Re-release this: Wario Blast: Featuring Bomberman!
A Wario and Bomberman crossover event that made a whole lot of sense for everyone involved.
This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
In 1994, Wario was still establishing himself as a character. We were introduced to him in 1992 as the antagonist of Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, and the main takeaway from that was Wario’s love of treasure and castles: Mario was seemingly a magnanimous type — how else do you explain Bowser not being murdered after multiple kidnappings? — but Wario just wanted to live large. In March of ‘94, North America received Wario’s first solo adventure, where he ran around wearing different hats looking for more treasure to build his own castle with, since Mario wasn’t thrilled about the whole having his own home stolen out from under him thing.
What else did we know about Wario at this point? He had a plane, which should have resulted in an Air Zonk-style shoot-em-up at some point but didn’t — Nintendo, there’s still time, call me — but that’s about it. He wasn’t a blank slate, but as a rogue-ish sometimes villain who wasn’t so lost to the path that he couldn’t head up his own games, there was room to maneuver there. So Nintendo did: when they worked with Hudson Soft to publish their game Bomberman GB in North America, it took on a very different form there.
In Japan, Bomberman GB — the “GB” stands for Game Boy — was a portable title in the series, released in August of 1994 and both published and developed by Hudson Soft there. Hudson had a history of developing their games for other companies even while they had their own consoles to support, and since the handheld cousin of the PC Engine (the TurboExpress) was basically a reverse Super Game Boy, in that it was a portable that played console games, there was plenty of room for Hudson to get away with developing a Bomberman specifically for the Game Boy rather than focusing on their weakening partnership with NEC. The money was with Nintendo’s platforms at this point, not Hudson’s own, and since Nintendo was seeking an edge over those upstarts at Sega, they were more than happy to make it a more official relationship by publishing some of Hudson’s games in North America and in PAL regions, helping them remain exclusives and off the Genesis and Game Gear.
Which is how Nintendo ended up not just publishing Bomberman GB outside of Japan, but making it a crossover title between Hudson’s Bomberman and Wario, who was in the midst of quite the push on both consoles and handhelds after his introduction two years earlier. In North America and Europe, Bomberman GB is known as Wario Blast: Featuring Bomberman! Rather than the original game’s story, where White Bomberman is assailed by his rival, Black Bomberman, and then has to fight off Black Bomberman’s minions in order to win back his abilities and a motorcycle, we’re instead treated to a different one. Wario has inexplicably shown up in Bomberman’s world, and wants to loot it for all it’s worth — and yes, part of that involves ending up with a motorcycle. If you play as Wario, you go around blowing things up as you always do in a Bomberman title, gaining more of Bomberman’s abilities as you plunder. If you play as Bomberman instead, you’re attempting to stop Wario’s scheme in its tracks.
It’s Bomberman whether you play as Wario or the titular protagonist, as the only real change to things is that there is a Wario sprite and Wario artwork all over the place now, but that’s fine. Bomberman is fun; Bomberman where you play as Wario is still Bomberman, and therefore is also fun. Maybe further incorporation of Wario should have occurred, or a sequel could have come out that meshed the two together instead of simply placing Wario inside of Bomberman’s universe, but what we got is still a good time if you’re into Bomberman.
The real great tragedy is that we didn’t get Bomberman showing up in Wario’s universe afterward, but hey, 1995’s Bomberman GB 2 — known as Bomberman GB in North America since that name wasn’t used the first time around — brought us Bomberman dressed up like Indiana Jones in a search for a legendary treasure, and 1998’s Pocket Bomberman was a side-scrolling platformer for the Game Boy and Game Boy Color. So that time with Wario rubbed off on him all the same. (Both of those games, like Wario Blast, were published in Japan by Hudson, and in North America by Nintendo.)
Apparently, Mario was the first consideration to join up with Bomberman, but director and designer Norio Okubo felt he was the wrong fit — in 2021, Okubo tweeted, amid a discussion of the game, (this is Twitter’s English translation of the Japanese text), “I thought it wouldn’t be good for Mario to have bombs.” Hudson eventually landed on Wario as making sense for this role instead, and in the end, bombs ended up heavily associated with him even though they had not previously been a fixture for the yellow-clad sometimes-hero. Wario is associated with bombs in one way or another in various spin-off games such as from the Mario Sports franchise, Mario Party, in Mario Kart: Double-Dash!! where his specialty attack involves a Bob-omb.
And let’s not forget about that motorcycle while focusing on the bombs, either: that thing is such a Wario staple at this point that he has biker gear and can drive it around and wield it as a weapon in Smash Bros. The decision of Okubo and Hudson to go in this direction ended up reverberating throughout the years, and helped to shape just who Wario was to Nintendo. No small thing for a game plenty of people never played or knew about in the first place.
