XP Arcade: Rainbow Islands: The Story of Bubble Bobble 2

A sequel to Bubble Bobble that wasn't especially Bubble Bobble-like, to the point that it ended up spinning off into its own series.

This column is “XP Arcade,” in which I’ll focus on a game from the arcades, or one that is clearly inspired by arcade titles, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Rainbows are at the heart of everything in the first sequel to Bubble Bobble, in the same way bubbles were the focus of it all in that game. Bub and Bob, the bubble dragons from Bubble Bobble, are here in their non-cursed human forms, as Bubby and Bobby. While they no longer can shoot bubbles out of their mouths in Rainbow Islands: The Story of Bubble Bobble 2, they have power over rainbows, and the rainbows are actually wildly more powerful and dangerous and versatile, despite what you might think you know about how rainbows work. Then again, bubbles weren’t exactly a terrifying prospect, either, but ask all the monsters that were trapped inside of them and then popped along with them how they feel about those things. (You can’t, because they’ve exploded.)

Sure, there are some similarities between 1987’s Rainbow Islands and 1986’s Bubble Bobble, and it’s clearly part of that series and universe. Rainbow Islands is very much its own thing, however, even if it has “Bubble Bobble” right there in its subtitle. It’s not quite as distinct of a departure as Puzzle Bobble is to Bubble Bobble, sure, as Rainbow Islands is still a platformer, but what you’re doing in this platformer, and how you’re doing it, is completely different than it was just one year prior. Whereas Bubble Bobble was about clearing out a single-screen arena of its enemies before time ran out and an invincible foe arrived to try to kill you, Rainbow Islands is about ascending a scrolling screen before the flood waters arrive to wash you, and the islands, away.

Defeating monsters still plays a significant role — they’re in your way and trying to kill you and all that — but they’re more a means toward points and pickups here rather than the entire point, as they were in Bubble Bobble. In addition to making rainbows to use as platforms and hills to help you reach the static platforms in these vertical platforming stages, you can also use rainbows as a weapon. In a direct fashion, by launching one at an enemy to strike them with it, or, you can setup a bunch of rainbows in a row, then jump on one, causing the entire structure to collapse: it will defeat any monster it touches on the way down, and those monsters will leave behind collectibles and items that you can only acquire through this method. Such as the colored diamonds that open up the game’s secret stages, if you can only manage to secure them. With some practice, you’ll even start collecting items with rainbows, or learn to use their slight area-of-affect damage radius to regularly deliver some indirect damage to your enemies.

Image credit: Arcade Archives

Rainbow Islands, like Bubble Bobble before it, had good and bad endings. Whereas Bubble Bobble’s “bad” ending was because you played a game where co-op was the point as a single player, in Rainbow Islands, you get the bad ending(s) by not playing as thoroughly and effectively as you could. There are seven islands in the game for you to conquer… unless you successfully picked up the seven big diamonds, one for each island, in which case another three islands appear when you complete those initial seven. These three bonus islands have their own bad and good endings, as well!

Also like Bubble Bobble, Rainbow Islands is as difficult as it is cute. To the point that the existence of these bonus islands wasn’t an inherently known thing, even among the developers and publishers who were tasked with converting the arcade game to home platforms. Programmer Andrew Braybrook, on his blog, detailed how the team he was on at Ocean discovered far too late into the process of developing personal computer ports of Rainbow Islands that there were three bonus islands to program into the game. While they attempted to make it work, they didn’t have the time, nor the space on disk, for those three islands, which were all much bigger and, in one case, even used their own specific tile sets.

It doesn’t help that at this point in time, the way these conversions sometimes worked is that someone would play the game and record that playthrough, and then the developer would attempt to recreate all they saw with the assets given to them by the original team and publisher as a guide. So Ocean not discovering until much later that there was more to Rainbow Islands — and that they’d been playing it “wrong” during these recording sessions — is the kind of thing that could just happen, considering. Things have obviously improved at this point, but you also don’t have a bunch of 16-bit arcade games being ported to 8-bit machines on a six-week contract, either, so these kinds of workarounds are a thing of the past in another way, as well.

About those diamonds. There are seven different colored small diamonds, and then one large diamond. You get the large diamonds from the boss of each of the initial seven islands, but only if you collect the seven small diamonds, one of each color, on that island prior to defeating the boss. You’ll also get an extra life for pulling that off, which is nice, but the real important thing here is accessing the large diamond. Otherwise, you’re going to finish the seven islands and have the game basically go, “hey, nice half-ass job you did there, try again.”

Getting the small colored diamonds is simple, but only once you know what it is you need to do. As said before, certain items appear only under certain conditions, and these small diamonds are one of those: they’ll show up if you defeat an enemy with a rainbow that you’ve caused to fall by jumping on it. Easy enough, right? Don’t worry, there’s an added layer of complexity here to make it a much more nerve-wracking and skillful task.

You can’t just crush any enemy wherever you want and then get a colored gem out of it. Each colored gem only exists within a small vertical slice of the screen’s real estate, and the gem you get corresponds to which section the defeated foe finally lands on after being knocked out of midair by a rainbow. Observe, through this image from Strategy Wiki that makes the invisible grid visible:

Image credit: StrategyWiki

No, your eyes do not deceive you there: those sections are arranged, left to right, by the colors of the rainbow. So it should at least be easy for you to drop a few Roy G. Biv mentions while you play in order to remember where on the screen you need to be trying to crush enemies with rainbows, in order to get the diamond you’re missing.

