Bubble Bobble – Taito - 1988 - First time playing?: No, played as a kid

What is the story of Bubble Bobble? It's a fantastic story, let me tell you. The intro told me as much so it must be true. Once upon a time, two boys and their girlfriends were playing in the forest near a cave. Then a grumpy alcoholic wizard got pissed at the kids for trespassing on his lawn, so he hid the girls in his 100 floor deep cave and turned the boys into bubble blowing dragons. You might be wondering why the amazingly named ‘Super Drunk’ decided that the best move to deal with trespassers is to trap them in the very cave he's mad at them for intruding on, ensuring they have no option but to keep trespassing indefinitely, but through the expanded story of the Master System port we now have the answer why. It's because his two sons want to marry the little girls in the name of their dark god. Um, okay game.

Despite the cutesy exterior and easy to grasp gameplay, Bubble Bobble is a hell of an undertaking, on the level of classic shoot-em-ups like R-Type in terms of the amount of practice, strategy and digging deeper into the deceptively complex mechanics that is required to beat it, as well as in how unforgiving it is. This is exacerbated in the arcade version, where you can’t even continue if you run out of lives unless you use an obscure button combination while you’re in your mid-death animation on your last life. It’s a puzzle game as much as it is an action platformer, but even that feels like it isn’t doing it justice when you account for all of the hidden mechanics and ways you can manipulate them via your actions over the course of the entire game.

I tried to beat Bubble Bobble as a teenager and I failed and I found it frustrating. Then I tried it again as an adult and I found it frustrating, but also an absolute masterpiece and quite possibly my favourite game of the entire 8-bit era. There’s still nothing like it to this day. Sure, there’s been imitators and it helped to spawn the single-screen elimination platformer subgenre (alongside earlier games like Mario Bros and The Fairyland Story), but none of them have come even close to matching the mechanical depth and ingenious level design of Bubble Bobble while remaining immediately understandable and easy to pick up and play. In my last review I mentioned that Wonder Boy was one of my favourite 80s platformers, but Bubble Bobble is one of my favourite games period.

Okay, this is maybe laying it on a bit thick for so early in the review. So what’s the gameplay actually like? You play as Bubblun, the green bubble dragon, or Bobblun the blue bubble dragon if you’re player 2. Your objective is to fight your way through 100 floors of monsters in order to reach the girls at the bottom of the cave. The bubble dragons don’t have a direct attack. Instead, they blow bubbles, which in spite of their cutesy appearance are actually effective at trapping enemies inside them. Blowing bubbles directly at monsters traps them, and then you can pop the bubble they’re stuck inside before they break free to finish them off. Bubbles will pop when making contact with any of the spikes on your bubble dragon’s body, or if you crush them by jumping on top of them or pushing them up against a wall. Popping a bubble will also cause any adjacent bubbles next to it to pop at the same time, allowing you to create chain reactions and pop multiple enemies at once for multiplied points. Defeat all the enemies on the screen to move onto the next floor.

That’s the basics, but there’s a few more intricacies surrounding the properties of the bubbles that also factor into how you play. Bubbles will drift around the level on their own after they’ve been blown, with every level having a different path that they flow along. This can potentially hinder you by having enemies trapped in bubbles drift away from you, but can also help you due to the ability to bounce off of bubbles, allowing you to ride them as they float up to higher out of reach platforms. You can also push bubbles by gently moving into them without your spikes making contact with them, which can help in positioning bubbled monsters closer together to combo them. On the other hand, if you need a monster dead ASAP, then there’s a technique that the manual refers to as "biting" but is more commonly known by fans as “kissing”, where if you get in, as the name implies, kissing distance of an enemy and then blow a bubble, you can trap them and then instantly pop them at once, which can be a lifesaver in the later hectic levels where you might not have the time to chase the bubbled monsters down and pop them. Lots of levels also have bubbles floating through them that you don’t blow yourself, and some of these have unique properties that can be used to dispatch enemies such as flame bubbles that light the floor on fire, lightning bubbles that shoot lightning bolts horizontally when popped, or water bubbles that send a torrent of water rushing down the level. Simple as the concept of blowing and popping bubbles may be, the ways you interact with those bubbles allows for a ton of possibilities and a variety of strategies in how you play the game.

The real highlight however? The brilliant level design which takes full advantage of all of these unique ideas. You’d expect the game to get samey when it’s 100 levels long, but Bubble Bobble is continuously playfully experimenting with its mechanics from start to finish. The puzzle elements start showing up when the game throws levels that at first glance look impossible or unreasonably difficult, but frequently in these cases, if you make creative use of the mechanics and techniques that the game has been gradually introducing and teaching you over the early levels, there’s often a safer and more elegant strategy that’s immensely rewarding and satisfying to see play out. A bubble jump here, positioning a flare bubble there, and before long the seemingly solid walls that form the level geometry become toys for you to play with and use to your advantage. As platforming games often do, jumping underneath platforms will have you jump through them and land on their surface if you reach them, but what if you instead jump underneath a wall next to an enclosed enemy? It wouldn’t be safe to get that close to the monster, but if you jump under the wall then you can keep yourself safe behind the wall while also being able to shoot a bubble through said wall at your target.

