40 years of Bomberman: Star Parodier
Not a Bomberman in name, but in practice? This parody game is Bomberman's shoot 'em up even more than it's Star Soldier's.
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.
Star Parodier is a Star Soldier parody game in name, much like Parodius is a Gradius parody. Part of the fun of the Parodius games — which also seeped into their design — is that they don’t just limit themselves to Gradius. TwinBee, another Konami shoot ‘em up series, is as vital to the Parodius equation as its namesake franchise. Similarly, Star Parodier wouldn’t work as well if it was just “Hudson Soft’s Star Soldier, but cute,” so instead, it’s paired up with Bomberman. To the point that this is arguably more Bomberman than Star Soldier, or, at least, Bomberman by way of Star Soldier.
Consider that the story revolves around a spaceship full of Bombermen of various colors reacting to distressing news about the planet Paroson. They are the ones who build the three fighter craft to handle the crisis, which launch from their ship. One is the Paro Caesar — pretty easy to see that’s “a parody version of the Caesar” there, if you’re the kind of sicko person of culture who knows offhand that “Caesar” is the name of the Star Soldier craft, anyway. A second one is a giant Bomberman with rocket propulsion and various weapon capabilities that the standard Bomberman models do not possess — it’s also alive, like the other Bombermen, as evidenced by the cartoonish, eyes-bulging-and-surprised way it reacts to being blown up. And the third, in an extreme moment of meta game design, is an anthropomorphic PC Engine that shoots CD-ROMs and HuCards at enemies.
The game has the cartoonish charm (and often look) of PC Engine-era Bomberman, it stars a cast of Bomberman who build a flying Bomberman fighter ship, you eventually fight an even bigger Bomberman who tries to destroy your ship in a Bomberman-style arena using bombs that explode in a cross pattern whilst picking up power-ups from Bomberman to enhance its attacks… like I said, Star Parodier is at least as much a Bomberman game as it is a Star Soldier one, and since we already know Bomberman could be anything Hudson Soft needed it to be, well. I rest my case.
Star Parodier is a vertical shoot ‘em up (shooting game, STG, shmup, whatever you want to call it) that lasts for eight stages (and one hidden bonus one). It’s a pretty easy game for the genre — it’s much more difficult at the end in ways that test both your reflexes and your ability to quickly recognize patterns, but overall, this isn’t a tough STG. If you’re a veteran of the genre, you can probably safely play on the harder setting from the jump and be fine — the hand that swoops down to steal various power-ups before you can grab them appears here more often and earlier, in addition to facing off against more ships, bullets, etc. Star Parodier also comes with a Caravan mode, as Star Soldier games tended to, which lets you play for the highest score you can in either a two or five-minute burst designed specifically for scoring. A big difference against the Star Soldier games is that you can choose which ship you want to play the Caravan mode with, and since they have different loadouts and power-ups that means different strategies to figure out.
If you’re not a fan of the Star Soldier-style shoot ‘em ups — lots of weapon upgrades and various weaponry, longer stages, more enemies to dodge and weave around than bullets — then Star Parodier probably won’t be for you, since it’s still that kind of game, just a parody of it. The harder sci-fi edges have been sanded down into something very cute — there are still some giant mechs and robots to defeat, but they’re all rounded yet blockier, less angular and sharp. And the various non-ship enemies you defeat wave white flags when you shoot them instead of exploding or dying. While I myself am a Star Soldier (and Star Parodier) fan, I at least understand why people would rather play the Compile games made by Compile instead of the ones someone else made after being impressed by what Compile was up to in Blazing Lazers.
And while there’s nothing seriously wrong with Star Parodier — it’s not challenging enough in the first half, but also not a complete cakewalk, it’s also sometimes derivative, but has enough personality and Bomberman to make up for that for the most part — its most significant issue is that it’s on a system that was loaded with STGs. Star Parodier is a pretty good shooter that was easily lost among the other ones. The Turbografx/PC Engine family of systems included classics like Gate of Thunder and Lords of Thunder, the three mainline Star Soldier games, Magical Chase, Air Zonk, Seirei Senshi Spriggan, Blazing Lazers, Ginga Fukei Densetsu Sapphire, Cho Aniki, impressive ports of arcade hits like R-Type, Fantasy Zone, Gradius, Gradius II, Salamander… I’m not forgetting any games here, but if I keep typing out quality shoot ‘em ups from Hudson and NEC’s consoles — Download, Coryoon, Parodius Da!, Nexzr — we’ll never move on from this point.
We’re out of the moment where you had to pick and choose, though, as it’s been over 30 years since Star Parodier released. And hell, the other reason Star Parodier has been comparatively but understandably overlooked against other shooters in that extensive library is because it was exclusive to Japan — Star Parodier is damn enjoyable, despite some clear faults, but most people didn’t have a chance to discover that. There was a planned release for North America — it even had a name, Fantasy Star Soldier, and a logo — but it didn’t end up happening in the end, likely because the Turbografx, 16 or CD, never quite took off outside Japan like it did inside of it as the PC Engine/PC Engine CD-ROM. Not all of the main series Star Soldier games made it out of Japan either despite their popularity, if that tells you anything.
