Remembering Hudson Soft: Saturn Bomberman
Criticized at the time for things we just do not need to care so much about in the present, or even in the past, really.
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.
While Hudson had a notable tendency to develop and publish games for platforms besides their own, those titles, more often than not, released on Nintendo consoles and handhelds. The two had a preexisting relationship, from Hudson porting Nintendo games to Japanese personal computers, to Nintendo publishing the North American version of Faxanadu, to crossover titles like a Bomberman game starring Wario. And that relationship would continue essentially until Konami swooped in and began purchasing large stakes of Hudson in the aughts.
Sega, though? There was very little Hudson presence on Sega’s consoles during the third and fourth console generations. Hudson never made a single Master System game — of course, given the Master System’s tiny library, no one else was stepping up, either — and they would make just a single Sega Genesis title: Mega Bomberman, which was actually just a port of the PC Engine title, Bomberman ‘94. There would be a little more Hudson action on the Sega CD/Mega CD, since Hudson could port over Turbografx CD and PC Engine CD titles like Lords of Thunder, Dungeon Explorer, and The Space Adventure, but no original titles to be found.
That changed with fifth-generation consoles, and the introduction of the Sega Saturn. Hudson needed homes for its games in the 32-bit era, and they were happy to put them on not just Nintendo consoles, but Sega’s and Sony’s, as well. And that’s where the first original Bomberman game for a Sega system came from, as well as the first original Hudson, worldwide-release on a Sega platform: Saturn Bomberman.
Not original enough for some critics, though. No one denied that Saturn Bomberman was good fun, but the complaints were that it didn’t do anything new for Bomberman. That it didn’t advance Bomberman in any meaningful way, outside of the introduction of its 10-player battle multiplayer (a mode which, obviously, required controller adapters for a console that had just two controller slots). I’m not picking on or singling out Jeff Gerstmann here, but his take is representative of a certain strain of Saturn Bomberman reviews, so let’s check it out:
Bomberman really reached its apex with the SNES version of Super Bomberman 2. Since that classic game, every subsequent Bomberman game has closely mirrored it, while tacking on a few silly features that kept the game fresh without really adding anything useful. Saturn Bomberman combines all these silly features into one game, giving you what should be the ultimate Bomberman game. But any serious Bomberman player has seen all this before.
Gerstmann would recommend Saturn Bomberman for anyone who didn’t still have an SNES and the ability to just go buy Super Bomberman 2 instead, and scored the game a 7.8 for Gamespot. Not bad, by any means.
A couple of things, though. As said, the devoted Sega audience did not necessarily have access to Bomberman games, and certainly not original ones. Mega Bomberman released in North America in 1995, a couple of months before the arrival of the Sega Saturn, and, as said, wasn’t an original Bomberman game, but one ported to the Genesis and Mega Drive by Westone. Bomberman and Bomberman II were NES games. There ended up being five Super Bomberman titles, all on the Super Nintendo/Super Famicom, and not all of those games released worldwide, either. Super Bomberman 3 released in Europe, but not North America, while 4 and 5 were both Japan exclusives. Those who chose the Genesis over the SNES had a comparative dearth of Bomberman to play, and Saturn Bomberman was coming out at a time when, especially in North America, the focus had already fully shifted from the previous generation to that of the Nintendo 64, Sony Playstation, and for around nine million people, the Sega Saturn. Super Bomberman 2 had released three full years before Saturn Bomberman’s arrival, and, unless you were an importer, the “silly features that kept the game fresh” were alien to even those who owned an SNES, never mind the Sega folks.
This is a case of critics not being able to step out of the kind of bubble their own video game experience is to consider why it is a more general audience might be attracted to a game. Gerstmann (and others with a similar criticism) might have been able to play a bunch of imported Super Bomberman games because of their roles, and might have still had their SNES in 1997, but that just isn’t the kind of angle to build meaningful criticism around, because it’s not a very normal experience that requires you imply those without an SNES were unserious about playing Bomberman.
Anyway, none of this matters so much when evaluating Saturn Bomberman in 2022, and again, Gerstmann liked the game plenty. Do you know how many 7.8 games I hold dear? I am very much picking nits to make a broader point about games criticism. What does matter is that the game is as good of a classic-style, arena-and-maze Bomberman as you can find. There might be better battle modes out there today, sure, but late-life Hudson, under the direction of Konami, was putting out their multiplayer Bomberman games as cheaper downloadable titles without as much of a single-player element to them.
