Alternative Title: "Tetris, But It's Rigged In Your Favor".

Decent enough competitive Tetris game, though the central gimmick means that if you have any Tetris know-how, you really can't be stopped. Basically, instead of your opponent dropping garbage blocks down your well on successful line clears, the game will sometimes drop really weird pieces, much larger and oddly-shaped compared to your usual Tetrominoes.

This has the potential for abuse, overwhelming a know-nothing player. But in execution, you run into the opposite issue where this makes the game too easy. See, the weird pieces will always slot neatly into the holes currently on your gameboard. So if you have decent pattern recognition, and you can move quickly enough, you can turn the tables on your opponent and waste 'em. Maybe that's more interesting in competitive, but in singleplayer, it just results in a quick campaign.

The Big Bad Wolf's one of your opponents, tho. Always nice to see him.

i wish my adjectives had been a bit more varied, but i was indeed fascinated by the minutiae of Magical Tetris Challenge. forgive me for blazing through the story, as it's uninteresting to me. i do believe that the base difficult dipswitches for arcade mode were much easer than the settings for the n64. there's a story somewhere about why the NAOMI system hosted such gorgeous games with 3d environments, and why the aleck64 seemed to be like mostly okay -- why SEGA poured more money and devs into it. the TAS confirmed for me that 4-widing is the meta, i just wasn't able to properly execute here. we also didn't see the high-clock magical pieces, which are n-minos for larger and larger values of n, as well as disconnected shapes. does the multiplayer format really support someone getting to that clock level? who knows. the shared next piece was apparently cribbed from Tetris Battle Gaiden (1993, BPS), which i'll have to investigate. i truly wish for a demonstration of the wallkicks possible with the strange kickmaps, but i don't know of such a video. i would encourage those interested to check out @Oshisaure, who i believe wrote the kicktable map and has streamed MTC a few time. fuck disney, but this stuff is cool. is this on fightcade?? 8/10

Playing this game feels kinda odd. It's a Tetris game that clearly precedes whatever insane "guidelines" the Tetris Company came up with by the 2000s. The game feels like it's balanced around gobbling up quarters with it having some absurd difficulty levels even on "normal mode" (could only imagine the hard mode).
The game loves handing you piece after piece after piece of the same one at points (even in the endless mode where there's no "battles"). It feels like the random number generator isn't as forgiving as "modern" Tetris. But wow this game looks visually incredible. Not bothering with any sort of 3D gameplay allows the power of the 2d graphics to pop. The soundtrack is kinda crazy at points going in a lot of directions. The story felt a little nonsense but apparently the Mickey one is last chronologically and I'm not playing all 4 campaigns.
Apparently this shares a director with Zelda's 2D Capcom games and also Breath of The Wild and Tears of the Kingdom?? I didn't realize this before playing and huh it's his directorial debut. I'm a sucker for puzzle games so I enjoyed this. Shame it didn't get an American release on PS1 so I had to play this at 50 FPS due to Mickey Mouse (haha) "PAL" monitors. Running a game at 50 Hz makes you not a real country.
7/10

One week after the previous Tetris game comes another officially licensed Tetris game – this one starring Mickey Mouse, even though the title surprisingly lacks any mention of either Mikey or Disney.

This isn’t just a regular Tetris game (although standard Tetris is an option), but takes on more of a Puyo Puyo format a you battle an opponent.

As you clear lines, you’ll send “bad blocks” to opponent, which can be countered by them quickly clearing a line, going back and forth until left alone for long enough. These will then cause non-standard Tetris pieces to appear, consisting of more than 4 blocks. These are awkward to place, with some being large squares, to mess you up.

However, it’s not all bad. Filling up your power bar will erase everything above a certain line, while doing well will reward you with a straight 5 block piece, which can be used to score a “Pentris” by clearing 5 lines at once.

It’s a hectic back and forth, but one I quite enjoy. You get to play the story from the view of Mickey, Minnie, Donald and Goofy, with Tetris used to resolve disputes. These are done on “Tetris machines” which fit into the classic Mikey aesthetic surprisingly well, with nice animation on the top and characters operating the controls.

On top of regular Tetris, you can also play “Upside Tetris” (which is one of the letter “Types” in other Tetris games) where blocks will appear at the bottom as you play.

I can definitely see why some people wouldn’t be keen on this version of Tetris, due to all the awkward blocks, but I personally like it a lot.