As for what Wario Blast is actually like when you play: it’s Bomberman. It’s titled Wario Blast: Featuring Bomberman! but it really should be the other way around. Wario is in Bomberman’s world, bound by its established rules. You can’t take damage, or you lose. Damage comes via being caught up in an explosion, whether from your own or an opponents’ bomb. The item drops are a bit simplified here, with Wario/Bomberman’s speed constant, for instance, rather than upgraded through random pickups, but the number of bombs you can drop and the range of their explosions are enhanced via pickup. And those pickups are made available by blasting away what can be blasted in the game’s maze-like arenas. The other abilities — speeding up, kicking bombs, ramming into opponents, motorcycle, and so on — are acquired as you clear a world. Complete the first three levels and then defeat the first world’s boss? You can now kick bombs across the map. Clear world two? Now you can run when you hold down B.
You’ll need to master the various abilities granted to you in order to complete each world, which bring their own complexities to consider as you advance. While the first is a simple affair where you just need to blow up opponents before they blow you up first, the second world introduces warp tiles, which you need to learn the patterns of in order to catch your foes up in a well-timed blast, the third world introduces tiles that guide the path of the bombs that you kick over them so you can redirect them around the map and, with luck, not back at you. While you never have to defeat more than three opponents in a single map, the fact that far more than just the graphical tileset has changed with each new world, but the very way you need to play and strategize and learn to deploy your powers also changes, keeps Wario Blast fresh even in its relative simplicity. And that’s what a Bomberman game needs, if it’s going to lean on the old-style arena-based formula for single-player: challenge and variety. (And a playable motorcycle.)
Wario Blast is not a graphical powerhouse — the sprites are a bit small, the detail in them lacking — but it’s not a dealbreaker for the game by any means. Future Bomberman efforts on the Game Boy looked obviously superior visually, is all, but the gap between them isn’t as great as, say, the jump between Super Mario Land and its sequel. The character art is a delight, at least, with large and detailed sprites for Wario and Bomberman peppered throughout the game — on the character select screen, before new levels, after a game over. And it all looks even better in color with the enhanced features designed for use on the Super Game Boy, which also include a border featuring many, many Bombermen, and one Wario:
Wario Blast features link cable-enabled multiplayer battles, as expected from an arena-based Bomberman title, but playing on the Super Game Boy bumps the player count from two to a possible four — you need a multitap to pull that off, but the option is there if you can manage to get your hands on a cartridge, a Super Game Boy, an SNES, a multitap, and four controllers. Much easier to do back in 1994, when all of those things were in-the-moment.
The soundtrack was composed by Yasuhiko Fukuda, and was his second Bomberman soundtrack after Super Bomberman, which had released in spring of 1994 in Japan and a couple of months before Wario Blast in North America. While Fukuda composed and arranged tracks for Bombeman games for just a few years, it was in the midst of Hudson’s multiplatform push. So, even though Fukuda was sharing compositional duties for the series with others during this time, he still ended up with credits on six different Bomberman titles between 1994 and 1997.
Wario Blast’s soundtrack is one worthy of the franchise: while the whole soundtrack is embedded above, I want to bring World 5’s theme to your attention:
The soundtrack is varied, with some high-speed tracks (World 7) and plenty that fit the bouncy playfulness and instrumental experimentation found in Bomberman’s deep library of sound that was shaped so much by Jun Chikuma and others like Fukuda throughout the early decades of the franchise’s existence, but World 5’s is the standout for me. An oddly moody track for Bomberman, maybe? But lovely all the same.
There are complaints to be made about Wario Blast — I’ve already made a couple of them, between the graphics not being quite as good as they probably should have been in 1994, and it being more Bomberman with Wario in it than a true fusion of the two franchises. They’re pretty minor in the grand scheme of things, though, and, along with enemy AI that bounces between nonsensical and why can’t I just blow them up what am I doing wrong, keeps it from being a classic entry in the franchise. It’s more noteworthy for its association with Nintendo’s budding star than anything, but as said before: it’s still Bomberman, and Bomberman is fun. Wario Blast might not be a top-tier entry in a series with an absurd number of titles to choose from, but it’s a good time worth checking out, regardless.
Sadly, it’s not available anywhere — it was not one of the Game Boy titles the vault was opened up for on the Nintendo 3DS eShop, and even if it had been, that’s shutting down in the spring of 2023, anyway. Nintendo and Konami should figure out a way to re-release this title, as well as the other Bomberman games the Big N published overseas for Hudson back in the day prior to Konami’s acquisition of the beloved studio. In the meantime, you can grab Wario Blast on the secondary market for under $10 if you’re lucky, or emulate it on one of the 5,000 devices in existence that can handle a Game Boy game. Of course, given how poorly Nintendo and Konami handle their extensive back catalogues, you might just want to prepare yourself to do that with all of those Bomberman games.
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