It's new to me: Bomberman Quest
It's new to me: Bomberman Quest
It's Bomberman meets Zelda. Metaphorically speaking.
This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Bomberman, as a franchise, is not new to me. Given just how many Bomberman games exist, however — 75 released between 1983 and 2018, if you count spinoffs but not compilations or collections — there are entire chunks of the franchise’s history that are waiting to be experienced by me for the first time. Bomberman Quest is one such title, and is representative of the kinds of things Hudson Soft tried to do with handheld iterations of their most famous mascot, where side-scrolling platformers and crossovers with Wario and games split in two like paired Pokémon titles existed. Rather than the kind of multiplayer arena gameplay Bomberman was best known for, Quest was a chance to put Bomberman in the starring role of a Legend of Zelda-like action-adventure game.
The 1999 release is not a subtle homage, inspiration, whatever you want to call it. The game looks a whole lot like other Game Boy Color Zelda titles, such as Link’s Awakening, down to the way the actual walls and plants and dungeons and water all look. Some of this is surely due to the Game Boy (and Game Boy Color’s) technical limitations that resulted in so many games from so many different developers having similar aesthetics due to what was visually possible on those handhelds. But it goes beyond just these extremely similar visuals that look as if Hudson — who worked on games for Nintendo systems even when they had a perfectly good Turbografx-16 of their own at home, who had a number of titles published by Nintendo on those and other systems, who developed Mario Party games and had a number of its employees end up leaving Hudson for Nintendo before the end came for the former, many of whom remain there today in an internal studio they founded — simply asked Nintendo for the Link’s Awakening tile set to save some development time.
Bomberman Quest begins with our titular hero in a shipwreck that places him in an unfamiliar land. Link’s Awakening begins with our titular hero in a shipwreck that places him in an unfamiliar land. Granted, it’s a spaceship Bomberman is on compared to Link’s sailing vessel, but putting Bomberman on a sailboat would have been a little too on the nose. Bomberman has to defeat all of the monsters that have suddenly appeared with his arrival, in a land that was otherwise peaceful. Link has to defeat all of the monsters that have suddenly appeared with his arrival, in a land that was otherwise peaceful. Bomberman, in his journey, will end up equipping a shovel to dig for hearts, slap on Power Bracelets in order to lift rocks, will solve puzzles in caves and dungeons that often involve hitting switches and avoiding arrows, and he plays an ocarina in order to be magically teleported back to the village that serves as the hub for the game world. (They call it a flute, but I know a video game ocarina when I see one.) Link, in his… alright, you get what I’m saying here.
Bomberman Quest, in the most generalized description possible, plays a lot like if you ran around in a 90s Zelda game only using Link’s bombs to fight. This should in no way be interpreted as a negative, because Bomberman Quest is great fun, and an inspired take on the Zelda style of action-adventure despite its need to absolutely bash you over the head with potential comparisons to said inspiration.
Those monsters that suddenly appeared at the same time Bomberman arrived on the scene are there because of Bomberman. Not because of some prophecy or the coming awakening of a powerful entity named Breeze Tuna, but because Bomberman’s spaceship was full of 48 monsters he had captured in his previous journeys: when the ship crashed, the monsters escaped. There are no basic enemies in Bomberman’s Quest, which actually does serve to separate it from the Zelda formula: instead, you have 48 boss fights of varying difficulty that require different strategies and different equipment to defeat, and they happen just about anywhere out in the world. Sometimes you’ll come upon foes you can’t beat yet or just don’t need to; sometimes, you’ll have to fight them and win in order to progress, as each drops an item you can use or a component for building specific kinds of bombs.
Whenever you go back to the village to save, the enemies you’ve defeated reappear, but you don’t need to fight them a second time, and avoiding them is as easy as walking or running past them into the next square on the grid that is your game world. If you do defeat an enemy you’ve already beaten before, you’ll receive a heart item that can be used to refill three pieces of your health bar. You can only carry one at a time, but between digging up hearts with your shovel and keeping one of these items around, you should be able to weather both long trips away from the hub village, as well as dungeons where one of the four primary bosses awaits you at the end.
You’ll need different strategies for these various bosses. Sure, some are as easy to defeat as just dropping a few bombs in the way of where they will eventually walk or jump or float to, but others require a more refined approach. There are bosses who can kick your own bombs back at you, or blow them away with whirlwinds, or are floating over pits of spikes that make your chasing after them tough. One of the more difficult of the game’s four dungeon-defending commanders can only be injured by a specific explosion type, and you have to hope he is hovering within its limited impact radius when it goes off, all while running to avoid his projectiles and his bombs that have a much, much larger explosive output than anything you’ve got. You get bombs that curve in a direction when thrown or kicked, homing bombs, bombs that freeze enemies, bombs that only work underwater, bombs that bounce when thrown. You can throw them, you can kick them, or you can just drop them and pray.
In addition, your equipment options give you a number of ways to play the game. They allow you to equip tougher armor that cuts damage in half, or to increase your walking speed, or to swim underwater, or be able to kick bombs, and so on, but you can only have one of these equipped at a time. You can switch between them at will, however, unlike with temporary items like the armored jacket that stops you from receiving any damage for a short time, or the stopwatch that freezes traps like those aforementioned arrows in dungeons. You will spend a lot of time on the menu screens figuring out the loadout Bomberman needs for a specific puzzle or foe.
