Bobmerman Land 2

A blast of action! The biggest theme park in gaming history!

JP release: 31st July 2003
NA release: N/A
EU release: N/A
Developer: Racjin
Publisher: Hudson Soft
NGC Magazine Score: N/A
Mods Used: Widescreen Code

The Bomberman Land seems to be games that sell themselves short. They seem like a minigame collection but contain more stuff too. The version of the first game on N64 (often dubbed Bomberman 64: Arcade Edition) included a classic bomberman mode and a few puzzle games. This full-fledged sequel doesn’t just have a bigger main mode, but so much more. So I’ll go though all the different parts of it.

Bomberman Land

The first main mode is a full on RPG style game where you explore the park and collect tickets by beating minigames or solving puzzles. The park itself is massive, comprising of five colossal areas. In each area, there are 25 badges to collect, which are mostly comprised of minigames. One thing that helps is that, like Mario Party, there’s a lot of minigames that use the same controls, making it easy to get to grips with them.

Some minigames I remembered from Bomberman 64: Arcade Edition, but there are also new ones. Some are extremely simple (like directing coloured bombs to the right spit), but still fun. The scores you have to beat are quite simple, but they’re preparing you for later. Even similar games, like multiple target practice ones, can have different mechanics to differentiate them. There are 70 minigames in total.

You’ll also encounter some recurring games, such as a single floor of a dungeon crawler. Here, bomberman has three weapons and can get coins from enemies. These are teasers for some of the other modes of the game, so I’ll go in them in more detail later on, although this dungeon crawler one will also be relevant elsewhere.

There’s an immense amount of NPC to talk to (which means a lot of translating) and you can often spend hours just walking around, chatting to people. In the first area, there’s an entire resort island that has a multi-story hotel and one room is used for getting the stamps you need, the rest is just extra stuff to explore. It’s quite astonishing just how much there is to see. You also have to search everywhere to progress (gates will only open when you have the correct stamps) to find the hidden secrets. By the time you’ve completed this mode, it feels like a full game, and the credits roll…but it’s far from over.

Land Advnture

During the celebrations of Bomberman winning the competition at Bomberman Land, the party gets invaded and Pretty Bomber gets kidnapped. It’s up to Bomberman to save her. For a mode that’s unlocked after fully completing the main mode, this isn’t just a quick romp, it’s a pretty significant action RPG. You’ll need to level up your stats and equipment and fight a ton of enemies across the entire park.

When a battle starts, it whisks you into an arena and it uses the gameplay from the dungeon crawler for combat. Starting off, you won’t have your hammer, which was the main melee attack, but you’ll eventually unlock everything and improve it beyond what you could use in the earlier minigames. I did find that the boomerang was the most useful item, but this is another really good mode.

Casino Adventure

An expanded version of the casino from the main game. This lets you walk around and talk to others like the previous two modes, but takes place in one small building instead of a sprawling map. The objective is simple: get 1,000,000 gold from the various gambling games. Other than the slot machine, these aren’t typical casino games – no poker or blackjack. The simple ones are a gambling version of Yhatzee, heads or tails and a card game where you and an opponent have 1-5 and you play one at a time, hoping to play a higher card than your opponent most times. At the end of it, you can also try to beat some of the minigames with ridiculously high score requirements for more rewards.

There are a few more interesting games, such as a shooting game where you use coins as bullets and hitting enemies will score you more coins. As you reach milestones, the other main bombers will challenge you to particular games. A fun mode.

Battle

Classic Bomberman multiplayer action. This has a good amount of options and some new modes, such as ones where you have to collect stars. This mode is always great fun and makes a welcome return here. There’s no singleplayer mode (other than playing with bots), unfortunately, but it’s not like this game is lacking.

Bomberman Kart

Bomberman Kart released on the PS2 in 2001 in Japan (and 2003 in Europe) and this seems to be a five-track demo of that game. It’s an average kart game with power ups and feels a bit slow, but not a terrible addition to the game. With Racjin porting part of the game over to GameCube for this, I wonder why they never released the full game.

Panic Bomber

Another addition of Panic Bomber, a fun puzzle game. This features a singleplayer challenge mode and a verses mode, which can be played with up to four people. Instead of squishing the pieces for four players, it reduces the playing area, which makes it extremely difficult to score combos, although does remind me of the puzzle game from Mario Party 3. There are some good options for how the pikes look, including setting them to the letters BOMER, which I found to be very clear.

SameGame

A classic puzzle game in Japan that has been released a great many times – there was even a Mario version released via Satellaview. You click on a tile and any of the same type that form a line will also disappear, with the ones on top dropping down. The goal is to clear a set amount to progress.

Bomberman Survival

The dungeon crawler minigame is now a full fledged dungeon crawler, with multiple dungeons comprised of randomly generated floors and multiple bosses. Throughout these dungeons are mini bombers, of which there are 300 to collect. As you collect them, their special meter goes up and you can launch a devastating attack as they zoom around the screen, destroying everything in their path. This is another significant mode, with the hub following the same gameplay as the main mode. There’s a surprising amount of cohesion across these games.

Bomberman Land 2 is a surprisingly expansive game with an obscene amount of stuff to do in it. There are some nice things you unlock as you play through it, such as some little manga strips, soundtracks and 10 minigames that can be sent to a GBA. With a name like Bomberman Land, I really wasn’t expecting anything this extensive, and it seems they really sold the game short, especially as some people may have never unlocked the other modes.

Great

The current Bomberman is useless, so I thought I would play past games
and bought them After all, I think it’s interesting because the old ones are not bad.
チュン, Amazon Customer (Translated)

Remake or remaster?

An English translation would be great to see.

Official Ways to get the game

There is no official way to get Bomberman Land 2.