" which is very present in its plot, as well as that sense of adventure which we will live with our protagonist. There are many melodies with very calm tones and some others with much faster rhythms, which fit in many of the situations and moments of this game. There is a particular melody called "Gift Of Magic" that reminded me of the melody "World Map Theme" from Final Fantasy IX ( My favorite Final Fantasy).

Magical Pop'n, like the other games I've been talking about these two weeks, still maintains the basic mechanics of more conventional platform games, but just like the other games mentioned above, it is equally entertaining (even more with the animations performed by our main character and some secondary characters). Although this game, unlike others in the platform genre, Magical Pop'n focuses a little more on action, since Princess (that's the name of the main character), is equipped with a sword that she will use to kill her enemies. At first I thought she would only use magic to eliminate enemies, but I was surprised to see that she uses a sword as her main weapon.

Likewise, being a platform game, Princess is very skillful in terms of movements, being able to jump and run with great agility. As expected, the mechanics and control over our character is quite easy, in fact, I think that of all the games of the adventure genre of which I have reviewed in recent weeks, Magical Pop'n is the easiest of all, but that does not make it a boring game, on the contrary, it is quite entertaining due to the many situations that Princess will live.

In addition to the main weapon of Princess, you can also get secondary weapons such as bombs, which the typical item that causes damage to all enemies on screen, you can also use ice and fire skills, also the typical items that will heal the life bar of our character and items that will recover the amount of magic that we have used. The game consists of several phases, which will always have a sub-boss of low difficulty and at the end of the phase, the final boss, which logically will have a slightly higher difficulty level, but in itself, Magical Pop'n is not a game with a very high difficulty curve, it is quite consistent and balanced.

Magical Pop'n is really a little gem of video games, which I'm sure few people know about, and one of those games that is worth playing at least once. It doesn't have much replayability, but it is highly recommended.