I have now played through one full world of Bomberman Hero and it absoooooolutely sucks the dick off a dog, just completely braindead, feels bad to play, and looks even blurrier and shittier than your average N64 title, which is saying something. Levels are these strange flat sandboxes you wander about, blowing up mostly stationary enemies, often with very little sound. The music is good, but this makes it all the more noticeable when a level will simply not have a soundtrack.
I suspect maybe the idea with this game was to make something very young kids could get through, since B64 had its share of convoluted solutions. It often feels like it’s trying to do Mario 64, but the most it can imagine you doing is shooting things with bombs like a shmup.
What happened to the idea from B64 of using all your abilities to solve puzzles?
Here’s what it looks like:
Looking into it the development:
Bomberman Hero was originally planned as an entry in the Bonk/PC Kid series known as Ultra Genjin, before being cancelled and repurposed as a Bomberman game.
I’m genuinely very surprised to find this was made by Hudson Soft. I would not consider them great game developers but B64 felt a lot better than this.
Now, did I get closure? It didn’t feel familiar to me at all, playing it, so I think maybe the only Bomberman N64 game I played back then was the original B64. My video store must not have actually had this one. Glad to have tried it and flushed the lingering doubt from my mind that this was something great I’d missed.