There are a couple of other things to note here, too. Enemies bounce an invisible column’s length away when they hit the ground, so you want to smash them next to the column you’re looking for to increase your chances there. There’s also a second, additional secret if you can manage to collect the small diamonds in order, either from red to violet or violet to red: doing so unlocks a secret door in the boss of the island room, the entering of which will allow you to skip fighting the boss, pick up a secret treasure, and then advance to the next world.

These secret room treasures are serious ones, because they are permanent upgrades or allow you to warp deeper into the game: in the case of the seventh island, the secret item even allows you to continue on to the additional bonus islands that you otherwise need all seven big diamonds to open up. As for those permanent upgrades, they allow you to always be able to fire off one more rainbow than you used to at a time, the speed at which you can shoot rainbows, or the ability to double jump. Normally, you upgrade these things incrementally, and can lose them when you die: all of your power-ups reset when you lose a life, which can turn the game from a breeze into a nightmare in a hurry. These secret items, though, ensure that the baseline version of your protagonist is at least one level above what you actually start the game with, so continuing to push on becomes easier. It’s a ton of work to get these secret item rooms, since you need to be sure to not mess up your diamond collection order, but it’s doable, and worthwhile.

It’s actually a bit absurd how many different items exist within Rainbow Islands. Every third enemy you defeat spawns a power-up of some kind, with seven different ones showing up, in order, before a rare eighth appears once, and then it’s back to the original seven. Shoes let you run faster. The red potion adds a rainbow to your limit, the yellow increases your firing speed. Yellow stars explode into seven pieces that attack enemies on-screen in an upward motion, while red stars become 16 pieces that attack in all directions. Then there’s the crystal ball, which is worth 5,000 points, and also causes enemies to convert into Bubble Bobble foes for their death animations.

Collecting multiple of a specific item over time will also make different items with special abilities appear. There are also items that appear based on fulfilling certain conditions, like X number of enemies defeated by a particular star item. Seven diamonds of one color makes a special magical cane appear, and that cane will make different food items worth more than the standard appear for nine rainbows’ worth of shots. Two canes of the same color makes a special bottle appear, which once again generates special food items worth even more points. There are scepters that give you hints, rare items that grant you some kind of power or just a boatload of points or make defeating enemies even easier for a bit. One of them even shows up only if you’ve used up 33 credits: it grants you 10,000 points, and makes the effects of potions, feathers, and shoes permanent. Rainbow Islands wants you to succeed! It’s just going to be very difficult for you to do so if you don’t play by its very strict rules, and it only wants to reward those who commit themselves to doing so.

While Rainbow Islands is part of the Bubble Bobble series, Taito was not shy about incorporating its other series into this game. When it’s time for a boss fight, Rainbow Islands borrows from Darius to let you know, with a giant flashing warning about a boss approaching fast. There’s an entire stage dedicated to Kiki Kaikai, the Taito game that became a Natsume series you might know better as Pocky & Rocky: the boss of that particular island is one simply pretending to be Pocky, aka Sayo-chan. There are a number of enemies anyone familiar with an earlier Taito arcade platformer, The Fairyland Story, will recognize, and there’s an entire Darius-themed island among the bonus ones.

The game is multiplayer, but not co-op like Bubble Bobble was. Instead, you alternate turns. Which is fine, really, since… hey, you saw how complicated and borderline convoluted all of those rules about collecting diamonds in order and such were, yeah? Rainbow Islands with co-op would end friendships, marriages, you name it. Fukio Mitsuji didn’t devote himself to making a game that young men and women would play together in arcades just to have its sequel cause a spike in the divorce rate.

In addition to the original game, there’s also a second arcade variant, known as Rainbow Islands Extra. This one re-balances things a bit, with stage layouts remaining the same, but things like boss behaviors have been changed to make them tougher. Extra was originally a limited release in arcades, but it’s lived on since: it was included as an additional mode in the Mega Drive port of Rainbow Islands, and it’s the version of the game that Taito chose to include in the base lineup of Egret II Mini titles. The original Rainbow Islands was the representative in Taito Legends for the Xbox, Playstation 2, and Windows, but the Japan-only Taito Memories series, which included more games and releases during the same time frame, received the Extra variant. Rainbow Islands released through Arcade Archives on Playstation 4 and Switch in January, 2024, and it includes the Extra variant on the main menu, so you don’t have to wait around for that as a separate, second release. Which… with the way Taito re-releases some of their stuff these days, that was entirely possible even if it would have been a goofy decision.

Like with Bubble Bobble, Rainbow Islands started in the arcade but ended up everywhere. Sensible, considering its popularity: it was a top-10 grossing arcade game in Japan in 1988, which was the year after its release. Even without getting into the modern ports and re-releases, just back in the day when it was a more relevant title, it landed on the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Amiga, NES, Master System, PC Engine CD, FM Towns, Game Boy Color, Sega Saturn, and Playstation. The aforementioned Mega Drive version released internationally on the Genesis Mini 2, and the WonderSwan version of Rainbow Islands is actually a spin-off subtitled Putty’s Party — there’s even a translation patch for that out there for it, if you’ve got the interest and the means to do something with that information.

I cannot stress enough that Rainbow Islands might be bright and colorful and sound sugary sweet, but it is hard. You can make some progress for a bit, and then have everything unravel at once, even if you aren’t actively trying to unlock the bonus islands or the super secret items or what have you. It’s a killer platformer, though, full of real depth and replayability, and one of those games that makes you wonder how they ever managed to do all of that with just two buttons. It’s that simplicity that allowed for the hidden layers of depth, though, this having to start from something so basic and then build on it, that makes Rainbow Islands continue to shine nearly 40 years on. If you’ve never given it a whirl, you’re missing out, because it’s an exceptional piece of Taito’s history that remains as much of a joy now as it was back then, even if it is actively trying to kill you long before the flood waters come.

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.