Every single pixel of Bubble Bobble’s level design feels deliberate and masterfully thought out, from the level terrain to the enemy placement, accommodating for your moveset and the various elemental bubbles brilliantly. However, with your bubble dragon dying in one hit and the limited extra lives, it can be quite the stressful and high stakes experience, especially if trying to beat the arcade version without the secret continue function. Levels have the potential to go very badly very quickly, and even with extra lives it can often be hard to come back from things going awry. Fortunately, you have a selection of powerups to help you even the odds. If you see any candies while you're playing, absolutely jump on getting those as soon as possible as they're easily the most helpful. Yellow candy gives you rapidfire bubbles, blue candy increases the speed of your bubbles and pink candy increases their range. There's also a sneaker which can increase your movement speed as well. These four powerups are only lost if you lose a life, allowing you to carry their buffs through the entire game if you're playing flawlessly enough. In addition to those long-term powerups, there's also a variety of power-ups that help you in the moment, such as grimoires and crosses which cast powerful magic such as lightning storms, earthquakes and floods to clear out the entire level. There's also items such as the potions which bring you to a minigame where the level you're in is filled with items and you're challenged to collect them under a time limit. In addition to all of this, you may see bubbles floating by with letters inside of them. If you collect all of the letters needed to spell out ‘EXTEND’ then you earn an extra life.

One of the coolest things about these powerups is that although they seem like random drops at first, they're actually tied to certain in-game actions and can be manipulated into appearing faster. There's a ton of invisible counters keeping track of actions you perform in-game, such as how many times you've jumped, blown bubbles, run the length of the screen, killed enemies in specific ways and so on. Once the requirements for an item to spawn in are met, that item is queued up to appear in the next level. Rapid fire bubbles is probably the most important powerup, and thankfully it's got a very simple condition to unlock, just requiring jumping 40 times, so if you die and lose it it's at least simple to get back. These counters never reset, even persisting after you game over and go back to the title, so if you game over after jumping 39 times, you'll only need to jump once when you start a new game to hit the requirement for the yellow candy. This adds an element of metaprogression to the game and consistently encourages experimentation with exploiting the different mechanics that make Bubble Bobble special, such as the cross items that are spawned in by killing enemies with the elemental bubbles, encouraging taking full advantage of those bubbles whenever they appear. In addition, this can result in different playstyles depending on if you're simply aiming for survival or if you are aiming to maximize your high score. The umbrellas are going to be a life saver if you're going for survival as they allow you to skip levels, but that robs you of more scoring opportunities and scoring-focused items that you could be obtaining in the stages you're skipping. The strategy of Bubble Bobble isn't simply limited to clearing the stages, but also the playstyle you incorporate over the course of the entire game in order to get the items most valuable to your personal tastes.

Something I will acknowledge however is that the controls are a bit… unusual. Yes, it is essentially just moving left and right and jumping and shooting, but the physics are awkward until you get a feel for them. You’ll likely be wondering why your mid-air momentum seems to just suddenly die after falling a certain height, or why jumping sometimes gives you mid-air control but other times doesn’t. The controls feel second nature to me now, but, well, I’ll let this diagram I drew up when I first started practicing the arcade version speak for itself. The controls are consistent and reliable once you have a feel for them, but getting to that point can be rough.

I love Bubble Bobble. Its level design is tight, compact and full of creative ideas, all crammed in single screen stages where not a single bit of the screen space feels wasted. Its mechanics are creative, deceptively deep and engaging. The replay value is through the roof with the variety of different playstyles the game allows for. It's responsible for the tons of love and adoration for the subgenre of single screen platformers that I have. It may be frustrating to get the hang of at first, but it's an immensely engaging and rewarding experience once you sink your teeth into it. So, how does the Master System version hold up? Well, it's not a perfect port of the arcade original, but it does an excellent job given the hardware limitations and it also comes packed full with a massive supply of extra content and quality of life tweaks. If you’ve ever played the NES version, some of it will seem familiar, such as the game giving you infinite continues and a password save. That’s just scratching the surface of the Master System version however.

Let's get the bad out of the way first. The music isn't great. It's a faithful enough adaptation of the classic arcade theme, but it's a bit shrill in contrast to the more bassy sounds of the arcade game. The Master System port probably could have benefited from supporting the FM sound unit. Flicker is also a pretty major problem due to sprite limits, not particularly surprising given the massive amount of bubbles on screen the second you get that rapidfire candy. Just so it’s clear however, the flicker doesn’t look nearly as bad on an actual Master System running at a native 60FPS, in contrast to how it looks in the 20FPS gifs on this page. Some of the requirements for getting certain items have also been tweaked in ways that I feel are inferior. For instance, in contrast to the arcade game where potions spawn depending on how many times you fall through the top of the screen, in the Master System version the only way to get potions is to instead lose 6 or more lives, heavily limiting your ability to get potions. There's also a few instances of muscle memory messing with me. The lightning bubbles are a big example of this. In the arcade version, if you're hit by one of your own lightning bolts, your bubble dragon is stunned for a second or so, during which you can't move but you also have invulnerability frames preventing it from being a severe hindrance. In the Master System version however, you're granted no such mercy invincibility, so you're left completely open for enemies with absolutely no way to save yourself.

