It's impossible to be upset at Bomberman. He's Bomberman, look at him!! It's also kinda hard to be mad at his little friend Pommy, even though I want to be. And therefore, I find it impossible to say I truly disliked this game, or think it was some kind of mistake, even though I had to drag myself through it.
Let's talk about aesthetics first. Following in the footsteps of the other Bomberman games on N64, this game has some truly exceptional music, with talented and recognizable names on board. What's more, after you've defeated the boss on each planet (which comes a fair bit before you'll actually be done with a given planet), more instrumentation gets added to the world's music track, which is a really fun detail. The level and enemy themes also work pretty well, and are substantially more interesting than the first Bomberman 64's rather generic areas, taking you from a casino planet to an apocalyptic city in the midst of a zombie outbreak and gang war. Overall, the simplistic style of the Bomberman universe and character design ethos is a perfect fit for the N64's limitations, leading to a game with plenty of visual charm.
The thing that stands out to me most about this game is its ambition. There's an unexpectedly detailed JRPG styled story, complete with extreme stakes, and a surprising amount of dialogue. Believe it or not, I enjoy when otherwise "simple" franchises attempt this sort of thing now and then. The story and structure actually reminded me a LOT of Super Paper Mario, which for me is one of the highest compliments I could give something. I want to love this! The main baddie is an emo cowboy and there are are interstitial "at the villain's lair" segments, gosh darn it!! The problem is that most of the characters' personalities are one-note, if there's a discernible note at all, without enough there to justify their amount of dialogue or the gravity with which the plot later wants to treat them. Still, I'm not going to fault them for trying, and it was fun.
The game's structure is puzzle-dungeon based, and solving problems with the various elemental bombs you're given (and there are a LOT by the end of the game) can be quite fun. That said, with so many options, certain solutions can just as much feel like a guessing game. Why do my super-overpowered earth bombs not destroy this gate, but my basic fire bombs do?
All of the pieces were in place for a game I would actually appreciate and love, and about halfway through it, I was ready to say this was my favorite Bomberman game on N64, despite its flaws. But over time, the game's innate problems just started to build up more and more to a degree where I no longer wanted to play the game, and forced myself through it. (This echoed the two GameFAQs guides I occasionally consulted, one of which was less than half complete, and the other in which the author had to recruit others to help with later sections as they did not finish it personally.)
First of all, each level consists of a series of lots of little rooms, and enemies will respawn when you leave a room and re-enter. This makes backtracking for exploration or puzzle-solving a massive pain. But what's more, the game frequently uses the classic Zelda dungeon structure where you'll have to defeat all the enemies in a given room before the doors will unlock and you can move on. This means you'll have to be fighting through the same rooms again and again- and this means patience, placing bombs, waiting for them to explode, trying not to get hit or blow yourself up in often cramped spaces.
Oh, and the only time you can save is when you beat a level. The levels are LONG. So, you want to get started on a planet? Get comfy and grab a drink; you're gonna be there a WHILE. You'd best commit. Granted, I'm a very slow gamer, but I don't think there was any planet that took me under an hour. (An hour of praying my N64 wasn't going to crash, as it sometimes does.) Once you figure out what to do, it'd be much faster, but finding out how to make progress can stop you in your tracks for a bit.
The checkpointing in the levels is the major source of the time sink. Some levels are structured in such a way that you can open up shortcuts and paths for yourself which can be utilized between lives, but this is very often not the case, and any death will result in you having to redo quite a bit, including certain puzzles which might involve pushing statues around or the like. AND THEN, when the game DOES give you a legitimate checkpoint (as in a change of where you respawn), it's often so unhelpful as to be almost insulting, maybe just a room or two out from your previous spawn point.
Aside from these major structural issues, there are a number of smaller frustrations that add up. In addition to the plentiful amount of "power-downs" that spawn as pickups, there are enemies that, if they hit you, will remove all your power-ups in
a given category (bomb number, bomb strength, or movement speed), rendering Bomberman instantly weak or- worst of all- extremely slow, until you find some boxes to blow up that will tediously get you back to where you were before.
