Bomberman Generation (GameCube)

The Bomberman series is best known for its top-down battle mazes, but every now and then, the bomb throwing gameplay is transported into 3D play, Bomberman Generation being one such outing. This was by no means his first adventure with the greater freedom of movement 3D environments allow, but it does seem at times that Bomberman hasn’t quite found his niche with this style of gameplay.

The adventure begins when a spaceship carrying six bomb elements of immense yet unknown power is intercepted, causing it to lose the bomb elements. A group known as the Hige Hige Bandits try to take advantage of this to steal the elements for their own use, the bandits even recruiting powerful bombers known as the Crush Bombers to help with acquiring these mysterious items. Professor Ein, the individual who discovered the elements, enlists Bomberman for the task of tracking down all six bomb elements down, Bomberman going to different locations on the planet Tentacalls and trying to snag back the ones the Hige Hige Bandits got to first. The story seems like a pretty clear case of just serving to contextualize the boss battles and locations you’ll find along the journey, the game never really establishing what the Bomb Elements are or really letting you get to know any character beyond their purpose in the game, but having things like the Crush Bombers do at least ensure that each world has an extra villain on top of that area’s boss, and the Hige Hige Bandits will make up a few of the enemies you face in regular levels as well.

In Bomberman Generation, your abilities are actually pretty simple and tied to exactly what you might expect them to be. Bomberman is all about the bombs, all of his combat and puzzle-solving being some extension of their use. At its most basic, using a bomb just involves plonking it down in front of you and letting its fuse run out to explode in a small radius, but you can find items in levels that will allow you to place more bombs at a time, increase your movement speed to get away from the blast, and increase the explosion’s blast radius. You do lose these power-ups on death though, which is a shame because after so long spent with the boosts, Bomberman can feel rather slow and puny on revival, especially since the deaths often come during boss fights where there is no opportunity to get those boosts back. The whole game can be handled with the lowest yield bombs though, but it is a bit less exciting to feel so weak compared to your typical strength level. Even without boosts, you still have some options for how to use your bombs, Bomberman able to pick up a bomb after it has been placed to charge it up into a larger bomb that deals more damage and has a better blast radius than your basic bomb. There are many enemies only susceptible to these enhanced bombs, so fighting many of them isn’t just a case of dropping a bomb and running away. There is one more ability to consider though, the bombs packing an odd function where if you hold one overhead, it can activate a barrier that deflects projectiles, a function that doesn’t have enough uses to be invaluable but one that still must be known to avoid unnecessary trouble from some foes.

The bombs are at the heart of everything you do in Bomberman Generation, and that leads to some of the awkwardness found in play. In 2D Bomberman, you can always count on a bomb’s blast to reach a certain distance and the enemies only having certain routes of escape to avoid the blast. However, in Bomberman Generation, many foes can scamper away from the bomb before it blows, and many will since they’re smart enough to notice trouble. The free movement that makes the environments more natural makes hurting enemies harder, something that is often overcome by the throwing of bombs. Your throws don’t really go too far though, so you end up quite often close enough to an enemy to be hit by your bomb’s blast when your chuck it at them. Waiting out the fuse can make seemingly simple fights a bit harder, but bombs are also used in puzzle solving. There are quite a few moments in the game where you’re expected to use bombs as platforms, bouncing off the top of them to get from one area to the next. However, these require oddly specific bomb placements, with even a slight misplacement meaning your bounce won’t work properly. Other times it’s a matter of throwing bombs precisely during short time windows like a segment involving walking on a conveyor belt and trying to time your toss perfectly as it carries you along. Since throwing is your only real means to place a bomb after its been put down, many puzzles can be a bit aggravating as you find you aren’t quite pixel perfect to complete it.

Thankfully, there is a remedy to quite a few of these problems, although it does take a few levels to crop up. That remedy would be the game’s Charabom system. Charaboms are special creatures Bomberman can equip to change certain aspects of himself or the bombs he’s using, with some being so incredibly useful it changes the game. For example, once you get Pommy, you unlock remote bombs, meaning that you can place a bomb and choose exactly when you want it to explode, allowing you to clear the area when fighting an enemy, solve puzzles that have multiple steps with better control, and generally avoid any of the timing woes the fuse would give trying to place bombs perfectly in any situation. Not only that, but other Charaboms will give you abilities like kicking bombs around as a new way to move them, better throwing distance, or bombs that home in on enemies so they can’t escape. You can increase your stats with them too, some serving as guaranteed boosts to your blast radius or speed regardless of how many power-ups you collected, and later on in the game Charaboms can be combined so you have two useful abilities active at once. Earning Charaboms isn’t too difficult either, the player fighting them in a small minigame where they pick a few arrangements of attacking, defending, and using special attacks for their Charabom to use to hopefully counter the new Charabom they’re fighting to unlock. There are type weaknesses to give you an edge, but you can also just bring in a high-levelled Charabom who was powered up by collecting items in the level to unlock them pretty easily.