When it comes to nailing the feel of the arcade game, the Master System port nails everything else, even containing most of the more obscure and hidden mechanics, even if some of them are slightly tweaked like the previously mentioned potion requirement. However, the strength of this port comes from where it differentiates itself from the arcade original. In the arcade game, after you beat the game with the good ending, you’re shown a button combination that allows you to access an extra mode called Super Bubble Bobble, a second loop of the game consisting of the same levels but with different and more dangerous enemies. The Master System heavily expands upon this second loop, making it a major part of the main campaign. Accessing it is a bit more elaborate than in the arcade version. If you just do the bare minimum and play through the levels without bothering with secrets, the game will end after level 100. In order to progress to level 101, you need to find and collect the three crystal balls hidden throughout the first half of the game.

These crystal balls are found in secret rooms accessed by hidden doors, a concept vastly expanded upon from the arcade original. In the arcade version, there were four hidden doors and they were all unlocked simply by reaching level milestones without losing any lives. In the Master System version meanwhile, there’s over 25 hidden doors at least, which have all kinds of unique and cryptic methods of unlocking based on what actions you take in the level. Some doors for instance will only open if you bubble every enemy in the level at once, while others need you to wait out until they appear without killing any enemies. These secret doors can lead to rooms full of gems, rooms with treasure chests filled with a variety of items, or key items such as the crystal balls. In addition to the unlock requirements adding some fun secondary challenges to multiple levels, this also helps with racking up insane scores far higher than what you could achieve in a single loop of the arcade version. Unfortunately, the conditions to unlock them are a bit too cryptic, entirely down to a localisation quirk. The hints that clue you in on how to make these hidden doors appear are completely untranslated and cut from the international version. There is however now a fan translation patch of the Japanese version of the game to remedy this issue.

So, you find the secret doors, get the crystal balls and beat level 100 and enter the second half of the game. Most of the levels here are directly ported from Super Bubble Bobble mode from the arcade version, but there’s also quite a few levels from the NES version alongside some brand new levels as well. The new levels aren’t quite as brilliantly designed as the arcade levels, but they’re very appreciated for adding a bit more variety to the second half of the game. The hidden doors however are much more elaborate here and result in the second half having much more of a different feel than Super Bubble Bobble. You now need to find three mirrors which are required in order to fight the final boss. In addition to that, there’s also the magic key and the magic candle, two items which grant you access to even more secret rooms, both required and optional. The real hurdle however is the green mirror, a real nasty hurdle for anyone relying on password saves and continues. In order to get to the secret room with the last item required to beat the game, you must reach level 195 with 1,000,000 points, requiring you to play through the last 20-30 or so levels on a single credit as your score is reset any time you game over.

Now, I managed to beat the entire arcade game on a single credit last year, so I’ve had a bit of practice and was able to achieve those 1,000,000 points pretty comfortably, but when I was trying to beat this game as a teenager? This made me give up any hope of ever seeing the ending. The nastiest part of all of this however is that just a few levels before level 195 is one of the new boss fights introduced to the Master System port, basically forcing you to fight that boss on the same credit you’re earning 1,000,000 points on and still manage to make it to level 195. The arcade version only had one boss, that just being Super Drunk at the end of the game, but there’s two more bosses here alongside him that you fight in earlier levels. These fights are clumsy and require a good grip on the physics and controls of Bubble Bobble, both of which absolutely take some getting used to. The bosses are fast and attack aggressively and your bubble dragon is just way too slow moving to keep up with them, in addition to the previously mentioned issue of you being vulnerable if you’re stunned by lightning, making the bosses significantly more difficult to fight than Super Drunk in the arcade version. With enough practice you’ll figure out a rhythm to take them down consistently, but it’s an uphill fight getting there. Either way however, I do appreciate the extra content regardless of the execution being a little off. The bosses aren’t awful by any means, it’s just the 1,000,000 points door that especially draws attention to them.

Regardless of the frustration with the boss fights and other small gripes, I still consider Master System Bubble Bobble to be one of the best versions of the game. More secrets, more levels, more bosses, more challenges, more items, more power-ups. The arcade version of Bubble Bobble was already a pretty massive game for the time, and the Master System version expands it even further to create one of the most content-packed and replayable games on the entire console. Whether or not I prefer it to the arcade original is dependent on my mood, but either way it’s well worth playing the Master System port, even if you’ve played the arcade game extensively already.

- Page written by MSX_POCKY, 1st March 2025