by Amr (@siegarettes)

• Bubble Bobble 4 Friends
• Developer: Taito
• Publisher: ININ Games
• Switch 

No longer tied to the esoteric design sense of the original arcade game, Bubble Bobble 4 Friends takes the mechanics of the original and builds towards making them more transparent to new players. Bubble Bobble’s simple premise of trapping and popping enemies in bubbles is immediately clear, but the small subtleties around air flow, chaining bubble pops and using them as platforms were almost secretive thanks in the original game. Bubble Bobble 4 gives focus to these mechanics, making them more accessible and using them to build its cooperative systems. 

It’s an admirable approach, and Bubble Bobble 4’s early levels work best for showing it off, giving you stages full of enemies to chain together into showers of fruit and candy. It gives a nice balance of strategy and platforming, giving opportunities to learn how to use airflow and bubble chains to capture and pop the most enemies at once. The new emphasis on using bubbles on platforms works well, especially during multiplayer, where other players can create bridges below you to give you a lift towards hard to reach areas.  

Around world 3 and 4, Bubble Bobble 4 begins to leans heavier on the platforming and maze like level designs, to its own detriment. The late stages fare a better in multiplayer, where you can quickly resurrect each other and clear out enemies, but still suffered a slowed pace in comparison to the early stages. The satisfying explosions of enemy crowds are gone, replaced with plenty of screens that feature single digit enemy counts, requiring tight platforming to reach, something that Bubble Bobble’s loose physics aren’t suited to. The platforming focus is particularly troublesome during boss fights, which become long wars of attrition as I hoped that I’d have enough extra lives to outlast the continuous barely avoidable deaths the boss rained upon me. 

Alongside the move away from high scores and enemy chains, the EXTEND system has seen a revision. Previously letters spelling EXTEND could be collected through the stages, appearing when large groups of enemies were burst at once. In Bubble Bobble 4 EXTENDs have instead become optional navigation challenges, asking you to reach out of the way areas before they disappears. They no longer give extra lives either, instead powering up whatever special skill you chose to enter the world with. 

Skills essentially take the place of certain powerups from the original game, extending range, setting bombs or firing electric bolts. Each looks flashy and powerful and being able to continually use them is fun, but as a result there aren’t many levels based around them. It’s another concession to the cooperative aspects of the game, which ends up flattening the pacing and variety elsewhere. 

Bubble Bobble 4 Friends looks fantastic, feels great and does a lot to create a modern feeling entry in the series that preserves the feeling of the original games. But its increasing focus on platforming challenges and maze like level designs misunderstands what makes both the original and this new entry so compelling. It’s a happy return for the series, if not exactly a triumphant one. I’m glad to see these little dinosaurs back in action, but I wish I had little longer to trap Bubble Bobble’s monsters before it burst my bubble.