 c- that's drunk. When you walked into an arcade back in the day, you expected to see certain types of games. You had your Beat Em Ups like X-Men and Ninja Turtles, you had your fighting games like Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat, you had sports games like NBA Jam, maybe you had a racing game or two, or a light gun gameplay like Lethal Enforcers or Cabal or something like that. At least those were always MY expectations! What I didn't understand back then is why anyone would ever want to play an arcade platformer at that point. Home consoles were doing just fine with platformers, whereas all those other genres I listed really benefited from the arcade setup, with huge sprites and loud as hell music and sound effects. So when it came to games like Willow or Three Wonders or Magical Crystals, which is what you see here, I didn't even acknowledge these games at the time. I mean come on, I had stuff like Super Mario World and Mega Man X and Super Metroid at home. I don't need to waste my precious quarters on platformers. Fast forward to 2020 and now I feel like I'm scrambling to make up for lost time because a lot of these games are a freaking blast to play. I looked at Willow a few weeks ago and Magical Crystals is another one that's well worth checking out, and it's another arcade game that never received any kind of home console release. This one was developed by Kaneko, who had a hand in making the Chester Cheetah games for Super Nintendo as well as the unreleased SNES game featuring former President Clinton's cat named Sox. Kaneko is usually associated with Taito, and yeah, for a lack of better phrasing Magical Crystals just has a Taito feel to it. I think it's the Bubble Bobble style color palette they've got going on here. Anyway, this is a two player top down run and gun game, a precursor to stuff you'd see later on Super Nintendo like Pocky and Rocky. One token gives you three lives, there's one button to fire and one button to jump that you use to get through six levels broken down into three stages apiece, two platforming stages before a boss fight. You also get weird little bonus games at the end of each level featuring whatever this thing is doing with this rope. Get a room dude. The goal of each stage is to collect these prism things within a time limit. They all contain trapped fairies, you free all the fairies and unlock the exit. There's also an assortment of power-ups you can find that'll help you out like a spread gun, a bomb gun, a speed boost, and my favorite, a power-up that makes you gigantic and lets you smash everything in your way. 16 years before the new Super Mario Bros. series started doing it. The action here is just as fun as it looks. Everything is fast, chaotic, and colorful. The only real issue I have is that you can only have a couple projectiles on screen at once. You might catch yourself pounding the hell out of the fire button only to find out that it does not matter. It's not like it's a technical limitation or anything. I mean, there's a gazillion other things happening on screen, running smoothly, no problem. Maybe they thought the game would be too easy if you were going off-contra all over the place. Maybe my favorite thing about this game is that it keeps track of stats, both for the time left on the clock, and a hit-miss ratio. I love stuff like that. It gives the game a ton of replay value, so if you're into doing specific runs, you can do the traditional speed run, or you can go for highest accuracy, so that's pretty cool. The thing is though, I'm not sure how the accuracy meter works with power-ups like the spread gun. I'm pretty sure that if any one of your three projectiles lands, it counts as a hit, but I can't be sure, and I don't even know how it would count for the power-up that makes you giant. More than that though, I kept wanting to play through this game just to see the boss fights, because they're really cool-looking. There's this Lisa Frank fire thing, there's a bowling ball Cyclops monster thing, there's this crazy cone crab thing, and there's even these goofy little mini bosses that pop up here and there. The settings are exactly what you'd expect, a fire stage and ice stage. I guess every game back then was contractually obligated to have these, but they still look nice. What's going to make or break your enjoyment of this game is probably obvious by now, if you're watching, it's the platforming. Anytime you play a game at a top-down angle like this, you're at the mercy of the shadow beneath you. The jump is reasonably forgiving, allowing you to make small adjustments in mid-air, which is absolutely essential considering how many moving platforms you have to land on, and even disappearing platforms too. The platforming can be a bastard. That's just the way it is with games like this, either the feel of the jump agrees with you, or it doesn't. That's true of every game with wonky platforming, everything from Landstalker to Super Mario RPG, and this game is no different. And yeah, there are definitely some pain in the ass jumps in this game, but I think it's just forgiving enough that it's not that big of a deal. So yeah, just a quick video about Magical Crystals, it's one of those arcade games I never see anyone talk about. I really dig the stat screen at the end of each stage. Highest accuracy I got in the stage was like 81%, I think, but I ended up going through six lives to get there. My one nitpick with this game is that it doesn't keep track of stats, cumulatively, it's just stage by stage, but whatever. This is still a fun two-player top-down run-a-gun arcade game that's well worth checking out. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.