Remembering Hudson Soft: Bomberman Generation

There are many 3D Bomberman games, sure, but Generation stands out.

Hudson Soft, founded in the 70s, did just about everything a studio and publisher could do in the video game industry before it was fully absorbed into Konami on March 1, 2012. For the next month here at Retro XP, the focus will be on the roles the studio played, the games they developed, the games they published, the consoles they were attached to, and the legacy they left behind. After all, someone has to remember them, since Konami doesn’t always seem to. Previous entries in the series can be found through this link.

For a significant chunk of the franchise’s history, Bomberman games were mostly a similar kind of game. There was nothing wrong with that game, mind you, it’s just that they were very much of a particular style and genre, which was repeated quite a bit, with variations here and there to keep things fresh. After Hudson was mostly free of their console partnership with tech giant NEC, though, and had to figure out how to exist again in a world where they couldn’t rely on being a first-party developer to pay the bills, Bomberman began to adapt, to branch out, to grow into the role of Hudson’s primary mascot and breadwinner. The maze-style multiplayer mayhem that also transferred over into a slower-paced single-player experience was able to become something else entirely, but still be Bomberman in the end. Hudson Soft basically took the energy and philosophy behind 1987’s RoboKing — a Bomberman spinoff that felt like a Bomberman-like character navigating the world of Blaster Master — and spread it out into a whole bunch of other directions, and in a far more refined and enjoyable manner.

This is how we ended up with the trilogy of Bomberman 3D platformers on the Nintendo 64, which focused more on the single-player campaign than the multiplayer: the multiplayer of Bomberman 64 was considered disappointing, but the single-player experience made up for it for many, and in the case of Bomberman Hero, the muliplayer was omitted altogether to fully focus on a campaign. This shift of what Bomberman could be is how the Game Boy Color ended up with Pocket Bomberman, which was a side-scrolling platformer that still used the central mechanics of bombs and power upgrades and clearing the screen of enemies in its play, and games like Bomberman Quest, which answered the question of what a topdown Zelda game would be like if you only had bombs. (That answer? Great.) It’s how Bomberman ended up with a kart racer, a falling block puzzle game, a spinoff series of mini-game collections, a tactical role-playing game, one based on a Bomberman anime series, and the more traditional multiplayer-focused arena titles all coexisting as Bomberman over the course of about a decade.

The peak of this era of experimentation in Bomberman, as far as pure quality goes, might very well be 2002’s GameCube exclusive, Bomberman Generation. It’s something of a hidden gem on that system, given it managed to be a runner-up for GameSpot’s “Best Game No One Played On The GameCube” award and GameSpot’s “Best GameCube Platformer” award in the same year. So underrated, it couldn’t even win the underrated award designed for games like that. I’m something of a Super Mario Sunshine apologist due to its ambition, while also being deeply aware of its very present flaws, so I’ve been wrestling with the idea of whether Generation should have won the “Best GameCube Platformer” honor over it in 2002, but the fact that it’s close enough for me to not just automatically go with the literal Mario title should tell you something about Generation. If nothing else, it’s aged better in just about every way than Sunshine, and it feels better to play, too.

Past 3D Bomberman games, even when they generally work well, don’t necessarily control smoothly or flawlessly. There’s a bit of an awkwardness to them, the kind that can come with the transition from 2D to 3D gameplay that often occurred in the fifth console generation, but by the time of the GameCube and Bomberman Generation, all of that had been ironed out and then some. The titular Bomberman can feel a little slow to control at first, but once you pick up speed upgrades and get a feel for how long you have before a bomb explodes, how far away you need to be from it, and how far you can throw a bomb, anyway, it all feels natural in a way that, say, the N64 Bomberman games didn’t, even when they otherwise worked well.

The classic kind of Bomberman logic and systems you expect are all here — the aforementioned speed upgrades, increases to the number of bombs you can drop, the blast strength of those bombs — as well as the (then) more recent 3D elements of a Bomberman platformer, like using bombs to make jumps across gaps before they explode, a little helper companion, and powering up a bomb to make a super bomb that does more damage to a wider area. It’s what the game does with all of these systems that make it stand out as the best of this style of Bomberman.

