I'm always a sucker for Bomberman games, and I've been on the lookout for these later 3D adventures of his ever since playing through most of the N64 games last year. I finally found this for a price that was way above just being right (beautiful condition, even came with the sealed trading cards, for only like 700 yen), and that made it a perfect addition to my pile of games to play for GameCube month. It took me about 10 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game and also beat the secret final boss.

Bomberman Jetters is a game based on an anime of the same name. That said, the plot is still really simple. The bad guys are tired of Bomberman ruining their plans constantly, so they make a giant meteor to smash into Planet Bomberman. Bomberman and MAX set out in their spaceships to stop this clearly bad thing from happening. It's a really thread bare and unimportant story, ultimately, although it apparently doesn't really follow characterizations in the anime, which is very odd. It has lots of voice acting which is well done and help bring the quite flat characters to life in a fun way, so that's nice at least.

The game itself is a 3D action game (kind of a platformer?) divided between 5 worlds of 6 levels each. Four levels in each world are proper stages, while two of the stages are just boss battles. The mini-bosses (stage 3) of each stage can even be beaten or weakened in certain ways (sometimes requiring re-fights using tools you didn't have yet) to fight an extra, secret final boss at the end. You can also find and unlock animal companions to join you, who give you certain passives and can be leveled up to give you better passives. You can even unlock new and particular elemental bomb types to give you an edge against each world boss. The game plays somewhat like the Baku Bomberman (aka Bomberman 64, in English) games on the N64, but like a marked step backwards.

Jetters's biggest problem is that it really just doesn't play very well and the level design is generally quite weak. They give you much more 360-degree freedom than they did on the N64, but this amounts to making throwing and kicking bombs into enemies a far more difficult task than it already was. I can't even count the number of times I missed a bomb or blew myself up instead of an enemy. Bosses also range from trivially easy (which is most of them, to be honest) to nightmarish and frustrating due to how exact you need your bomb throws to be (like the secret final boss who is in no way shape or form worth fighting). The animal companions and elemental bombs also feel very half-baked, as they all range from totally useless to absolutely essential and grinding up the level of the more essential animal companions gets to be a real pain.

The presentation of the game is fine, but very uninspired. For a mid-life GameCube game, Jetters doesn't exactly look ugly, but it's very uninspired. The music is also generally okay if a bit surreal and weird. The whole game is just a huge, flat "OK", and the presentation is no exception.


Verdict: Not Recommended. This game is actually okay, but that's all it is. It is one of the most aggressively mediocre games I've ever played, and it's just really hard to care about either way because of that. You probably won't hate your time with it, but it'll likely be hard to prompt yourself to actually finish the game unless you're very dedicated to beat it because you can. Your time is better spent playing other, better 3D Bomberman games than this.