Bubble Bobble (Arcade)

In Bubble Bobble, two young boys named Bubby and Bobby have their very similar looking girlfriends kidnapped and taken deep into the Cave of Monsters, and while the two child heroes didn’t really seem to be much of a threat before, they are turned into little dragons to try and prevent them from saving the girls. Now going by Bub and Bob, you might think becoming dragons would mean they could shoot fire or bite the monsters standing in their path, but instead these new forms only give them the ability to shoot large bubbles out of their mouth, a skill that is still surprisingly effective at incapacitating enemies.

 

Bubble Bobble is a 100 level arcade game that can be played by two players working together, and while 100 may seem like a lot of stages for a game you’ll be spending quarters on to keep playing, each level fills only a single screen. Most stages are just a set of platforms to jump around on as you spit bubbles at enemies to trap them, the little dragons then needing to kick the bubbled enemies to remove them from play. A stage will end shortly after the last enemy has been dealt with, meaning that most levels are over fairly quickly. The stage design has a wide range of focuses, some trying to lay out the platforms in a way that will make reaching enemies difficult or dangerous and others simply trying to make something like a smiley face or words out of the platforms that have been placed down. For the most part you only really need to jump around to navigate these stages, some featuring holes in the bottom that you can drop through to then fall in from the top of the stage while others require you to spit out bubbles and bounce on them to reach new heights, but it’s not until late in the game that the designs get really absurd.

Bubble Bobble’s simple task of bubbling every enemy onscreen begins to become quite complicated near the end as levels begin truly testing the limits of your basic abilities. Level 95 traps you in very small quarters and asks you to squeak out a bubble to ride up, but if you aren’t fast enough enemies might slip into your destination and you have to do perfectly timed jumps and bubbles to get them before they kill you with their touch. Level 99 requires you to stand on the exact right pixels of platforms to navigate the tall shafts, and if you mess up, you can only wait for death to claim you. Every level has a time limit, and if that runs out, red-eyed ghosts will fly in and try to kill both Bub and Bob. They can be avoided sometimes, but the different level timers mean these ghosts can appear pretty quickly and rob you of a life if you were fiddling with the difficult bubble bouncing or one of the crueler late game level designs. Apparently these ghosts are called Baron von Blubba, who according to the U.S. version of the game’s story are responsible for transforming the boys into dragons in the first place, but the final boss of the game is an entirely different character despite these ghosts supposedly being the main villain. After the Baron takes a single life though, he’ll disappear so you can get back to trying to actually finish the level, but two-player teams do have to worry about two Barons being in the battlefield at once.

 

There are quite a few levels in Bubble Bobble that seem to want to drain your coins with unexciting challenges, but there are definitely far more that fall in the realm of simple fun. Dropping into a new stage and quickly getting to work bubbling baddies is decent fun, especially because of the good bit of variety found across the stages. Some enemies are basically just bumbling about waiting to be beat, but others may fly around the level, fire on you if they see you, or bounce off the walls as passive threats who aren’t technically gunning for the boys. While some like the monsters who shoot fireballs or the space invaders are definitely dangerous, none of them are really too difficult to face on their own, the level design instead making them sometimes too effective for their own good. Regular levels are usually straightforward enough battles of finding the right place to be when firing your bubbles, but if you don’t kick a bubbled enemy away, they can end up popping back out and becoming an angrier version of themselves. The final remaining enemy of the stage will get this speed upgrade for free, but being faster isn’t so much of a power boost that it shifts the dynamic up too much.

