Money Puzzle Exchanger

The Good
If you’re familiar with upside down Tetris-styled games, this one you can get the hang of in a trice. If you’re scratching your head in confusion there are easy instructions. For a varied type of gameplay, you have some versus modes and a continuous mode. The gameplay itself is thrilling as you match and merge the coins together, it’s a pleasure to watch that value increase and turn into points. Your dexterity will truly be tested as you try to clean out that money as fast as you can. For presentation just look at the characters' comical reactions, typical anime series style. Brilliant fun.

The Bad
The first thing you’ll notice that will let you down is that you can only play as Sakura the exchanger and Asahi the debtmiser in the single player and continuous modes. Other characters can only be played in the two player modes. In fact you don’t really get much background information on the characters. You don’t even get any plot or characters’ endings, just a plain credits screen. Good luck finding the manga and folder related to the game.

Music tunes fall short on variety and seem to repeat with short loops and get reused for most characters. You only have a couple of unique tunes for particular characters. There should have been one tune per character.

The Bottom Line
Before merging tiles and objects was common on mobile games, we got this. Despite being a Puzzle Bobble or Magical Drop clone, this title has its own sort of charm to make any retro player that loves money want to play. Doesn’t really have the lasting replayability that you would hold dear, but it is worth a try. It’s a miracle that it did come out at all, no thanks to Data East’s lawsuit. But that’s all in the past now that this title has been generously ported on newer consoles, so you have multiple opportunities to play it.