There are three worlds to visit at the game’s start — as Bomberman sets out to defeat the Hige Hige Bandits and retrieve the stolen “Bomb Elements” that could cause untold destruction in the wrong hands — and you can do so in any order. You can even bounce between the three as you please: starting in 1-1 does not commit you to that first world until you complete it. You can hop on over to 2-1 or 3-1 and start making progress in those worlds whenever you please, and there are reasons to do so. For one, you could simply end up stuck at a puzzle or a tough boss fight, and want to go elsewhere until you can figure things out. Even more practically, though, is that there are permanent upgrades to be collected, and what you find in the second world might be of use to you in the first, and so on. It’s possible the thing you’re missing to make a puzzle solvable is something you wouldn’t have access to until later if you just played through the worlds in order, or you might be able to better fend off a boss’ attack if you’re equipped in a different way thanks to hitting up other worlds first.

Those equippables are actually your little animal companions, known as Charaboms. If you’ve played some other Bomberman titles, you might remember Pommy: Pommy is Charabom. You’ll find doorways within levels, and some of them contain a potential Charabom companion, which you can win to your side by having another of your Charaboms defeat them in battle. Hudson was allowed to do a little Pocket Monster action of their own, alright? They developed the Pokémon Trading Card Game video games for Nintendo and published the Robopon series, too, pitting cute monsters against each other in battle to aid in their keeper’s progress is fine. You find where the Charabom is hiding, select another Charabom to fight them, considering things like elemental weaknesses in the process, and then you essentially program three rounds of battle options at once. You have a series of options, like attack, defend, then special attack, or defend, special, and attack, and so on, and you pick three of those macros, none of them repeated, and hope that your strategy will win out against your opponents’ plan.

You’re able to keep trying again and again, so don’t worry if it doesn’t work out the first time, or if your Charabom gets absolutely obliterated because you didn’t consider that maybe your water-based opponent would be able to trounce your fire-based ally. You spend much of the game somewhat passively leveling up your Charabom for these battles, too, so you can always come back later and try again if the problem was that their stats just didn’t match up with those of the one you were trying to recruit. Enemies and destructable objects alike drop items that will level up whichever Charabom you have equipped at the time you collect them, granting them higher attack, defense, and so on, and since you can replay levels to your heart’s content, if you ever need to level up a specific Charabom a few times, it’s easy enough to do so.

Chances are good you won’t need to do any kind of grinding like that, though, or maybe just early on before you have a stable of Charabom pals to turn to. And that’s because you can switch between Charabom whenever, and just sort of naturally level up the ones you want to as you play the game like normal. Each Charabom has a unique power that will help you, whether it’s the ability to throw bombs further, kick them further, control their movement, detonate them yourself in the order you dropped them in, or things like improving the defense of Bomberman himself. And you’ll find yourself, due to the design of the stages, focusing heavily on specific Charabom at a time, giving them space to level up as you continually need to throw bombs further or detonate them at specific times and so on in a given stage that focuses more on one aspect of gameplay than another.

Later in the game, due to the merging of Charabom, you’ll need to worry even less about which Charabom are getting all of the experience items, since the merging process spits out high-level Charabom capable of defeating any others you find in recruitable zones. These Charabom are the ones you’ll use the most in the game’s later stages, which will unlock after you complete the first three worlds: that’s because they combine two powers from Charabom you already have together, allowing you to do things like detonate bombs when you choose to and use those bombs to jump through the same Charabom. It saves you some time, but also allows for higher-level environmental puzzles than could exist in the first few worlds when your Charabom were more specific in their potential application.

In order to merge Charabom, though, you’ll need to find the more basic forms of them. Exploration is the key to this, and you’ll do quite a bit of it in Bomberman Generation. You’ll do it to find additional upgrades, to find Charabom, to find the lightning cards (that, practically, only unlock Bomberman’s ally slash rival Max as a playable character in multiplayer once you’ve collected them all, but in terms of ego and feeling accomplished, are attached to a number of quality environmental puzzles and pathfinding sections of the game) and the puzzles associated with them. And to find the hidden bomb powers that you will need in order to complete the game.

Improving Bomberman’s arsenal is a two-part process. First, you need to find an item that will be able to alter his standard fire-based bomb into something else, and to do so, you need to complete some kind of mini-game or challenge that you happen upon while exploring a level. Then, you need to find a completely separate door, in a completely separate stage, that will allow you to build a new type of bomb. The ones that you build all have their own elemental power that will let you make progress in levels you’ve yet to complete as well as additional progress in ones you had already played: water, ice, wind, and a light bomb which gives corporeal form to objects and enemies that you could not interact with previously. You’ll need to switch between the bombs often in order to solve the environmental platforming puzzles in front of you, and it’s also helpful to keep something of a mental register for puzzles that seem unsolvable with your current arsenal, so that you can go back to them later once you’re fully equipped to handle the task at hand.

