The Bubble Bobble Series: The Definitive Review

Always Be Bubbling

It took me by quite some surprise to learn that a re-release of Parasol Stars was arriving in July 2024, as I’d thought the videogames industry had finally abandoned all things Bubble Bobble thanks to the utterly mediocre Bubble Bobble 4 Friends failing to deliver anything of real note or substance. By all accounts it seemed like this surprisingly low-effort reboot managed to provide considerably less than the sum of the original’s parts. But then this is hardly news; much of the Bubble Bobble series’ output in the 21st Century has, for the most part, been either straight re-releases of the arcade originals or disastrously shit. Sadly and very much regrettably, I actually had to play a professional role in some of that, but rest assured it wasn’t with the kind of empty-headed compliance you’d expect from underpaid PR account execs. Yep, I sent emails about box-art and even game design to people with sway in those matters and nope, nobody gave a shit.

If Taito¹ can be shouted at for anything, it’s for the way it let some of its very best IP rot on the vine and be licensed out for lazy exploitation. In a way, Parasol Stars in its PC Engine and Amiga/ST variants was the end of the glory days for the Bubble Bobble series. After that came the reinvention as a strict puzzler with Puzzle Bobble and then endless years as a tribute act as far as home users were concerned. Bubble Bobble and Rainbow Islands ended up on PlayStation and set the precedent that would see Bubble Bobble popping up all over the place, including a funky GameBoy Advance version that supported system link for co-op. But not so much was seen of the 90s sequels - Bubble Memories and Bubble Symphony, although both suffered perhaps from being too tied to their own legacy. Being enhanced level packs and graphical upgrades of sorts for the original, Bubble Bobble had seemingly come full circle and, of course, Puzzle Bobble’s shift away from frantic platforming proved to be a popular one. Symphony actually ended up with a release on the Sega Saturn, so the official lineage of Bubble Bobble ends there. That is of course until that run of generally awful remakes and re-inventions come into play in the 2000s - which is where I come in!

I’m not going to name all the titles I worked on, but I will say they left me incredibly bitter. They were part of a larger suite of Taito licences that I was assigned, the first being a truly disastrous attempt to make Space Invaders work on the Nintendo DS. And no, it wasn’t Space Invaders Extreme, it was the games that Extreme learnt from. One of these reviewed extremely badly, as it fucking should have because it was cash-in garbage, but I was asked to write a response to one of the reviews which, for me, was something so shameful it stills burns in me to this day². But really, what I was struck with when it came to the Bubble Bobble titles was how the publishers and developers for these projects cared about the cash value of the IP but couldn’t give a single fuck about respecting it. I talked to the designer for two of these games and while they were a thoroughly decent human being, it was clear just from the outlines that their designs were absolutely awful. They were catastrophically misplaced and unimaginative concepts that bore no real understanding of the core qualities of the Bubble Bobble design. It was heartbreaking, as not only would this mean a desperate uphill struggle for my work in PRing these bags of shit, it almost certainly meant either death or retro-conservatism for the series after these obviously inevitable failures. I don’t blame the designer - they came up with what they thought would work. The fault lies with whoever approved them, whoever thought this was fitting for what was once a genuinely iconic brand. I guess ultimately, the real target for dismay should be Taito itself, but around that time Taito was owned by electronics manufacturer Kyocera, and getting ready to be bought by Square Enix. Perhaps all that did really matter to the big decision-makers was the money. Upon seeing the design for the final Bubble Bobble title in the run, I was wracked with a sense of having to do something. I’d already fought and lost a battle to change the EU box-art for one title, which was an abominable crime against an extremely well-established art style³, and had faced the bitter humiliation of having to tell a competition winner that they couldn’t in fact have the Bubble Bobble arcade cabinet they were so excited about winning, because the client flatly refused to ship it to Northern Ireland⁴. Seeing that the last Bubble Bobble ‘upgrade’ was going to be effectively Nebulus with logic puzzles, I wrote an email to the producer in Japan saying what I, a Bubble Bobble fan of nearly 20 years, would want from an updated, modernised game. I knew it was futile, but at least I’d voiced something, y’know?⁵

