It's new to me: Magical Pop'n
Another in a long line of quality games that never made it outside of Japan during the 16-bit era.
This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
You might have nostalgic memories of your time with the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, which unarguably sported a deep library of instant classics and games that have stood the test of time. Did you know that North America still got hosed on that system, in general? The SNES received 717 games there, while Japan had 1,448 before you even get into the couple hundred Satellaview titles, for those who bothered to purchase that add-on hardware.
One thousand four hundred and forty eight Super Famicom games. That’s more than twice as many as North Americans were able to play on their version of the system! One of those many games that remained exclusive to Japan is Magical Pop’n, but since we live in the future, there are workarounds for that outside of expensive imports. Magical Pop’n might be a collector’s item that will cost you well over $400 for an SFC original cartridge on the secondary market — more like $2,000 if you want it to come with a box — but it’s also a game with an unofficially translated ROM into English, courtesy Aeon Genesis. Unless you’re a collector, that’s where you’re going to want to go.
Magical Pop’n was developed by Polestar, a studio that doesn’t have its own Wikipedia page, and published by Pack-in-Video, which was eventually merged into Victor Entertainment to become Victor Entertainment Software, which is to say another company that most people are not aware of unless they played Chulip or are very into games with Japanese titles and no Wikipedia pages, either. You know, in case you were wondering how this game ended up being a rarity in the first place.
Magical Pop’n was the second game from Polestar, and they would develop just five before shutting their doors. You might not know the studio (I didn’t!), but you know some of the people who worked for it: Yasuhiro Wada, for instance, is credited as a producer on Magical Pop’n, and was a producer, as well as responsible for Original Planning, on the first Harvest Moon title as well. While a significant chunk of Wada’s career revolved around Harvest Moon (now Story of Seasons) games, that’s far from all he’s been attached to: he was the president of Marvelous Entertainment, then their CCO, and then moved over to Goichi Suda’s Grasshopper Manufacture as their COO and a producer for a spell, before leaving there to form Toybox Inc., which is made up of former Marvelous staff and responsible for franchises like Deadly Premonition.
Takeshi Suzuki — not to be confused with a developer by the same name at FromSoftware — and Tomio Kanazawa are two other devs for Magical Pop'n with résumés as lengthy as Wada’s. Suzuki has written scripts (Nostalgia, Grandia III), he’s worked on art and graphics (Bomberman Generation, Grandia II, Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean), he’s been a programmer (Virtua Fighter and Virtua Fighter 2), and he’s worked as both a planner and a designer (Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Super Swing Golf). Kanazawa ended up working for many of the same studios and publishers as Wada, with credits on dozens of games that range from localization work (Muramasa: The Demon Blade, Little King’s Story), to marketing (Magical Pop’n, Harvest Moon), to artwork (Reel Fishing II and III), to production (Flower Sun and Rain, Deadly Premonition, Contact).
A game by an unknown developer, but not by unknown developers. Even if they were all relatively close to the start of their careers way back in 1995.
Magical Pop’n doesn’t necessarily add anything brand new to the action platformer genre, but you don’t have to innovate to be worthwhile. The gameplay is a lot of fun, with various attack options at your disposal, and the platforming feels slick and fast. It all looks good, too — not quite, say, DoReMi Fantasy good, since it leans more PC Engine than late-life Super Famicom in its presentation, but everything animates well and the art design is top notch bubbly fantasy. It received some criticism at the time from outlets like Famitsu for its difficulty and for being “old-fashioned,” but it has rated better as an import title, and in retrospective reviews from outlets like Destructoid and Hardcore Gaming 101, as well. Famitsu also likened it to Monster World-style games, but I don’t know if that’s really true. Yes, there’s some of that proto-metroidvania exploration and backtracking going on, but everything moves much faster in Magical Pop’n, and the RPG elements of Monster World aren’t there, either.
You play as the Princess of To’ahl, and the game opens with her defending the king from an attack. She then goes off to find who is responsible for said attack to make sure there won’t be a second one, and does so through running, jumping, spin-jumping, short-ranged attacks, using her sword like a pogo stick to bounce off of enemies, and magic. Lots of magic!
You have magic points, 100 of them, and those points are refilled by collecting stars. Unless you’re really spamming those magic attacks constantly, you should be able to have enough on you at all times thanks to the refills to avoid completely running out, unless it’s at the very end of a boss fight or something. But you should use them when you have them, regardless, because they’re supremely useful. While the Princess has a short attack range with her sword, her magic spells give her opportunities to attack from a distance. Her basic magic attack uses two points, and fires off a small magic bullet in a straight line. The next spell she finds lets her lob a magic grenade in an arc at a cost of four points. Then there’s a three-way ice shot, flame balls you can fire continuously, and the alternate, more expensive versions of each of these spells, too. While your initial spell will shoot a lengthy and much wider beam of blue magic for 10 magic points when you press the Select button, the others are all screen-consuming attacks. Using these too often will absolutely drain your supply of magic points, but if you time their usage right and ration your points well, you’ll find you’re using them as often as you need.
The game is tough, but not impossible: you just need to learn to not be too reckless, and to remember that you have magic spells that let you attack from range. This is especially important since there is no save function, and you need to complete the game’s six stages in one go. You do have unlimited continues, at least, and extra lives are, while not plentiful, not necessarily rare, either. It just takes some work to get them, as you need to collect three little statues of the Princess’ face in order to acquire one. There are also permanent health upgrades that you’ll be happy you grabbed as the levels get longer and the bosses grow in size and speed.
It’s probably worth pointing out, too, that it takes around an hour to 90 minutes to complete a run of Magical Pop’n, so it’s not as if having to finish the whole thing in one playthrough is some daunting, day-spanning task. It has a real arcade platformer feel to it, between the difficulty, the length, and the level design, so maybe that explains some of why Famitsu likened it to the Monster World games, even if it’s not a perfect comparison.
You rotate between your magic spells with the L and R shoulder buttons, but spells aren’t the only thing in that menu. You also have a grappling hook for grabbing on to objects on the wall you can swing from — an act that can be very annoying if you don’t figure out the timing for launching yourself up and away, but once you get the hang of it, it’s simple enough, and it doesn’t cost magic points to use, either — and a late-game move that lets you utilize the Princess’ spin jump for wall climbing. With the exception of the first spell, all of these end up having environmental uses, not just combat ones, and since you acquire one new power per stage, they all play a little differently even outside of the differences in location.
My only real complaint with Magical Pop’n is that the audio mix seems a little off. The Princess’ voice acting adds to the game, and comes by way of a former idol, Ai Iijima (who tragically died from pneumonia at 36 shortly after her retiring from that industry — if you want to learn more about her, this video shifts to a focus on her life about halfway through), but it’s also shoved to the forefront over the soundtrack. There’s some good music in here that really fits the cute-but-also-dark aesthetic, just like the voice acting does, but it’s difficult to hear with ease without making the sound effects far too loud. Sadly, the audio options are for sound tests and switching from stereo to mono only, so you’re stuck that way.
This is, overall, a small thing, though. Magical Pop’n flows well, controls exceptionally outside of the aforementioned grappling hangup, and is fun to look at. It’s worth seeking out to play, if you’re into action platformers and hidden — well, from North Americans — gems. Just, you know. Maybe get the unofficial translation, not an original, secondhand cartridge that costs at least as much as any platform you might want to play it on.
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