Even the bosses are something of a puzzle to be solved. You’re not going to get very far against them, whether we’re talking about the mid-world Hige Hige Bandit fights or the end-world regional big bad battle — without trying to learn their patterns and identifying their weak points: many of the bosses are only vulnerable to attacks for a very short window of time, and you’ll need to either time a bomb throw or detonate a bomb at the right time in order to damage them, all while defending yourself from what is often an incessant onslaught that can always harm you. You’ll find yourself going on the defensive pretty regularly — maybe even equipping the defensive-boost Charabom in case you take a hit — before switching to an offensive mindset to score damage where you can. It makes the boss fights fairly thrilling, and while you do need to learn patterns in order to do anything — and you do need to attack with the large bombs only, as small bombs won’t cause even a scratch to appear — nothing is as opaque in this regard as it could occasionally be in Generation’s 3D predecessors.

Generation plays excellently, but it also looks and sounds wonderful. It released in 2002 in a cel-shaded style, which makes it something of an early adopter there, and it still looks great to this day, whether you play on a CRT monitor as intended or are forced to use an HD set to play. In my recent play of Generation, I used both to see the difference: everything appears to move more smoothly on my CRT, but even without Progressive Mode — which Generation lacks — on a 55-inch HD set, the game still looks good in a way that games from the same era that strove for realism or simply a less age-less style do not. Baten Kaitos, for all its beauty, needs that Progressive Mode enabled if you want it to look good on an HD set. Bomberman Generation looks good regardless of what you play it on; it just looks better in its native resolution and environment.

The game was actually developed by Game Arts, not Hudson Soft, and published by Hudson in Japan, with Majesco handling the North American release. Even knowing it was Game Arts that developed Generation, it’s still something of a surprise that they did: Game Arts is more known for role-playing games like Grandia and Lunar than they are for action-adventure games, and this would be the only Bomberman title they would develop. Game Arts would sometimes branch out, though: they’re responsible for two significant JRPG series, yes, but they’ve also developed run-and-gun games, originated the Silpheed series, the mecha-piloting Gungriffon games, and even contributed to the development of Super Smash Bros. Brawl. They might have seemed an odd choice for Bomberman, specifically, but whether it was their vision or simply enacting Hudson’s own, they nailed it with Generation.

And it wasn’t just the campaign, either. Generation has a fully fleshed out and wonderful multiplayer component, too: these are designed in the more classic sense, with 3D graphics, yes, but played in a more two-dimensional space with two-dimensional movements. There are five different battle modes to choose from. In Standard, it’s a timed four-player fight, with the arena shrinking in the last minute as blocks begin to fall and force a resolution between however many players are left standing by then. Reversi has you attempting to secure the most panels on the floor before time runs out, and, you guessed it, you secure a panel by being the last one to have blown it up with a bomb. The Dodge battle mode has you avoiding bombs that fall from the sky rather than your opponents’ hands. Revenge has you racing to see who can blow up the most moles, with partial scores awarded for stunning them, before time runs out. And the Coin battle has you all blowing up barrels full of coins, and trying to avoid dying in the process, as that will cut your coin total in half.

Bomberman’s multiplayer is obviously a time-tested affair, so even just the standard battle mode is plenty of fun, but options are nice, and the variety here is even better: it’s not just slight variations on the same theme, but different styles of multiplayer battle to choose from. And there is enough customization present for you to tweak until you find the perfect form of a standard multiplayer battle, too: you’re not just playing one mode out of the box forever.

Bomberman Generation combines an excellent multiplayer component with a best-in-class single-player experience, that plays and looks great today, with Game Arts contributing a soundtrack that fits in well with what Bomberman is supposed to be sound like. It’s a hidden gem, an underrated classic, whatever you want to call it: the most important thing is that it’s still a ton of fun, 20 years after its release, and that you might be surprised to find out just how much fun it is if you’ve never played before. Which, given the award it was in the running for two decades ago, is a list comprised of basically everyone reading this.

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