Pocket Bomberman (Game Boy Color)

In most Bomberman games, you’re looking down on the action from above. Maze-like battlefields fit Bomberman’s explosives well, their cross-shaped blasts able to threaten enemies boxed in by the maze’s blocks and walls. Pocket Bomberman breaks him free of those restrictive mazes though, putting him in a platformer that still includes a lot of the familiar trappings but now with enemies at risk of being blown up even if they’re up high or down low.

 

This break from the usual format for Bomberman also comes with a plot that leans more towards adventure and fantasy than usual for the little bomber. In the world of Pocket Bomberman, the sun long ago disappeared behind a permanent cloud cover thanks to a dark force sealing away the Sword of the Sun. Freeing it would require collecting the five Power Stones kept by powerful monsters on the Evil Mountain, our hero Bomberman steps up to the task with his seemingly endless ability to place down large cartoonish bombs. Impressively, Bomberman can even place them in midair, a useful trick as the levels he finds himself in are rather tall and having a floating bomb you can use like a platform can help you reach higher places. Of course, you need to watch out for the fuse, the bombs in Pocket Bomberman still containing the distinctive cross-shaped blast from the other games meaning you don’t want to be above, below, or beside them when they detonate.

The goal in most levels in Pocket Bomberman is to defeat every enemy in a stage to open the exit door. Touching any creature yourself will kill you, the player needing to approach monsters carefully to drop their bomb and skedaddle before the explosion can hit them as well. The game doesn’t get too adventurous with its standard enemy design, most of them having a single behavior to help them stand out from other foes. A little man on a cloud will try to shock you from above with lightning bolts to make placing bombs below him dangerous, a skeletal bird flies in quick diagonal patterns that make it a challenge to time your explosions right, and even simple creatures can be a problem if they’re thrown in tight passages where you have to make sure there’s an escape route before dropping your bomb. Evil Mountain is split into five worlds with five levels each, the Ocean world having jets of water you can ride to move around while the Wind world demands some more careful movement so you don’t run through a pair of electric generators right as they unleash their charge. Pocket Bomberman isn’t too hectic a game though, the player often able to approach obstacles at whatever pace they feel suits the danger, the time limit for a level barely a factor but some caution is definitely necessary due to the game’s screen not scrolling as much as it should at times. Nudging forward and hoping one of the quick hopping clams isn’t just off-screen waiting to leap onto you instantly is the kind of danger you can expect when just trying to continue forward, Pocket Bomberman not always having the best handle on how much visual information it should grant you to avoid cheap deaths.

 

Pocket Bomberman does use a password system that makes it easy to continue from any level, but death should definitely be avoided because Bomberman also brings his familiar power-ups with him from his other adventures and loses all of them should you get a game over. At your most basic, a dropped bomb will send out a small blast up, down, to the right, and to the left, it fairly easy to give it some space but also enemies must be nearby for it to actually harm them. However, levels contain not only ground to stand on, but blocks to break, these sometimes containing valuable boosts. Fire Up expands the range of your explosions, Speed Up lets you run away from those blasts better, and Bomb Up increase the amount of bombs you can drop at once if you want to make a chain reaction. There are some truly useful items to be found on occasion though, such as the Heart that lets you take an extra hit before dying or the very helpful Remote Bomb function that means you can drop a bomb and wait for the right moment to detonate it, essentially removing some of the danger of being caught in your own blast from sloppy placement. Wings can even give you the ability to almost fly, it more like a drifting upwards leap but still useful in some of the later levels that start denying you solid ground more. Since most enemies aren’t too aggressive, having some consequences for slipping up or approaching them poorly makes sense, losing your power-ups not often dooming you but still helping to encourage a more careful approach, although it does sting when the off-screen ambushes are the reason you lose some strength rather than a legitimate danger taking you out.

