@bib and I blew each other in brotherhood balls-against-the-backboard Hudson-style throughout the remainder of Bomberman 64: The Second Attack, using two-player via Parsec, I in the role of The Bomberman, Bib taking control of hit breakout character Pommy:
Overall, I loved this game. This is a remarkably charming title, full of shit to do, it looks fantastic, the soundtrack is great, it’s incredibly weird and, best of all, it’s a real ball-buster. I really love the boss fights.
B64:TSA is also truly excruciating in a whole lot of ways, ways that thwart your every instinct time and time again, ways that come at you from every unguarded angle to exploit something you never imagined was a weakness. You will feel every bungled bombing, and as bombs are your only way of interacting with this world, you will feel them often. I can only theorize as to why Husdon never refines their games, never sands down the rough edges or adds some quality of life changes, maybe it’s just inexperience with working in a 3D environment at this point in time? It was pretty late in the N64’s life though! Ah whatever.
You get to do tons of bomb shit! You have like eight different kinds of bombs with which to try and solve platforming puzzles! One of them gusts you across the room, another freezes water into walkable tiles, others generate mini-black holes that suck up everyone in the room… it’s all quite the delight.
Full Thoughts on Bomberman 64: The Second Attack (spoilers)
I found the super sentai JRPG-ass anime-ass storyline extremely fun, the type of thing where you can tell the writers did not have Bomberman at all in mind when designing, but Bomberman was the available successful IP at hand. This is likeeeee Mario going through the events of Chrono Cross, or Sonic going through the events of any given 3D Sonic game. Bomberman of Planet Bomber is somehow the most important single being in the universe, the one who decides if creation itself should continue or wither on the vine. BOMBERMAN is this person.
This begins at the very starting line, where the first thing you see when you boot up the cart is a text crawl laying out the formation of the universe, and how it was split into celestial angels of pure Order and cackling demons of Chaos, like this is Shin Megami Tensei or something.
I would take this absolutely any day over the standard Nothing we’re given in most Bomberman game stories. This is definitely Something. This is like a teenager’s webcomic plot, or most of the stories I’d see in my RPG Maker 2k community days, and it’s fun and funny to see a game this cutsey also taking itself incredibly deathly seriously.
One thing the regularly destroyed us was the way the game itself seems to realize its story is vastly overcomplicated, relying on constant lore dumps where Pommy acted like the mediator, keeping everyone on the same page as each new reveal was dropped like a hot bomb:
I was a huge fan of the black hole realm the entire game takes place in, it’s a very cool, very unique location that looks great. You can’t see the slowly-rotating spiral in the background but trust me:
World variety was nice, definitely a big step up from B64 in terms of how unique each stage was. You actually feel like you’re playing through a designed complex, rather than the one or two big rooms you’d get in B64. There’s a good sense of verticality to these stages you definitely didn’t see in Hero.
Now the design of these levels is often still pretty frustrating. You will be required to clear every single enemy in every single room to progress, in a game that requires you to backtrack constantly for every little thing. You will travel to the end of the level, flip a switch, go back to the beginning of the level, grab a card, then use it to get back to the end of the level, then repeat. This is not a game that remotely respects your time, and if you die, you game over and are sent to the beginning of the level, with everything reset. Dire stuff. Save states make this a lot more playable.
Also, the way you progress is completely arbitrary. Sometimes a destructable console object you have blown up for Item a thousand times before is unique and you must instead walk up to it to trigger a dialogue option. Sometimes you need to use a special bomb to turn on a system to reveal a different thing you need a magma bomb to destroy, so you can get a keycard (?) for the next room, or open a door on the other side of the level. We managed to cheese our way through some of these using bomb-hopping, but it actually turns out, you need to bomb hop in very awakward ways to complete the game as intended. You actually need to build a bomb hop tower and then throw a bomb at a wall so it drops on your head, stuns you, and lobs you into the air a little so your bomberbutt lands on the first bomb in your tower, so you can ascend it. What the FUCK.
The Pommy system, as deranged as it is implemented, gives you a pretty remarkable number of forms for player two to try out:
Now this may seem merely vastly over-complicated, but as Bib and I found, there is no reliable information on the internet about how the fuck this system works. Many, many people have different old wive’s tales that say that if you eat 16 hams, 16 cantaloupes, and 34 entire cakes, you will unlock General Leo Pommy’s final demon form, but all of those people are wrong.
In fact, it turns out that one guy in a buried GameFAQs thread is correct, in that you need to have Pommy eat 17 hams, 17 cantaloupes, and 36 entire cakes. This was not easy to discover but we sure as fuck found out after a remarkable amount of experimentation.
There is no godly reason that any of the Pommy stuff is has fucking difficult as it is to do. If you had a little brother or a friend wanting to play with you, you’d imagine they’d make it easy for them to turn into Pommy’s many unique forms, so you could see the Content, but no, it’s quite difficult and grindy to see any of them. For our playthrough, Bib was able to see Beast Pommy, who can only knock enemies into a daze, then Dragon Pommy, who can break fire but only in a locked-in animation that lasts 8 seconds on one square, then finally, Satan Pommy, who can mostly stab things with his unicorn horn but also sometimes fire a complicated ice crystal slowly. I will wonder about Dinosaur Pommy and Bird Pommy until the day I lay down in my grave.
I really enjoyed the bomb-tricks you get to do, kicking bombs into other bombs to billiards them into an enemy, or pumping up bombs and tossing them into the fray. I really really wish the duration of these explosions with a tiny fraction of what they were, because when you miss, boy howdy, you will be there for a spell. The way enemies work is quite baffling and often maddening -if you are hit by an enemy, you are locked into a stunned state for a full 8 seconds, sometimes continuing to get your ballsatchel smashed in by a loose genie or a chompy wind-up toy or a literal demon, and much like the real world where if you become dazed due to misadventure, you might lose four health hearts before you can crawl away to safety. 8 seconds is an eternity. If you die die, you get a game over screen that sends you back to the start of the level, sometimes without any power-ups. Sometimes enemies just steal all your powers and don’t hurt you at all (?), sometimes you are insta-killed. Impossible to know. Do not fall prey to these beasts.
The boss fights RIP. They all start with an incredible indulgent character moment for the boss where they introduce themselves in a flashy manner and talk a TON of shit, then the fight begins. I loved these a lot, you never feel like you have control of the situation. There was a magma guy in particular that beat the living christ out of my body, kicking me to the ground, picking me up, and slamming me against the wall for 3 hearts. Just brutal.
I loooooove how edgy these guys are, lordy bagordy:
As you might expect, you fight Satan himself in a really kickass Dark Tournament stadium situation where missed attack blow up parts of the map:
The final boss of the game is easily the most difficult boss battle I’ve endured for years, and without a doubt the most punishing one on the Nintendo 64. You have such tiny tiny opportunities to land a hit, and the boss will choose several branching paths of actions in the middle of three-attack combos. I feel bad for any kid that tried this on the original hardware without save states, because I don’t know how else you learn any of these patterns.
So yeah, hell of a game. It’s hard to fully recommend it because of the constant frustrations and baffling level design choices, but, I think if you’re prepared for that, there’s a lot of fun to be had here.