There are other minigames to find in the various levels of Bomberman Generation as well, and besides being brief shifts to the gameplay like outrunning a boulder or trying to skydive accurately onto a log, these also give your bombs more possibilities. Beating these will unlock components for adding elements to your bombs, these elements tending to find more use in the puzzle-solving than the enemy fighting side of the game. For example, you can unlock a Wind Bomb that will let you launch leaf platforms up into the air to ride, and Water Bombs can be used to put out fires. Once you do have the attribute bombs and the Charaboms with useful abilities, Bomberman Generation goes from a game that threatens to be bad to just a slightly awkward adventure. Swapping Charaboms around to try and get all the functions whenever they might be needed isn’t totally practical and even with kicks and better throws, bombs still feel a bit finicky to place precisely. Thankfully, it does still become much easier to enjoy the level designs and boss fights when the time to deal with them is pared down by your better means of handling the challenges.

The levels do a pretty good of setting themselves apart from one another, bombs finding many different uses in many different areas. The worlds manage to introduce a theme to their levels without them feeling too similar to each other, the desert area for example starting out in the sands but moving to interior areas like an ancient ruin where you must blast yourself to higher and higher levels, Bomberman Generation definitely taking advantage of vertical movement in its level designs. Navigating shipwrecks underwater and changing the water flow in rivers serve as some of the better moments of making your ways through levels, many small puzzles along the way testing your timing and problem solving. There are moments where bomb placement is focused on too heavily though and you encounter the issue of needing to fiddle with them a bit too much to overcome the level, but pushing past these can usually get you back to the more creative uses of bombs and movement. Bosses though are a bit more of a mixed bag. You can expect plenty to use cycles where they attack and then leave themselves open briefly, and this can be a bother even with remote bombs, as some like a ship enemy and a statue boss require you to get in close enough to toss your bomb in the right place while also putting yourself in heavy danger. Many bosses have little baddies around to hassle you and activate your bombs prematurely as well, so waiting out another dodging cycle only to have your brief window squandered can make fights drag. The length of these vulnerable periods and the cycles between them isn’t too bad on some bosses, Heart Bomber and her bouncing bombs and the combining mech Constructor X staying active battles since they have clearly communicated attacks and weaknesses, but then later battles can have so much going on it can be difficult to get your bombs in like Bomber Elite who you will have to sit through another long sequence of simple dodging if you fail to hit them. Most bosses only take damage from a charged bomb as well, so if you weren’t charging a bomb at the start of a vulnerability period, you can miss your window and be forced to wait for it to appear all over again.

Despite this being a 3D Bomberman game though, the multiplayer mode actually shifts things back to the style more reminiscent of his earlier outings. With the top down view restricted to a grid, the focus of Bomberman multiplayer is on blasting your way through a maze to blow up the other players, a mode that takes a bit to get going and can last quite a while if players move well enough to avoid enemy blasts. There are other options though, like a battle mode focused on flipping floor tiles, one about finding coins in barrels that the players blow up, a mode where it’s just about surviving bombs raining in from above, and perhaps the oddest alteration being one where players instead use cannons to shoot at moles who pop up inside the battle mazes. Bomberman multiplayer has never really clicked for me despite it being a huge draw for some fans of the series, but the alternate modes do give it a bit more to work with and make it a worthy addition to the game even if some are better for just a brief visit due to the gimmicks being fairly simple.

THE VERDICT: Bomberman Generation’s game flow swings back and forth quite often. When you’ve got a few good Charaboms to increase your options and the boosts to use your bombs well, action and puzzle solving in Bomberman Generation can be satisfying, areas offering up a variety of puzzles and a few bosses able to maintain a dynamic fight. However, when you’re at your weakest, battles can be incredibly slow, and there are puzzles in the game that are awkward to complete even with the right Charaboms due to the few options you have for handling your bombs. Periods of enjoyment can screech to a halt when you need to place a bomb just so or fight a boss that drags on, but creative level designs and a multiplayer supplement do prevent the title from being a chore.

And so, I give Bomberman Generation for the Nintendo GameCube…

An OKAY rating. Even being able to lightly nudge bombs a bit by running into them would remedy many of the moments of awkward bomb placement problems, and certain bosses having slightly longer windows for taking damage would help those cut a quicker pace as well. Losing your boosts is also rather harsh, with bosses being the place where multiple bombs in play or greater speed is most useful but most likely to be lost when you’re first learning them, and Charaboms can’t always fill the gap of losing a boost due to fuse concerns. When the moments these elements fail crop up, it does bring things to a crawl, but there is a good game surrounding it all that is let down by these weaker moments. Once you’ve got a few Charaboms, the 3D movement isn’t as much of a concern and battles can be more interesting and involved. Puzzle-solving challenges throughout the levels remains effective as well, with bombs just finding more and more uses even before you factor in attributes and Charaboms.

Bomberman Generation is just a game that struggles to maintain its flow. The breaks to play minigames are fine since they remain engaging despite the different style of play, but the shift from active puzzle-solving and battles to drawn out affairs of fiddling with bomb placement or waiting on bosses aren’t style shifts. It ends up feeling akin to driving along at high speeds in a car, enjoying the twists and turns of the road until suddenly you screech down to a much slower speed, the whiplash hurting the moment and making the ride in general less enjoyable because of these speed shifts. Push past them and you can have something quite fun, but these trouble moments are sadly a bit too common to write off.