40 years of Bomberman: Pocket Bomberman

Bomberman gameplay and Bomberman rules, but all wrapped up in a portable 2D platformer.

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.

Not every Bomberman was designed as a multiplayer experience. The series didn’t start that way, either, but it eventually became widely lauded for its incredible multiplayer arena play, so the inclusion of it became an expected thing. When so many Bomberman games were being released at once, though — multiple Bomberman games per year on multiple systems — did every single Bomberman need to have a multiplayer component? Or was there space to explore more single-player oriented experiences, detached from the multiplayer in a way that (wonderful) titles like Bomberman ‘94 or Saturn Bomberman couldn’t quite do? Those games had perfectly enjoyable single-player modes, but those modes also heavily leaned on translating the multiplayer experience into a single-player one.

Pocket Bomberman was first released in Japan and Europe in 1997 on the Game Boy with Super Game Boy capabilities, and then again a year later on the Game Boy Color. Instead of like the above games had, it took some of the core concepts of Bomberman — placing bombs to navigate your environment, taking down enemies to progress, powering up — and applied them not to an overhead maze structure, but instead, to a 2D platformer. This complete change in genre expectations freed Bomberman from its origins: Bomberman could still blow things up, still had to navigate a maze-like structure, still powered up — but now it was all performed within the context of a side-scrolling 2D platformer, instead. Which allowed for some real changes in how Bomberman could move, could fight, could explore. It wasn’t a superb refining of an existing concept, a la Bomberman ‘94 or Saturn Bomberman and others, but it was an entirely new concept instead, with some old ideas attached to it.

Essentially, it has the rules of Bomberman, but applied to a genre with its own pre-established rules. If Bomberman Quest was basically Bomberman as Link, questing around in an action-adventure but with the basic rules of Bomberman applying, then this is Bomberman as Mario doing the same. Though really it’s probably more accurate to say it’s Bomberman as Milon, given each stage is a self-contained maze of sorts that you need to break containment from by defeating enemies.

As Hudson left the PC Engine/Turbografx further behind, their focus narrowed a bit more, with Bomberman becoming a priority in a way that led to more genre work starring him. They didn’t need to develop their own Mario killer or Zelda clone any longer to convince someone to buy their console instead of a competing one. Instead, they could just go “hey, I bet Bomberman would work in a 2D platformer/action-adventure/kart racer” and go from there, even working with their previous competition in the process to make it happen. Hudson Soft published Pocket Bomberman in Japan, but Nintendo handled the international publishing duties, and it was even a launch title for the Game Boy Color.

Speaking of Bomberman Quest, that’s the occasion Bomberman looks dressed up for here, at least in the interstitial scenes and cover art. A cape, armor, a sword: this Bomberman is ready to fight that skeleton dragon you see on the box. In-game, though, you have bombs, and are looking for a magical sword. You do fight a skeleton dragon, though, and use bombs to do it, too, so you won’t see me complaining about the visual bait-and-switch.

You get plenty of the usual power-ups in Pocket Bomberman’s five worlds and 25 levels (five of which are boss fights). Power-ups to extend the range of your bombs, and ones to increase how many bombs you can deploy at once. A device for remotely detonating your bombs when you want to, instead of just on a timer. There’s also an invisibility power so your foes don’t realize you’re sneaking up on them and can’t run away or give chase upon seeing you, a heart power-up that lets you take a hit without dying from it, and, obviously new to the series, two jumping power-ups. One slows the speed of your jumps so you can make more accurate, floatier ones — helpful not just for the platforming but also for deploying bombs while mid-air — and the other is a double jump. Sort of.

Said double jump is actually a flying power called “Wings,” but with the way the levels are designed, it’ll find much more use as a double jump. If you need to press the button again to “jump” yet another time beyond “double” you can. You’ll find plenty of use for that ability whether your brain processes it as flight or extra jumping, given the structure of these levels, especially late-game, often requires you try to stack some bombs on top of each other in order to have a foothold for reaching higher platforms. If you don’t have the remote-controlled detonator, well, each of those little platforms you build out of bombs will only last for so long before they explode on you. So, yeah. Double jumping, flying, whatever you use it as is useful.