Now imagine all that combined with how many things in this game can insta-kill you, from spikes to water and lava (that you have to build bridges over while trying not to harm yourself in the process because every chunk of an ice bridge is itself formed from an exploding bomb) to simply miscalculating your wind-bomb-blast as you propel yourself over a pit. Or falling into a pit because there was a small hole you couldn't even see.
All of these issues add up to a game that feels extremely punishing, but Bomberman's little friend Pommy is an aspect that COULD make an unfriendly game much friendlier. Based on food you find in the world, he can evolve into a number of really cute designs, and later evolutions can damage enemies for you (while earlier ones will just stun them and frankly, he will be mostly useless). The problem is, on a regular playthrough, both me and my partner and the random person whose let's play I watched and the OTHER random person whose cutscene collection I watched, never got past his second form. The amount of grinding for food you'd have to do to get Pommy into a state where he's actually useful doesn't seem to happen naturally over most playthroughs.
Pommy can be controlled by a second player, and could potentially be useful at strategically stunning enemies even in earlier forms, but for the vast majority of people who aren't going to be able to recruit a friend or loved one into playing Bomberman 64: The Second Attack! with them, he pretty much just gets in the way and spends most of the time stunned himself.
But the absolute worst thing that happened to me is that I completed all the requirements to get the good ending and "true" final boss, but due to extreme bad luck in the final level, had something happen which locked me into the bad ending anyway, and which I would have had to replay about half the level to revert (and even then there's a chance it could have happened again, with save-scumming not being an option). I don't want to spoil the details, but that's a thing that can happen and you might want to look it up before going in. So I accepted my bad ending, complete with bad final boss which seems to actually be more difficult than the other one, and just watched the good ending on Youtube. I was ready to be done.
Upon writing this review, while re-listening to this game's soundtrack, I decided to bump it up from a two and a half to a three on sheer ambition. This is a strange, unique game that very few people have played or even know about. Even some people (including myself until the past few years) who've heard of it assume that it was only released in Japan. The game deserves love and praise for some of its mechanics and the amount of care they put into certain details. Like I mentioned above, I would rather a game be ambitious in its story and structure than a franchise constantly playing it safe. I just really, really wish it wasn't dragged down by so much frustrating nonsense, leading to an overall experience that's very hard to recommend. Even Bomberman seems to spend most of this game being either confused or pissed off.
Let's talk about aesthetics first. Following in the footsteps of the other Bomberman games on N64, this game has some truly exceptional music, with talented and recognizable names on board. What's more, after you've defeated the boss on each planet (which comes a fair bit before you'll actually be done with a given planet), more instrumentation gets added to the world's music track, which is a really fun detail. The level and enemy themes also work pretty well, and are substantially more interesting than the first Bomberman 64's rather generic areas, taking you from a casino planet to an apocalyptic city in the midst of a zombie outbreak and gang war. Overall, the simplistic style of the Bomberman universe and character design ethos is a perfect fit for the N64's limitations, leading to a game with plenty of visual charm.
The thing that stands out to me most about this game is its ambition. There's an unexpectedly detailed JRPG styled story, complete with extreme stakes, and a surprising amount of dialogue. Believe it or not, I enjoy when otherwise "simple" franchises attempt this sort of thing now and then. The story and structure actually reminded me a LOT of Super Paper Mario, which for me is one of the highest compliments I could give something. I want to love this! The main baddie is an emo cowboy and there are are interstitial "at the villain's lair" segments, gosh darn it!! The problem is that most of the characters' personalities are one-note, if there's a discernible note at all, without enough there to justify their amount of dialogue or the gravity with which the plot later wants to treat them. Still, I'm not going to fault them for trying, and it was fun.
The game's structure is puzzle-dungeon based, and solving problems with the various elemental bombs you're given (and there are a LOT by the end of the game) can be quite fun. That said, with so many options, certain solutions can just as much feel like a guessing game. Why do my super-overpowered earth bombs not destroy this gate, but my basic fire bombs do?
All of the pieces were in place for a game I would actually appreciate and love, and about halfway through it, I was ready to say this was my favorite Bomberman game on N64, despite its flaws. But over time, the game's innate problems just started to build up more and more to a degree where I no longer wanted to play the game, and forced myself through it. (This echoed the two GameFAQs guides I occasionally consulted, one of which was less than half complete, and the other in which the author had to recruit others to help with later sections as they did not finish it personally.)