The Bubble Bobble series shares a fate with several other 8-bit greats that stagnated in their 16-bit years and failed to have their Super Mario 64 revolutions to bring them into the modern age. Closest perhaps is Hudsonsoft’s Bomberman, a game every bit as fun, fizzy and vibrant as Bubble Bobble. Yet why these games fail is rarely understood, mostly because it’s rarely questioned. In the case of Bubble Bobble, we can look at the three initial games and see what they share - they all offer the player mastery in a skill of enemy control. Therefore the design challenge is to work out fun ways to broaden that control, hybridise that control, complexify that control. Which, of course, nobody bothered to do. While the formal challenge for Bubble Bobble and Parasol Stars is to kill all the baddies, Rainbow Islands is more a vertical platformer race to a designated goal, which probably explains why I don’t rate it anywhere near as highly as the other two. Nonetheless, it still gives you rainbows to assist your ascent and manage the bad guys. This strategic discipline is beautifully refined in Parasol Stars, wherein temporarily paralysed enemies can be used offensively to bump off others and, more crucially, to generate lines of bonus items. This combination of Bubble Bobble’s challenge and structure allied with the bonus-uncovering and strategic deployment possibilities of Rainbow Islands’ rainbows is what makes Parasol Stars such a beautifully unique delight. As I’ve written before, Parasol Stars’ hybrid status as (an apocryphal) unreleased arcade prototype, that ended up somehow as a PC Engine game⁶, lends it high-end quality gameplay but with a supremely idiosyncratic quirk - work efficiently enough in generating bonus items and eventually you get an actual game credit as a reward⁷. This effectively means you can buy more time to tackle its challenge by playing it well, which is a wonderful mechanic that seems remarkably under-exploited in the modern age. What was depressing about Bubble Memories and Bubble Symphony was that they represented a deliberate regression in the late 1990s, an attempted erasure of the fun, imaginative explorations of Rainbow Islands and Parasol Stars. The fact that later Bubble Bobbles didn’t bother to even acknowledge those sequels showed how shallow the thinking behind the 21st century Bobbles really was. But it’s easy to forget the games that lived around Bubble Bobble’s periphery - Liquid Kids’ take on the rolling-runner platformer is rarely considered, nor is New Zealand Story⁸ as anything other than an exquisitely cute and charming platformer for the Amiga and ST. Yet both have ideas to offer up to a Bubble Bobble continuation. And naturally, none of this mattered. Thus, the most successful entry in the 21st century is Bubble Bobble Plus/Neo!, a polygonal remake of the arcade original that featured new add-on levels but no major changes to the 1986 design. Once again, it’s as if Rainbow Islands and Parasol Stars never existed.

If we take that initial trio as the series proper, then what we have is a collection of games that are certainly familial in terms of gameplay challenges, power-ups, bonus items and player abilities, yet are distinctly separate from each other as individual games. There’s a signature kind of playfulness in all three, and real, brilliant joie de vivre in their exuberance. Especially given the chaotic riot of the games in co-op play, they sing with a wonderfully individual vibrancy that now seems distant and somehow lost - much like the aforementioned Bomberman series. But then Taito at the time seemed to be the most playfully fun of the arcade brands, having already dipped its toes in self-celebration and back-referencing with Arkanoid’s famous Space Invaders level. Arkanoid, of course, themes the fifth island in Rainbow Islands and both of those two end up in the latter stages of Parasol Stars. It was a lightness that Taito shared with Konami, which indulged its own whimsy with Twinbee and, more famously perhaps, Parodius. Yet Taito seemed to make that joy a cornerstone, and that Bubble Bobble threesome is perhaps its finest jewels. It’s this sense of playfulness that’s missing in the modern titles. It’s even missing in the upcoming Parasol Stars re-release, with its terribly exclusive very limited editions for what appears to be just the base game, but legitimised and freed from being in a PC Engine emulator. If you really want to spend money, you can order it in a double pack with the conversion of Spica Adventure, a curio from the Kyocera-era Taito’s dying days as an arcade developer. Spica Adventure is a side-scrolling platformer with plenty of Bubble Bobble series traits which seemingly got a home port because it was something cool that hadn’t been ported yet. I did try Spica Adventure when it arrived in M.A.M.E. and I can’t say it shares quite the same magic as the Bubble series. If I sound a bit jaded, it’s because I fucking am. I get a deep sense of unease when what should be ultra-cheap retro titles are puffed up into money-milking luxury items, especially when the IP itself, its designs and dreams, its delightful playfulness and wonderfully skillful gameplay, are consigned to being mere history pieces. They could be signposts for whole new roads to travel, to open up new landscapes ripe for exploration. Dare I dream that Parasol Stars, my most beloved of that series, would find adoring new fans for its 2024 release? Perhaps, but I’m not banking on any new pots of treasure at the end of these fucking rainbows.