You aren’t just spending all your time bubbling enemies in Bubble Bobble though. Many items will appear throughout the stages, their impact varying wildly but their number being surprisingly high. Enemies tend to drop food when defeated, these point bonus pick-ups coming in all kinds of varieties like corn dogs, french fries, ice cream, sushi, corn, tomatoes, and even beer. Points can earn you extra lives, as can collecting the letters to the word EXTEND, this method even letting you skip the stage you were currently on once you grab the last required letter. There are ways to skip multiple stages at once though, grabbing an umbrella carrying you down deeper into the Cave of Monsters, and some items like the blue cross and bomb wipe out all enemies with a level flood or level-wide explosions respectively. There are pretty much just as many power-ups as there are different food designs, and the conditions for making them appear vary wildly, but some things like the candies are common enough to increase your bubble firing speed, and the red cross will even replace your bubbles with fire breath that will instantly take out whatever it hits. Learning what a strange new item does is always interesting, giving you something to focus on besides just quickly bubbling enemies.

 

A few rough levels aside, most of the levels are plain little scrambles to get the enemies before they get you, and while sometimes the game dips into puzzle elements where you need to hit lightning bubbles to hurt enemies you can’t otherwise reach, the demand is usually not too crazy outside of the rare stage like level 97 which requires very good movement management to succeed at the puzzle part. However, after the single boss battle at the end, the player might not even get a good ending after playing all 100 stages. If you play single-player you are instructed to come back with a friend, and if you play with a friend you then need to complete Super mode after, which includes all 100 levels but with more dangerous enemy placement. If you can complete that, then you see the best ending that isn’t too different from the two-player ending, but Bubble Bobble definitely wants to stretch its content thin, and having more difficult versions of the already demanding later levels doesn’t really make seeing the slightly altered ending that great of a reward. It may be cute and breezy for the most part, but a completionist run of Bubble Bobble would be a chore. High scores are at least easier to work towards since its more about collecting all the foods and surviving as best you can, and while dying to a single enemy touching you does make even the weakest enemy dangerous, especially if you thought you bubbled them but you didn’t, there is room for a skilled player to learn the layouts and survive deep into the adventure and place high on the leaderboard.

THE VERDICT: The cute and colorful adventure of Bub and Bob is, for the most part, a breezy and somewhat plain platforming adventure with a bunch of interesting items to tinker with and level layouts that do their job well enough. The later stages do ask a lot of the players though as they start asking for tight puzzle solving and perfect movement, but for the most part, the enemy-bubbling action is brisk thanks to the small levels, that size meaning they can present a quirky platform arrangement or power-up to play with as brief but interesting focuses. Bubble Bobble is charmingly saccharine and balances a simple premise with a wide variety of items to keep your interest, but it’s certainly more of a pastime than something to invest a heavy amount of time into, especially because it wants you to do far too much to see the game’s underwhelming true ending.

 

And so, I give Bubble Bobble for arcade machines…

An OKAY rating. Cute, quick play is Bubble Bobble’s biggest strength and why some of its rigid levels and harder designs feel so at odds with a game that otherwise moves along at a breezy pace. Each new floor in the Cave of Monsters is mostly just a chance to interact lightly with whatever happens to be there, the basic play not bad at all but certainly missing the kind of pep that would make 100 stages, potentially twice over, consistently exciting. New power-ups are cool to find, but when they’re leaned on too strongly, some stages become waiting games as you need things to line up right, time you can’t spend waiting since the Baron von Blubbas will punish you as you try and solve those puzzle stages or gimmick levels. It’s still enjoyable to scramble around as the little dragons to grab everything you can, and thankfully a good majority of the levels focus on the simple thrills instead of trying to wring too much out of mechanics that sometimes get a little overtaxed by harsher stage designs.

 

Bubble Bobble begins accessible and adorable, the single repeating musical track featured almost entirely throughout even having a fun bubbly rhythm to it despite being constantly looped. The game doesn’t quite have the same rhythm though, sometimes getting hitched on concepts that seem to suddenly ask a lot of the player out of the blue. Difficulty spikes aren’t too rampant though, and if you don’t need to see the best ending you can avoid some of the tedium, so Bubble Bobble can still come out fun enough for brief co-op action or small visits to a cute world filled with quirky little shake-ups.