Some titles are niche and always will be. The Bomberman franchise is a cult-classic among the early consoles where it got its major following. It continued on throughout virtually every console generation – including mobile phones – and the next generation is no different. However, the cutesy and simplistic format that kept Bomberman in its alcove outside of the AAA title realm may be well and gone.
Redesigned for a more “mature” look, Hudson Soft is bringing Bomberman to the Xbox 360. Bomberman is no longer a sprite-based character in a light-hearted environment…well, as light-hearted as blowing things up can be, anyway. Bomberman himself looks quite serious and intense, scaled in full 3D and rendered with thousands of polygons. He looks dark and follows a tight line between looking like a hero and a villain. That’s quite a disparate comparison to his cute little self in Super Bomberman.
Also different is his reason for laying bombs and blowing stuff up – as if blowing stuff up needs a reason. Humans are test subjects in an underground laboratory, trained to become soldiers. Outfitted with battle suits, only the best soldier will survive to become the Ultimate Human Weapon.
The stages remain unchanged in overall design, which may or may not be a good thing. While the original gameplay intrigued thousands, it was still too simplistic to lure out more casual gamers. In addition to the historic top-down gameplay, Hudson Soft has included an optional play type called First Person Battle (FPB), but don’t take the name as verbatim to its actual play type. In FPB mode, the camera zooms in to a third person view for an action/adventure feel. You also get a get a life bar and the ability to crouch to better absorb blasts, decreasing damage some percent.
New to the franchise is an online multiplayer option via Xbox Live. Up to 8 players can battle frantically to gain status on the World Rankings.
Though Bomberman looks quite mature and is caught in a new confrontation on a next-generation console, it’s still fairly underwhelming, especially graphically. The game lacks the visuals that it should. Considering the core gameplay hasn’t even changed since the series’ inception, you’d think a lot more time and detail could have gone into the visual appeal. While graphics aren’t everything, it certainly helps when your goal is to appeal to new players in the first place.
So what makes Hudson Soft think that a style change (with underwhelming graphics,) a new view, and multiplayer will bring in new fans? What was once a cult-classic is being only mildly rebuilt and replaced with a more mainstream and stylized version to – theoretically – appeal to the masses. This type of thinking is not too dissimilar from what Warner Bros did to the Looney Tunes or SEGA did to the Sonic franchise by giving Shadow a gun. Some things just look better on paper than execution. We’ll see how Bomberman fares.
