Bomberman (NES)

While I had a pretty low opinion of the Bomberman series before starting The Game Hoard, again and again I’ve found that when I do give games in the series a shot, they turn out to be okay or outright good. However, since I intend to eventually play the entire series, starting with the titles that might be good could lead to the older games ending up harder to return to, so it felt prudent to go all the way back to the start and see what the first game is like. Without the much lauded multiplayer the series is known for and which I still feel is too heavily dependent on players making errors than outfoxing each other, Bomberman for the NES will live or die based solely on the quality of its single-player adventure.

 

For what little story there is to be found in the manual, it’s clear that Hudson Soft didn’t expect Bomberman to be one of their breakout franchises. Already using a sprite lifted from their game Lode Runner for the titular Bomberman, the plot involves the little bomb-making robot toiling away in an underground complex until he learns that anyone who manages to escape is able to become a human. As he pushes through 50 floors to make his escape, Bomberman must blow up every baddie he comes across and locate an exit door underneath one of the many bricks piled about the similarly designed mazes, the only differences between these levels built off of a rectangular grid being the brick and enemy placement.

Every level uses the same flat green background for the top down action, unbreakable grey squares placed in alternating rows and columns with the bricks scattered about in different locations and amounts based on how deep you are in on your quest to become a human. Besides just recognizing there are more blocks than the previous stage, this does mean all 50 levels pretty much feel the same when it comes to their layout, but the enemies at least get harder as you get deeper in. The first foes you face are balloon shaped baddies who move around the area they can access with little aggression, but later foes start to base their actions on yours such as the tear-shaped O’Neals who try to smartly avoid you and your bombs. Some enemies are able to completely pass over blocks with ease, meaning they can escape your explosives or hunt you down as you try to open up a path in the usually tight quarters. Bombing the exit door will cause a surge of monsters to spawn in to cause more trouble, so actually catching the foes in your blast and doing so without killing yourself or hitting something important requires some careful maneuvering and an understanding of what you’re up against.

 

Things get off to a really poor start though. Bomberman begins his adventure slow, only able to place one bomb at a time, that bomb’s blast radius being a small cross, and the fuse taking some time to activate the explosive. Because of this, the first level can actually be one of the hardest as every level has a timer, and if you don’t know where the stage’s power-up is or where the exit door is hidden, you can be timed out and lose a life. Power ups are not just more convenient to have in the original Bomberman but outright vital in some of the toughest stages, the number of bricks and enemies with movement gimmicks too great to handle without some tricks of your own. Increasing your blast radius and the number of bombs you can place are common upgrades, with movement speed boosts cropping up a bit less regularly. However, the most helpful power-ups to find are things like the ability to manually detonate your bombs, thus skipping the process of waiting on fuses and allowing you to bait enemies into moving to a bomb you can then safely set off. Once you start to get the ability to walk over bricks unimpeded and even fully resist your own explosions, Bomberman reaches a point where you can start moving through levels with a bit more confidence. Waiting on fuses to get through packed mazes is tedious without these strong bonuses, as is chasing down more mobile enemies or even just trying to find the door when death is one small mistake away with power-up loss an unfortunate punishment for not being up to snuff.

The bonus levels are at least a breeze, these free-for-alls cropping up every five levels where your own bombs won’t hurt you and there are no bricks to bother with. Instead, you just detonate bombs to your hearts content to earn bonus points for killing the equally harmless enemies milling about these otherwise empty mazes. These are more a relief for not being another nearly identical maze rather than something truly compelling, but a chance to decompress after so many levels of slowly blowing bricks apart to navigate the maze helps ease up the impact of the repetition a bit.

 

Passwords seen after a game over will help you get back to where you left off if necessary, but the fact of the matter is Bomberman is just a sequence of incredibly similar stages with barely anything compelling filling them. If you can get up to a decent power level then things can start going quicker, but Bomberman is still far too similar across all of its 50 stages to really merit sticking with the experience. The enemy roll out does nothing to invigorate the player as they’re already moving about mazes and bombing bricks in a bid to find the door and adding extra steps to try and snag the oddly moving enemies doesn’t feel like it disrupts that rote process very much. The action isn’t entirely boring because powered up bombs can be used cleverly to snag multiple foes or more effectively navigate the mazes in smaller time frames, but that feels like it’s helping you make regular play more manageable rather than helping it feel exciting. There’s never a stage where a win feels thrilling because they are all just lightly recycled versions of what you already played, the game far too basic to really warrant the time investment needed to see all of its levels and the ending.

THE VERDICT: Bomberman is a sequence of lightly altered brick mazes that do not really have much to offer. The new enemy types introduced can navigate the maze in different ways and some of your power-ups speed things up and allow for a bit of cleverness with strategies like trap setting, but making progress in a stage is often slow and unexciting because of the bland process of searching for the door. Bonus levels break things up enough that you won’t feel trapped in this barely evolving sequence of stages, but while power ups make you more efficient and help take some of the edge off the experience by making it go by more quickly, Bomberman still struggles to engage with the player due to its odd relationship between the timer, player power, stage layouts, and enemy behaviors.

 

And so, I give Bomberman for the Nintendo Entertainment System…

A BAD rating. A pretty poor first showing for the Bomberman concept and one that shows that it’s the mix-ups to the gameplay formula that make it entertaining rather than the core idea. The brick mazes struggle to come up with interesting designs and your bombs don’t feel like they’re the best tool for getting things done in a reasonable amount of time anyway. Having to rely on power-ups to make things manageable shows how weak the regular play is without them, and while some enemy types can ask for a bit of smart play, it’s more about trapping them in hallways or anticipating their path than getting really clever with the bombs or level layouts. Bomberman ends up being about the slow and thankless push through mazes, sometimes without even an enemy nearby who is willing to antagonize your gradual and bland work. Bomberman never really experiments with its systems beyond letting certain characters go across the bricks without blowing them up, but it still feels like this game boils down to robotically making your way through mazes without any exciting challenge waiting in the wings to motivate you to keep pushing forward.

 

It is at least easy to suggest what Bomberman can do to improve, because an entire game series comes next where the formula is toyed with constantly and the crowd-pleasing multiplayer would show up in the series as early as this game’s sequel. This first game relied too heavily on its basics with no idea of how to really develop them over the course of the game besides adding in enemies who barely mix things up. It’s never truly agonizing in its slowness, but even a level done quickly feels rather hollow as the process fails to adequately challenge the player. Bomberman is certainly archaic in comparison to the series it inspired, and considering how many of its levels feel pretty much the same, it’s hard to even justify giving it a look just to see how things kicked off. It is the tame kind of boring rather than egregiously flawed, and that is likely why the series was able to continue on with such success after this bare bones starting point. With some variety and creativity Bomberman games can be entertaining, but both were sadly missing from the progenitor of this explosive franchise.