Each world in Pocket Bomberman is capped off with a boss like Torent the mustachioed tree or the impressive beast from the boxart known as Pterastone, and thankfully, each arena does feature a few of the soft blocks you can break to get some of your power-ups so you aren’t fighting them with no way to recover any boosts lost figuring the fight out. The boss arenas are fairly small, many of these large monsters able to move through them freely and taking a good amount of bombs to finally put down. They’ll increase their range of attacks as you hit them more and more though, and even the basic tree monster that serves as the first boss can pack a move that might kill you the first time you see it as you don’t know what to expect from your opponent yet. Those kind of attacks are the ones where you learn to avoid certain positions in reference to the boss or the broader arena, most of them providing a fairly decent fight once you have learned those lessons in the unfortunately rough way their speed causes. However, bosses can be taken down very quickly if you’re good with your bomb placement and timing, these monsters only briefly impervious to damage after taking a hit but otherwise fair game. Act quickly enough, and you can even avoid their stronger tricks from the later battle phases, giving you a strategic angle to tap but also one with some risk involved since you wouldn’t be as focused on dodging as a result.

 

If you want quicker and less committal action than a full adventure, Pocket Bomberman also includes something it calls Jump Mode. Available in three difficulties that each feature a unique level layout, Jump Mode actually removes your ability to jump as you wish, Bomberman instead bouncing back up into the air every time he touches the ground. This mode has its own unique enemies to take advantage of your constant movement like octopuses that move in and out of pots so you really need to get bomb placement timing right to hurt them, but you don’t need to clear out every foe like in the main game. Instead, the goal is to reach the top of the shafts you find yourself in, there being a few closed gates along the way that only open up when you defeat the big heads at the top of that section. The heads aren’t too fierce despite being themed to look like vampires, mummies, and werewolves. They move back and forth and responding to your presence by speeding up sometimes, but your constant springing means even that can be threatening to your success. You can get power-ups in this mode though, but it’s much harder and the timer is definitely a more tangible threat here so you can’t be too slow in trying to ascend. Even the hardest Jump Game isn’t too long once you’ve figured it out, this side amusement more like a minigame but not the worst idea for one even if sometimes jumping uncontrollably into your doom is the kind of error that can grow frustrating before you’ve honed your skill enough.

THE VERDICT: Pocket Bomberman moving the bomb dropping formula of the series into a platformer works fairly well even if it feels like there’s more room for adjustments. Figuring out how to clear out each level is a quick and simple task and the bosses mostly work despite often introducing an attack in a way that might be hard to dodge when you first see it. Having some areas in the game reliant on pushing forward blindly and possibly getting hurt for it does hamper some of the game’s potential, but usually your adventuring will be just dangerous enough thanks to managing your own blasts while trying to blow up every baddie in your path.

 

And so, I give Pocket Bomberman for Game Boy Color…

An OKAY rating. Pocket Bomberman feels a bit like a proof of concept for a Bomberman platformer rather than the big shift in genre it could have been. Most of his power-ups and even how the bombs function shift pretty well into jumping around a small stage looking for bad guys to blast, and the enemies come in enough varieties to test that task as you get deeper in. However, the bosses and scrolling issues do feel sloppy on occasion because they can hit before you react. While grabbing power-ups and placing bombs emphasizes an awareness of a level’s layout, you also are denied key information at points, leading to those points where Pocket Bomberman gets in the way of your otherwise breezy bombing adventure. One of your power-ups does let you kick bombs and it feels like there’s more room for a platforming adventure to use that as the kind of expansive ability that results in more complex interactions down the line, the action not really growing too much though as your response will often be trying to get bomb timing right or waiting out for the remote controlled blast to be lined up right. Pocket Bomberman has that room for growth and evolution that it needs to explore, but level gimmicks and a range of enemies do help it still keep your interest. Jump Game is an odd little side mode that came about from experimenting with what Bomberman could do, and jumping out of control isn’t likely a good fit for the main adventure, but some more adventurous shifts in design could have lead to more memorable stages since otherwise one of the few that did stand out was the rather plain concept of a level teeming with pots that blocked your path but blow up easily.

 

The Bomberman series didn’t totally avoid platformers after this simple start, but it has been pretty content to play in the mazes more often than explore what other shapes the series could take. On the one hand, Pocket Bomberman shows there is something that can work in there, but it also shows that you need to start expanding what its hero can do if you want to be more than one of many decent but unexceptional 2D platformers.