40 years of Bomberman: Bomberman Wars
Bomberman, but in strategy RPG form.
July marks 40 years of Hudson Soft’s (and Konami’s) Bomberman franchise. Throughout the month, I’ll be covering Bomberman games, the versatility of its protagonist, and the legacy of both. Previous entries in the series can be found through this link.
A strategy role-playing game might seem antithetical to the chaos that so often defines Bomberman, but it is very much still Bomberman. Rather than everything happening at a frenetic place, it instead comes at you in turn-based form: the tension of placing a bomb in the wrong place, of hoping that your foe’s escape routes are blocked off leaving them moments from exploding, persists, but the kind of tension is now different. Instead of constantly moving (or knowing when not to move), instead of incessant explosions and rapid-fire responses, you instead have to slowly build the traps that will ensnare your enemies, while avoiding the traps those same enemies are setting for you. The how of it all translates from the traditional form of Bomberman to this strategy RPG one, but it’s all just slower, with some new considerations, as well.
It’s a bit easier to envision Bomberman Wars — the strategy RPG in question that released in 1998 for both the Sony Playstation and Sega Saturn in Japan — as the video game version of a board game rather than as the kind of tactical video game we normally think of when someone uses that term. It has more in common with something like chess than Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics or Tactics Ogre or whatever series you envision first upon hearing SRPG. It's slow (very slow), and sometimes that’s because of the year it released, sure, but more often it’s slow because it’s meant to be more like a board game than the video game genre that it’s associated with.
Which is not to say it’s just like playing chess (or that chess’ pace is a negative), but the rules of movement in Bomberman Wars are both strict and varied, and you’re often left to hope that your opponents are fooled into suffering against your actions. This isn’t a game where you can run up to an enemy on the “board” and then enter into battle, where your high attack power or use of a weapon triangle will assure your victory in this conflict within a conflict. Bomberman Wars is still Bomberman, meaning you’re still placing bombs around the map in a way that blows your opponents up before they can do it to you. Movement is limited because it makes it more difficult to both endanger your foes and to escape them, and this works both ways, which is why you’ll find your computer opponents blowing themselves up pretty regularly, sometimes accidentally and sometimes because it’s worth it to take you down, too.
You also get a little bit of help that reminds you that this is a video game and not a board game, as well. If 30 turns pass and there is no victor, the sky starts randomly dropping bombs. And those bombs will eventually explode, and that explosion will likely touch another bomb, which will set off another bomb, and so on, until one side of the engagement is no more. In the turns preceding these, though, Bomberman Wars truly feels like its roots are more board game than video game, which is also maybe part of why the few critics that did get their hands on this Japan exclusive didn’t seem to care for it much. Strategy RPGs weren’t exactly beloved at the time, and coming out after Final Fantasy Tactics without being more Final Fantasy Tactics didn’t help Wars’ case much.
Here’s how Bomberman Wars works: you build a party of five units, where four are your choice and the fifth is your king. Your goal in each map is to defeat the opposing king — even if the force you’re facing outnumbers you by this point, if you defeat their king, you win. You get 30 turns before the bombs start to drop, endangering whatever careful planning you’ve done, and turns aren’t setup to be you and the enemy moves combined. Your side’s set of moves is one turn, and the other side’s are another turn, and this also plays into the timer for the bombs you drop. Bombs sit on the map for five turns before they explode, which is part of what makes things feel a little slow, but the idea behind the long wait is to give you time to lose track of time: to accidentally end up somewhere you shouldn’t be, to place another bomb somewhere you shouldn’t without thinking, and then to suffer the consequences of this sloppiness. Like reacting in a traditional Bomberman game by overzealously and quickly placing bombs in a way that causes you to blow yourself up, Bomberman Wars’ slower pace can actually cause you to forget the bigger picture, and failure to take into account that bomb X blowing up in two turns means bomb Y is also going to blow up even though it’s supposed to explode five turns from now is one such example of that.
While the pace works when it works, there are also times where Bomberman Wars feels more plodding than intentionally slow. This is the kind of thing that could be solved in the present, if there were ever a re-release, by simply adding a fast-forward option or a button for skipping animations. Chess might not look as flashy as video games, but it moves a hell of a lot faster than Bomberman Wars’ very 1998 pacing. Hey, if it was good enough for Tactics Ogre, then it’s good enough for Bomberman’s strategy spin-off.
As for those units, there are a variety of classes to choose from. They’re all boilerplate fantasy classes — thieves, witches, paladins, archers, bishops, clerics, and so on — but there are actual differences in them that will change how you play. There are 15 classes in total, which includes the required Bomber King class, and some of them (like the Bomber Bishop) are combinations of earlier classes so you can manage to squeeze both new and old together into your small five-unit force.
