It's new to me: Money Puzzle Exchanger

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.

Money Puzzle Exchanger — or Money Idol Exchanger, as it’s known in Japan — is a combination of ideas that other developers had, mashed together into something that looks a lot like those games, but is markedly different. The most obvious one, due to the sustained popularity and existence of the series, is Data East’s Magical Drop — the similarities, at least on their face, were enough that Data East actually sued the developer and publisher of Money Puzzle Exchanger, for a copyright violation.

The lesser-known side of things comes from Moujiya, a falling block puzzle game where the blocks were yen coins, which would be grouped together with other like coins, eventually disappearing from the board. Face took this idea of grouping coins together from Moujiya, added it to Magical Drop’s mechanic for pulling blocks from the top yourself to later add them back in and clear them where you pleased, and something new was made out of it. Something that would end up more popular than Moujiya, and arguably more fun to play than Magical Drop, since it added a layer of complexity that made the similarities more surface level than anything else.

It’s not that Money Puzzle Exchanger’s developer, Face, didn’t copy Magical Drop’s specific mechanic: falling block puzzle games were the way of the world in 1997, and Magical Drop, which had released its first entry in 1995, differentiated itself from the vast majority of puzzle titles on the market by having you pull like blocks down yourself, and then fire them back up toward the top of the screen as you pleased in order to try to clear them. It’s more that Face “copied” this mechanic in the same way that Columns “copied” Tetris: those two games are significantly different in how they play, but yes, blocks do fall from the top, and they match in some way and you clear them. Imagine if Taito had sued everyone else who tried to make a shoot ‘em up after Space Invaders hit!

There are two other items that make it (1) funny and (2) clear why Data East sued, though. One, Data East was on the defending side in a copyright violation lawsuit against Capcom a few years earlier, due to Fighter’s History and its similarities to Street Fighter II — similarities that went so far as the design documents for the game outright referencing Street Fighter II on multiple occasions. Data East successfully defended against the suit despite their egregiousness, with the strategy being to argue that the things that were copied weren’t actually copyrightable. The courts agreed based on the idea that granting Capcom victory here would have given them a monopoly over the idea of martial arts in fighting games. Data East likely got the idea for this strategy from when they lost their own lawsuit against the developer of a clone of Karate Champ, Epyx’s World Karate Championship — they lost due to the same principles, with the idea being that no one could own the concept of karate or representations of it.

Now, what gave Data East an edge — or a workaround — of these principles in their lawsuit against Face was that Data East had paid for the rights to the very game concepts they used in Magical Drop. Data East had credited a license for the mechanics of Magical Drop to “Russ Ltd,” a company from Russia that had developed a game called Drop-Drop. Now, Magical Drop isn’t just Drop-Drop with new art direction and new characters, but it does use the central concept of Drop-Drop’s gameplay. Which is exactly how Money Puzzle Exchanger and Magical Drop are related, too, since they might share this core mechanic but were otherwise completely different in more ways than, say, Fighter’s History and Street Fighter II were. That there was a copyright of the mechanic, though, and that Data East had at first paid to license it for the original Magical Drop and its sequel before outright purchasing the license from Russ, strengthened their case.

It also helped that Face went bankrupt before the courts could come to a decision, hastening a settlement. Would Data East have actually won this case, or, like in other cases involving them, would the side that filed suit have come away the loser had it been allowed to reach a non-settlement conclusion? That’s all unclear, as is whether the lawsuit is what hastened Face’s bankruptcy. “A small developer that makes Neo Geo games ran out of money” is not exactly a unique tale, you know.

Good news, though. Despite the bankruptcy, and despite the lawsuit, Money Puzzle Exchanger not only continued to exist rather than be pulled from arcades and shelves, but saw a re-release by Hamster via the Neo Geo-specific Arcade Archives line on Playstation 4 and Switch. This version includes both the Japanese edition with the yen coins, and the North American version with more generic coins that show off denominations so you can still play exactly the same way. There’s just no quarter coin, you know, since the denominations are based on the yen: 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, and 500 are the denominations you’ll be working with.

A basic overview of how Money Puzzle Exchanger works: you have a character moving around the bottom of the screen, left to right — they don’t loop all the way around, like in Magical Drop, but instead hit the edge of the screen and must go back the other way. They can grab coins from the column they’re in and hold onto them to then shoot them back up elsewhere. If there’s one coin of a type, you grab one coin. If four of a type are stacked vertically, you grab all four.