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1. Or rather, whichever merciless capitalist entity that owns the Taito IPs.

2. I was told to write an email to the editor of the publication that carried the negative review and basically voice displeasure. I wrote out a draft in defence of the publisher and criticising the reviewer and their ability. This draft was approved by my manager and the client and lo, it was sent - with my name on it. The editor's response was swift, cutting and perfectly true. They must have thought I was an absolute c**t, but I managed to build bridges by meeting both the editor and the reviewer in person later on in my career. When I did meet the reviewer, I felt so fucking bad as they were lovely and extremely knowledgeable. I definitely lost part of my soul in all of this, but in doing so vowed to never do that shit again. Somehow, I managed to avoid being such a professional bellend for the rest of my PR career - though I think my reputation with clients suffered as a result.

3. Upon seeing a draft, I mentioned to the graphic designer that the game has legendary characters in a very established, fixed visual style and he replied “well, I’m the kind of designer who likes to ignore rules”. Upon raising this extremely relevant problem with branding to the MD of the client, I think I the reply was literally “I could not give a shit”.

4. If I remember correctly, this incident brought about a ban on competitions for one of the UK's leading online gaming websites. Another notch on the bedpost of shame for Tony Coles.

5. My design was for a the static arenas of Parasol Stars with an emphasis on clearing monster generators and disposing of enemies to generate formalised combo counts and therefore upgrade the bonus item lines, again from Parasol Stars. Only you could choose to play with bubbles, rainbows or parasols. The idea being you had to make a set score within a time limit to advance the levels. I MEAN IT SOUNDS LIKE IT COULD BE FUN, RIGHT? AS A BUBBLE BOBBLE GAME, YEAH?

6. The official history is clouded in denials and weirdness. Taito apparently insisted that no arcade version existed, yet Working Designs, a US developer, worked from something as the game is far too 'correct' to the lineage to be a wholly US invention, especially given the stylistic aptitude and cultural environment of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The best speculation to be found is that Parasol Stars was initially developed in-house by Taito staff for its unreleased console, which then ended up being on PC Engine somehow with the intention to field it as an arcade cabinet as well as a home release. Quite what Working Designs did, other than maybe port from the unreleased WoWoW hardware to the PC Engine, is a complete mystery.  For the 2024 release, the limited edition has a book with material, it's claimed, taken directly from the original game design document. The only conclusion we can make, therefore, is that Parasol Stars is literally magic. See also: https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/2022/02/parasol-stars/

7. Giving away a full credit as a bonus items proves that Taito is irrefutably the world leader in bonus items, offering the best range by far in JAMMA era pixelart. Sure, Pac Man did the fruit thing, as did the actual Fruit Machines, but from Bubble Bobble onward nobody came close. Capcom did have some straight-up bangers, such as the cow in Sidearms, but Bubble Bobble onwards offers you a wonderful galaxy of food and drink, as well as shoes and rings and shit. Gemstones! Money! Delicious fruit drinks!

8. One of my proudest achievements in PR was getting into the Media Guardian with a press release headline about a Nintendo DS update to New Zealand Story, which I titled as simply as I could. Yep, we put the release out as New New Zealand Story Story.