As usual, you can power-up to dropping four bombs at a time, and the power of those bombs also increases to a fourth level where you’re going to have to actively be away from where you dropped the thing to avoid the explosion. There’s also a bomb power-up that has the explosions blow through destructible walls rather than being stopped by them as they blow up, which changes your escape patterns further. You can speed up a few times through power-ups in order to manage that, but if you find you’re going too fast, you can grab the clogs power-up to slow down again. And you can completely stop the movement of enemies with the clock power-up, at least briefly, which can be useful for some that chase you aggressively or move in a pattern that’s hard to time just right with your explosions.

While there aren’t a ton of levels in Pocket Bomberman — again, just 20 non-boss fight stages — they’re tightly designed and satisfying ones. It helps, too, that each area is distinct, both in terms of their look and also what’s expected of you. While the end goal is the same in each — defeat all of the enemies to unlock the door — each area has its own enemies with their own movement patterns and tics, as well as differing level design and obstacles to learn and overcome. You’ll die if you take any damage, so you basically need to do a perfect run to make it through each one. And while you can be patient to try to avoid mistakes, be they running right into an enemy or getting hit by a projectile or blowing yourself up, you can only be so patient, as each stage has a timer. Early on you won’t even notice it, but as the stages grow in size and sophistication, you’ll start to wonder how much longer you’ve got.

The boss fights are real satisfying, as they sit right on the border of being frustrating: when you do figure out their movement and firing patterns and how to account for each, you’re going to feel great. It helps, too, that upon dying — in a boss fight or anywhere — you don’t lose your power-ups. So you can stack up the power-ups from one life with those found in another to be a more formidable Bomberman in your next go at a level or battle. While you can start from the level you were just on if you run out of lives and continue from a Game Over, your powers will be reset, meaning it’s a bit more of a climb to truly get right back to where you were. Still, power-ups are plentiful, and learning how to fly, as it were, without all those extra tools to help you do so will benefit you in the long run.

While the main game might seem a little short, it does get tricky enough as said, and it’s also not the entire game. There is no multiplayer here — likely owing to its presence on other Game Boy Bomberman titles, of which this was the fifth overall and fourth released in North America — but there is a “Jump” game that’s even more differentiated from other Bomberman titles than the 2D platformer was.

It’s a score-attack game where Bomberman continually jumps without you pressing any buttons to do so. It’s more like bouncing, and you have to navigate vertical platforming stages to progress. Enemies are in your way as well as platforms and destructible blocks, and you still die in a single hit: you have to, while continually bouncing, drop bombs to take out those enemies and open up a vertical path through these stages. Do this for as long as you can without taking damage, on Easy, Normal, or Hard difficulty, and then receive your score. It’s real simple, but it works. That’s Bomberman in a nutshell sometimes, huh?

The music of Pocket Bomberman is worth noting, too. The “World of Forest” theme is an arrangement of the Bomberman theme found in the NES title, and it’s ridiculously catchy:

Later area stages also incorporate that original Bomberman theme into them, each very much being their own thing while working off of that core beat:

June Chikuma is credited as half of the composing team for Pocket Bomberman, which makes sense, as she was handling much of the Bomberman music in this era of the series, but Yoshio Tsuru also worked on the game. Tsuru’s other Bomberman credit is Saturn Bomberman Fight!! (a different game from Saturn Bomberman), but you might know his work from a few Yakuza games (3, 4, Dead Souls) better than a Japan-only Saturn title. And you should know this bit of Bomberman history that he’s responsible for as well:

Hudson’s love for bees, promotional videos, and crossovers all wrapped up in one song. Hi-Ten Bomberman was used to promote the 1993 Hudson Soft Super Caravan: it was a 10-player Bomberman title that’s also accepted as the first game developed for high-definition screens, and would be the basis for Saturn Bomberman. You can’t even emulate it given what it took to run the thing in the first place (two PC Engines and two multitaps to fit the 10 players). This song was used to promote that game’s sequel, Hi-Ten Chara Bomb, which was basically the same game but used protagonists from other Hudson properties as well as Bomberman. While you can’t play either of these in-the-moment exclusives, you can at least enjoy this vocalized, promotional Bomberman track in the present.

Anyway, Pocket Bomberman is good fun, and pretty different from the rest of the series, both at the time it released and all these years later. While there would be other action-adventure Bomberman games and plenty of 3D Bomberman action, the 2D realm was mostly left unexplored. Pocket Bomberman did a quality job of it, at least. Sadly, you’ll have to buy a physical copy secondhand or emulate it in order to experience it, as it might have been available on two platforms back in 1998, but now it’s not available anywhere.

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