Some classes have a special ability, like the cleric being able to “Pray” for bombs that are in their range, which makes them take one additional turn to explode. This could save you from a disaster when used correctly, or just give you a little more breathing room for escaping. Archers can fire arrows at bombs, speeding up their eventual explosion. The Bomber Samurai takes this to the extreme, as he can cut a bomb and force it, regardless of how many turns remained, to explode on the next turn. Since it only works on bombs directly next to him, though, that means he’s possibly killing himself to do it.
Some other units don’t have specials like these, but they do have stats that skew heavily in one direction or another to ensure they remain intriguing and useful. The Bomber Witch, for instance, can move just one space at a time, but she can place bombs up to three spaces away, which is huge for messing up the potential paths for your enemies to take: she’s already nearly out of range when she plants a bomb, which is a huge advantage even if she can’t move very far each turn. The Bomber Fighter unit lacks a special ability, but is fairly balanced, with a bomb and movement range of two spaces. The Bomber Thief can only place bombs one square away, but can move three, so he can infiltrate and then escape at a speed that those you’re trying to blow up won’t be able to, unless they are also thieves. Figuring out which units work for you and your style is vital, especially since you are also going to need to be able to defend your Bomber King: that unit has a bomb range of two, but a movement range of one, so spending your time doing much besides avoiding possible explosions with him can turn out to be more trouble than it’s worth.
Those movement ranges, by the way, are fairly strict in terms of not just how far you can move, but even in what direction. You can’t move one space left and then one space up with a movement range of two: you can move one or two spaces in one direction, none of those directions diagonally, and that’s it. So no ducking around corners in one go, meaning if you want to avoid a bomb blast coming in the space directly to your right, and there is a block you can hide behind one space to your left and one space above you, then you need to move left past it, then up next to it, in separate moves. Which is something to keep in mind when placing your own bombs, or trying to avoid being boxed in by those of an enemy that are very happy to destroy themselves if it means taking you out first. And that means something given you can’t easily chase even the slow-moving king around with a full force, never mind a compromised one.
The king’s castle is your central base, and from there you can change your party — as you find and defeat more units, they’ll join your forces for later missions — and buy support items. Along with the usual power-ups you expect to find in exploded soft blocks in a Bomberman game — a larger blast radius, the ability for a unit to drop more bombs at a time, remote controlled bombs, and so on — there are also coins that you use to make purchases. The Zero Watch, for instance, can set the turn timer to zero, which can certainly speed up how quickly a stage reaches its resolution. Not without danger to you as well, of course, but sometimes that risk is worth it, especially if you’re wildly outnumbered and have little chance of reaching the other side’s king before they get you.
The Angel Voice can grant a unit another turn, a Power Drink enhances a unit’s stats, the Speed Boots increase movement range for the unit in question, and the Loose Bell is all about buying time, as it’s basically the opposite of the Zero Watch: you use this to increase the turn counter by five on every bomb on the map. Which will save you from certain disaster, yes, but also potentially doom whatever plan you had already in action for taking out your foes.
There are 25 different stages for you to conquer in your bid to unify the land under the banner of your Bomber King, and while there are some environmental differences to consider — trees, rock placements, water, the occasional non-explodeable structure — the levels are a little too samey, and figuring out how to neutralize the new kinds of units you’ll be facing off against is where much of the difference in stages exists. Bomberman Wars, with its pacing and this sameness, can get a little stale before it ends. In some ways the whole thing feels more like a proof of concept than a completely finished product. Though, since it all works fine, maybe it’s more fair to say that there are good ideas here that maybe could have been even better, or should have also existed in a better game.
Bomberman Wars isn’t a bad game, though, it’s just that it's not a great one in a franchise full of great ones, and you probably have to be way down the strategy RPG and/or Bomberman rabbit holes for it to feel good. Which is fine! Niche games for niche gamers, and all that. But it still feels like a title that could have been more than that with some improved pacing and more ways to differentiate the first stages you play from the middle and end ones. The multiplayer implementing the same style of gameplay as the single-player Quest mode certainly gives it a reason to exist beyond “let’s make a strategy RPG” and is a reason to come back after finishing the single-player, since it tests the idea mentioned before of this still being very much Bomberman, just slower and with a different kind of tension and strategy, but that also moves pretty slow, too — maybe too slow for some!
The greatest disappointment, though, is actually that there wasn’t a follow-up release that addressed any of this, and instead left us with this unfulfilled potential: a good game could have become a great sequel with the right tweaks, but Bomberman Wars received no such additional attention. And hell, the original is only available in a language other than Japanese thanks to the work of unofficial translators, so maybe we should just sigh and feel satisfied with the fact we even got as much of this imperfect spin-off as we did.
This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.
Video games that feel like board games are an interesting area. I like experimental titles such as this.