And Saturn Bomberman’s whole deal, as far as the pre-full 3D era of Bomberman games go, is arguably the series’ peak, regrettably tucked away on a system that lost the fifth-generation console race by a few miles. Electronic Gaming Monthly named it their Game of the Year for the Saturn in 1997, as well as the best multiplayer game on the system. EGM also ranked it as the 10th-best console game ever, which is probably going just a tiny bit overboard even for me, a regular guy who actually has imported Bomberman games and ordered reproduction cartridges when the originals were nowhere to be found any longer, but the point is, there were people out there who loved it.
The battle mode, outside of the legitimate complaint that playing with 10 players actually is a problem for being able to see what the hell you’re doing or acquiring, is excellent. It is everything the Super Bomberman games were, and not meant in a negative sense: it’s also the best-looking Bomberman game in this style out there, thanks to the power of the 32-bit Saturn compared to the previous favorite home for Bomberman games, the 16-bit SNES.
Jun Chikuma’s soundtrack is on point, which is just what’d you expect from the person whose composing created the sound of Bomberman in the first place, especially after being given access to a CD-ROM system and all that entails for the first time in Bomberman’s history — the Turbografx/PC Engine releases of Bomberman were all on the standard HuCard instead of discs.
Chikuma always has a way with drums in her compositions, and the Battle Mode Menu theme is no exception:
It might seem basic in some ways, but that’s one of the strengths of her work: putting together an extremely catchy beat, often powered by drums, and then finding ways to build on that beat with chiptune sound effects, synths, Arabic instruments, and so on — whatever that particular song needs to accomplish its intended goal. Here, the theme for Amusement World incorporates the sound effects you might hear while at an amusement park — the bustle of crowds, the sounds of the amusements themselves — and blends those in with piano, synths, and, of course, an excellent back beat of drum and cymbal work to create a song that will stick in your head even when you aren’t playing Saturn Bomberman:
Last one: the Boss Battle theme is an excellent example of the kind of layering that goes on in Chikuma’s compositions. There is just so much happening, both within each moment and in the transition from one to the next. Excellent stuff:
The single-player mode, while not quite as engaging as some of the Bomberman games that prioritized a completely different genre experience instead of working the arena/maze format into a story mode, is still a lot of fun to work through. And it will prep you more than just a little bit for ruining your friends in the battle multiplayer.
The single-player mode features the same kind of power-ups you’d find in the multiplayer: upgrades for the number of bombs you can drop at a time, upgrades for the strength of the explosion they’ll make, upgrades to make Bomberman move faster, to withstand damage, to be able to throw or kick bombs after they’ve been placed. You also get a little dinosaur pal you can ride, and they have different powers depending on whether you’ve managed to level them up or not. The most basic version is able to jump, which can be helpful for avoiding an enemy who has gotten to close or if you’ve mistimed when an explosion is coming and can’t run away from it in time. The larger dinosaur pal can dash, which tends to be more useful, since there more situations where you can utilize that. Running from enemies, from bombs: you do a lot of running away in Bomberman, you know. Explosives are dangerous, after all, and Bomberman is as susceptible to them as his foes and the walls he’s trying to take down.
Depending on your point of view, the boss battles are either annoyingly difficult, or are asking for you to really think about a strategy in order to survive them. The first boss, for instance, is a flying building with long arms. If you place bombs too close to it, it’ll simply float away from the blast radius, and if it can’t get away, it will attempt to absorb one of the bombs with its hands, while avoiding any others with where its body was placed. You need to basically figure out how to lure this flying building in, laying enough bombs that it can’t account for them all, all while avoiding blowing yourself up or accidentally putting bombs behind obstacles that’ll block the blast and save this boss. Or you can be super aggressive and try to corner the boss at the top of the arena, which has its own pros and cons.
Like most Bomberman single-player games, it’s not overly difficult if you can get yourself in the head space where you won’t be accidentally trapping yourself with your own bombs, but it does help that Saturn Bomberman saves your progress so you can pick up after the last level you had completed. You won’t carry over your upgrades or anything, but you will keep your progress, which keeps you from needing to replay it all over and over again. And you won’t be trapped at a boss with no upgrades to help you in that fight if that’s what’s next up, either, since you can select to start at any stage you’ve previously completed, not just the most recent one.
I have played quite a bit of Bomberman. Saturn Bomberman is an exceptional entry, and arguably the best among the more classic-style games in the series, before the shift to 3D and a broadening of what a Bomberman game’s single-player experience should look like. It’s a shame that it ended up on a system that didn’t sell particularly well, that also is not particularly easy to emulate. If you have the means to play Saturn Bomberman, though, whether it be through a modded Saturn or emulation, you should. It’s a credit to the series, even if the most serious Bomberman players have seen it all before.
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.