The PC Engine Software Bible made a note of not just that planned North American title, but also why the original was named the way it was, and why it would have received such a change overseas:
In Japanese, Super Star Soldier is spelt more phonetically, i.e. Supaa Sutaa Soruja. So as a parody, Paroja is a contraction of Soruja (Soldier) and Parodi (parody). The title is written as Star Parodier - an accurate representation of the intention, and as this seems to be the common spelling among PC Engine fans. All this confusion and word-play is probably why many import companies just settled on the less complicated Star Parody. Was due for release in the USA as Fantasy Star Soldier.
Star Parodier would receive a second Japanese-exclusive release on the Playstation Portable’s PC Engine Best Collection: Star Soldier, but eventually did release outside of Japan and into North America. It took until the Wii Virtual Console began to include not just Turbografx-16 and CD titles, but also imports, for that to happen. It had a second, more limited release, this time on the Turbografx-16 Mini, which also includes the available PC Engine titles even outside of Japan where it was sold as the PC Engine Mini.
I mentioned before that Star Parodier was in the Compile style, but not developed by Compile. That’s because Compile was responsible for developing the classic shoot ‘em up Gunhed (Blazing Lazers outside of Japan) for the PC Engine, which Hudson Soft published and was so enamored by that they changed the direction of their Star Soldier games, which had been on the NES, by the time they arrived on their own home system. Super Star Soldier, Soldier Blade, and Final Soldier all took cues from Compile’s efforts on Blazing Lazers, and so, of course, the parody game based on those games did, too.
The developers of Super Star Soldier (1990) and Final Soldier (1991) were Kaneko and Inter State — Inter State was a studio within Kaneko — and they also worked on Star Parodier (1992). Soldier Blade is actually the “final” Star Soldier game on the platform, but that was developed by Hudson Soft on an accelerated timeline alongside development of Star Parodier, to release just a couple of months after it in ‘92. Besides the gameplay, what these titles have in common is an emphasis on impressive sprites and graphics that showed off what the system could do: this was pretty standard practice for Hudson Soft’s first-party efforts on their system. Star Parodier was developed by a third-party, sure, but one that Hudson had worked with extensively that they trusted to handle this core series, and they would work closely with their partners, too, just as they expected their partners to work closely with them when they were the ones doing the developing for other systems and publishers.
The most impressive takeaways visually are the moments where sprite scaling are employed, whether to have an enemy sprite be zoomed in on then fly off, to have your own ship rise up and fly away, or because a Bomberman boss has to get really, really big. It also hits you, when you recognize what a level is an homage to, just how good Star Parodier’s version of things look. The difference, visually, in something like Scene (stage) 7, which seems to be based off of Blazing Lazer’s giant bubble-focused stage, and the source material, is wild: it’s more cartoony, sure, but it’s brighter, more vibrant, more alive, and, pun intended, bursting with character. Each stage is also wildly different from the last one, with little in the way of reused backgrounds and sprites: the first stage is probably the most boring one visually, since it’s just “space” like in Star Soldier titles, but even that manages to throw in domed space station colonies, bright coloring outside of the starry background, and an amusement park/circus vibe by the end. Being on the CD-ROM add-on instead of the standard PC Engine HuCard format, with all of the extra storage that entails, is part of the difference here, since more assets could be stored and used. But it also helps that Kaneko/Inter State/Hudson decided to make sure that space was utilized to create an impressive game on the visual side.
The only element of the game that is lacking is the soundtrack: it’s fitting in-game, and it’s a good listen, too, but it’s very much the kind of soundtrack that only works within its setting. The music is a bit forgettable: it does its job in the moment, but for someone as invested in video game music as I am, I honestly can’t get a single beat of a track to play in my head now as I sit here thinking on it. All things considered, that’s not a deal breaker by any means, since again, it does its job in-game. You just probably won’t find yourself hoping for a vinyl release of the original soundtrack or anything like that.
At least the audio is high quality, owing to the CD-ROM format once again, and there are voice samples that not only sound clear, but are also helpful: there’s no on-screen indicator in English for your ship’s movement speed, for instance, but a voice yells “Speed up!” or “Speed down!” when you press the button, depending on where in the cycle you are, and the various weapon types get a shout, too. Which is useful, since each ship has its own power-ups to collect for their exclusive weaponry, like the Bomberman ship and its ability to fire a wave of bombs.
Star Parodier can be derivative, for sure, as it pulls more than just a little bit from other non-Star Soldier shooters, and it’s not as inspired in its wackiness as Parodius — what is? But if you’re into the Star Soldier games in general — especially the PC Engine-era ones — and want to play a goofier version of them where you get to be a giant Bomberman ship flying through the sky blowing up cartoon enemies with bombs and balloons, or even just an anthropomorphic video game console that fires CD-ROMs and HuCards, well, there’s a place where you can do all of those things. Now if only it could get a wider release in the present, so people could actually get the chance to do said things without it being illegal.
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