You don’t need to capture all 48 of the escaped monsters in order to complete the game. You just need to defeat every one of them that has a necessary component or item. You won’t get the “real” Bomberman Quest ending without defeating all four dungeons and their commanders as well as the 48 escaped monsters, however: doing so gets you access to a hidden final boss, and the true ending for your efforts. Whether it’s worth getting all of this is up to you: Bomberman Quest isn’t a particularly lengthy game, coming in at around five hours, and the grid map isn’t massive by any means so it’s not a major stretch to go around and find the monsters that are still missing. Plus, your menu screen shows you how many monsters are in each of the game’s four zones, and how many you have left to catch, so you don’t need to simply wander the wilderness forever to figure out what’s left, either.
Bomberman Quest has some quality music to listen to while you navigate the world looking for these monsters, too. It was Jun Chikuma’s final game as a Hudson regular (though, not her final contribution to a Bomberman game) and the mind primarily behind what Bomberman games sounded like to that point, but the soundtrack was not just hers: she composed the battle theme, yes, but Keiji Ueno and Goro Takahashi would also contribute songs, and the work of the three of them helped ensure that, though the game looked like Zelda and certainly borrowed concepts from it, it was very much a Bomberman title.
I am partial to the Hurri Commander theme, as the song helps perpetuate what you’re feeling when you’re fighting what is easily at that point the toughest boss battle of the game, one where you feel like these guys in Bomberman’s way might have more power than you realized:
Each zone has their own themes, too, often upbeat, and a great example of the quality music the Game Boy (Color)’s fairly basic tech was capable of producing:
The whole soundtrack is available on YouTube, if you want to see what I mean.
Now, let’s talk about who made Bomberman Quest, because it’s somehow unclear. I’ve been trying to find information on this since the mystery revealed itself to me, but what you see is what I’ve got. Someone else is going to have to sort this one out in full, like when Super Jump Magazine finally tracked down the mystery developers of Game Boy Color title Snoopy Tennis 20 years after it released.
The game itself says Hudson Soft on the title screen. Wikipedia, as well as the Bomberman fandom wiki, both list Eleven as the developer, however. Neither has a link to a page for the developer Eleven, and a Google search of a studio named Eleven doesn’t net you what you’d hope for, either, largely thanks to it being a studio named after a number instead of something much more distinct.
Giant Bomb’s archives mention Hudson as the developer, with no mention of Eleven. The studio only has credits on one other game I could find, courtesy of The Cutting Room Floor, and that’s Nightmare in the Dark, a game where, in one listing, they are shown as one of three developers, and in another, they are shown to be the publisher of it.
Shigeki Fujiwara, one of the game’s directors, had a long history of working on Bomberman games, and joined Hudson all the way back in 1989. The other director, Takeshi Ikenouchi, also worked for Hudson, and Quest was his first Bomberman title. Shoji Mizuno, who passed away in 2018, worked on the art for the game, and was the guy who gave Bomberman his 90s redesign as well as a longtime Hudson staffer. Kozue Satoh, another artist, worked on Bomberman games from 1996 through 2001 for Hudson.
Seriously, who is Eleven? Was it just a team at Hudson that was putting together this game? That doesn’t necessarily check out, considering they are also listed as the Japanese publisher on Nightmare in the Dark, and that game has nothing to do with Hudson, anyway. I finally found a clearer lead at Moby Games, of all places, as they have credits pages for games, not just box art. Moby Games lists Eleven Co., Ltd. as a developer on the 1995 edition of Lords of Thunder on the Sega CD (coincidentally enough, Lords of Thunder was developed originally by a studio that often worked with Hudson, Red Company, for Hudson’s PC Engine CD, and was published by Hudson in Japan, too), as well as SNES side-scroller Majūō, Nightmare in the Dark, Bomberman Quest, and a second Bomberman title, Saturn Bomberman Fight!!, which, you can probably guess the platform for that one.
Moby Games also has a link to the Game Developer Research Institute page for Eleven Co., Ltd., and it’s there we finally see some concrete-ish info on them. They “appear” to have formed in 1993, by former staff of Kaneko, a subsidiary of Inter State, whom you might know as the developers of Aero Blasters/Air Buster, which was released in arcades as well as on the Sega Genesis and Turbografx-16. Before the remaining Kaneko employees broke off to form Eleven in ‘93, others had left in 1991 to form the previously mentioned Red Company. So, that Lords of Thunder port was something of a reunion for these developers, and Hudson was there every step of the way, too, at least in Japan.
The GDRI page also lists additional games developed by or with assistance from Eleven, including the Neo Geo’s Panic Bomber, a Bomberman falling block puzzler, so this studio did a whole lot more than either Wikipedia or the Bomberman wiki’s lack of additional links implies. Why am I mentioning all of this? Mostly as a reminder that, for all of the information that’s been collected about video game development and the industry’s history over the years, especially in the age of the internet, it still sometimes takes a surprising amount of effort to discover anything about even a studio that had its hands on multiple titles of one of the longest-running and most-prolific franchises out there. There’s a lot of documentation left out there to unearth or piece together, if this is the state of info gathering on developers who worked on literally Bomberman on more than one occasion.
Anyway! Bomberman Quest is a lot of fun and certainly worth the time whether you’re into Bomberman or are intrigued by the idea of playing a Zelda-style game through a different lens. The problem is that it just isn’t available anywhere: it’s not a game you can find on the Nintendo 3DS eShop, it’s not one that either Hudson nor their absorber, Konami, bothered to re-release or make available elsewhere. It’s one you’re just going to have to buy secondhand for more money than you want to pay for it, or you’ll just have to, I don’t know, load up a Master Boy emulator on your Playstation Portable and find the ROM file for Bomberman Quest. That’s just a hypothetical, of course. Whatever emulator you choose, Bomberman Quest will be worth the effort of tracking it down.
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.