You need enough coins in a specific denomination to add up to the next denomination, and they’ll be… wait for it… exchanged. Five of the 1 coins add up to a 5 coin. Two 5 coins gets you a 10. Five of the 10s gets you a 50, two 50s gets you a 100, five 100s gets you a 500, and two 500s gets you 1,000 points and the two coins cleared from the board. You can also clear more than is needed of a type — six 1s or four 50s or what have you — which can be helpful for clearing more coins off of the board at once. Though, clearing more than two 500s doesn’t get you more than the 1,000 points, so be mindful of that.

Easy enough, right? There are layers! For one, you can’t just chain in the same way you would in Magical Drop, because matching like coins, save for when you clear 500s, creates a new coin. Which means you need to account for the new coin appearing when you’re attempting to make chains, as, it could actually block you from securing said chains depending on its placement on the board. You also can have the coins touching each other in any way, so long as there is direct contact: you don’t need five in a straight line, vertically or diagonally, or for the grouping to at least begin vertically for a certain number of coins to count. You can just fire off some coins at a blob of them, so long as they’re connected, and they’ll clear. Which means you can get some huge clears, depending on how you handle things.

The way to ensure that this happens, other than very careful planning and a little luck, is with the power-up coins. One of these is the Erase Coin, which shows up on screen as a blue coin with “ER” on it. This coin will erase every coin of the same type that’s directly above the ER coin, but it doesn’t just work on its own. You need a matching ER coin to enable this power, which in turn means that a single ER coin can make your life more difficult until its partner shows up. Here’s a short video of the ER coin in action indirectly causing a significant chain, as it cleared away every 5 coin and allowed for the other types to eventually cascade.

The other kind of coin is the Rank Up (RU), which acts similarly to the ER coin in terms of how you get it to do its thing, but instead of erasing every coin of the same type above it when it’s played, you instead increase the denomination of every coin of the same type. Which means you can trigger some serious chains when used right — and create a ton of 500 coins all at once — as shown in this video:

My score was 18,971 at the time I used the RU coin, and, after the 5-chain ended, it sat at 56,729, and my opponent was defeated. Another way to put it is that, at the time of this match-up, my top score in Hi Score mode in Arcade Archives was 44,886 — this single chain courtesy the RU coin was worth almost that on its own.

What about if you have an item ready to go, but barely any coins to play with? If you want to maximize your scoring opportunity, you can press down on the stick (or D-pad, at home) to add additional lines of coins to the board, just like how in Puzzle League you can pump additional lines in from the bottom if you’re having trouble making matches with what’s available. This allows you to build — or at least give you more of an opportunity to build — a more significant chain than you could if you had just three or four lines of coins at the time you’ve managed to corral a pair of ER or RU coins together.

There are multiple game modes. A two-player competitive mode, of course, as well as a single-player version of that where you face the computer, one character at a time, until you reach the end of the story. The story is… not really told in the arcade version of Money Puzzle Exchanger, and honestly it doesn’t make a ton of sense even in the versions it is told in. Some people got very wealthy and evil, and to stop them, you will also get very wealthy, but presumably not evil. Read some theory, you guys, that’s not how this works. You all end up evil.

There’s also the endless mode, where you go at it alone and just try to survive as long as possible, and are awarded points based on that. Not points in the tens of thousands of points range, but like “you survived for this long with this many chains, here’s 35 points,” and those are used on the high score screen. Oddly, in the Arcade Archives release, this endless mode is the one that the basic online leaderboards will use — only with the bigger point total rather than the one Money Puzzle Exchanger features — but for the Hi Score leaderboard ACA tracks, specifically, it uses the story mode.

The game’s music is exceptionally catchy, and perfect for what is an intense puzzle game where you not only have to setup chains and think about where pieces go, but do some basic math while you’re handling all of that. It gets a little intense sometimes, and can even sound like it belongs in a Mega Man game instead, but it fits: they’re both very stressful game environments, after all. The art, too, catches the eye, which makes a lot of sense: it was drawn by a team of artists, including Atsuko Ishida, who worked on various anime and OVA like Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion, Ranma ½, Fist of the North Star, and Magic Knight Rayearth. Ishida also has a few video game credits under her belt, too, such as the Sega Saturn adaptation of Magic Knight Rayearth, the PC Engine Super CD-ROM² detective adventure game, Private Eye Dol, the fighting game Asuka 120% Excellent: BURNING Fest., and Money Puzzle Exchanger.

While not a classic in the sense that it was a hit, Money Puzzle Exchanger is certainly a classic of the genre, in terms of its quality. Chances are good that you missed out on this the first time around, but that it’s here now, in the present, means that you can make good on that. And you should, too, given that it built on the gameplay of Magical Drop in a way that makes for a more fascinating and engaging puzzler, one that’ll have you dropping in more credits just to give it another go.

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