First of all, each level consists of a series of lots of little rooms, and enemies will respawn when you leave a room and re-enter. This makes backtracking for exploration or puzzle-solving a massive pain. But what's more, the game frequently uses the classic Zelda dungeon structure where you'll have to defeat all the enemies in a given room before the doors will unlock and you can move on. This means you'll have to be fighting through the same rooms again and again- and this means patience, placing bombs, waiting for them to explode, trying not to get hit or blow yourself up in often cramped spaces.
Oh, and the only time you can save is when you beat a level. The levels are LONG. So, you want to get started on a planet? Get comfy and grab a drink; you're gonna be there a WHILE. You'd best commit. Granted, I'm a very slow gamer, but I don't think there was any planet that took me under an hour. (An hour of praying my N64 wasn't going to crash, as it sometimes does.) Once you figure out what to do, it'd be much faster, but finding out how to make progress can stop you in your tracks for a bit.
The checkpointing in the levels is the major source of the time sink. Some levels are structured in such a way that you can open up shortcuts and paths for yourself which can be utilized between lives, but this is very often not the case, and any death will result in you having to redo quite a bit, including certain puzzles which might involve pushing statues around or the like. AND THEN, when the game DOES give you a legitimate checkpoint (as in a change of where you respawn), it's often so unhelpful as to be almost insulting, maybe just a room or two out from your previous spawn point.
Aside from these major structural issues, there are a number of smaller frustrations that add up. In addition to the plentiful amount of "power-downs" that spawn as pickups, there are enemies that, if they hit you, will remove all your power-ups in
a given category (bomb number, bomb strength, or movement speed), rendering Bomberman instantly weak or- worst of all- extremely slow, until you find some boxes to blow up that will tediously get you back to where you were before.
Now imagine all that combined with how many things in this game can insta-kill you, from spikes to water and lava (that you have to build bridges over while trying not to harm yourself in the process because every chunk of an ice bridge is itself formed from an exploding bomb) to simply miscalculating your wind-bomb-blast as you propel yourself over a pit. Or falling into a pit because there was a small hole you couldn't even see.
All of these issues add up to a game that feels extremely punishing, but Bomberman's little friend Pommy is an aspect that COULD make an unfriendly game much friendlier. Based on food you find in the world, he can evolve into a number of really cute designs, and later evolutions can damage enemies for you (while earlier ones will just stun them and frankly, he will be mostly useless). The problem is, on a regular playthrough, both me and my partner and the random person whose let's play I watched and the OTHER random person whose cutscene collection I watched, never got past his second form. The amount of grinding for food you'd have to do to get Pommy into a state where he's actually useful doesn't seem to happen naturally over most playthroughs.
Pommy can be controlled by a second player, and could potentially be useful at strategically stunning enemies even in earlier forms, but for the vast majority of people who aren't going to be able to recruit a friend or loved one into playing Bomberman 64: The Second Attack! with them, he pretty much just gets in the way and spends most of the time stunned himself.
But the absolute worst thing that happened to me is that I completed all the requirements to get the good ending and "true" final boss, but due to extreme bad luck in the final level, had something happen which locked me into the bad ending anyway, and which I would have had to replay about half the level to revert (and even then there's a chance it could have happened again, with save-scumming not being an option). I don't want to spoil the details, but that's a thing that can happen and you might want to look it up before going in. So I accepted my bad ending, complete with bad final boss which seems to actually be more difficult than the other one, and just watched the good ending on Youtube. I was ready to be done.
Upon writing this review, while re-listening to this game's soundtrack, I decided to bump it up from a two and a half to a three on sheer ambition. This is a strange, unique game that very few people have played or even know about. Even some people (including myself until the past few years) who've heard of it assume that it was only released in Japan. The game deserves love and praise for some of its mechanics and the amount of care they put into certain details. Like I mentioned above, I would rather a game be ambitious in its story and structure than a franchise constantly playing it safe. I just really, really wish it wasn't dragged down by so much frustrating nonsense, leading to an overall experience that's very hard to recommend. Even Bomberman seems to spend most of this game being either confused or pissed off.