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Super Bomberman 5 Game Review

Super Bomberman 5 is a 1997 action video game released by Hudson Soft for the SNES. It’s one of the best entries in this subseries.

This was the last entry in the Super Bomberman subseries and it was released when the SNES was pretty much nearing its end. It’s a well-regarded game that needs more love for everything that it did right. It’s my favorite entry in this series after the third one.

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Because it is a very late Super Nintendo game there is not a lot to talk about here in terms of its presentation. Graphically, it looks good. The character designs are great, the colors are vibrant and it’s all pleasing to the eye, but nothing we haven’t seen before. The audio fared better with a couple of very strong themes that are fun and catchy.

Let’s talk about the gameplay. First off, the single player campaign. Honestly, I did not quite love it. This was the only entry that introduced a nonlinear progression, which was interesting for the time, but in practice it didn’t fully function. This means that you can choose where to go next after each section, but the sections aren’t delineated all that much from each other, so it didn’t matter as much.

The shortness of it all was also an issue. I completed it very quickly. There isn’t a lot of meat here, though everything was admittedly so well done. I appreciated the bosses in particular. They for once posed genuine danger and it was thrilling battling them. Some of them I had to battle more than a couple of times, which is always fun. This was by far the best part of the main campaign. The level design is also strong and at times even inspired. Some opponents were also pleasantly demanding and those that could go through walls were the hardest. I liked playing the campaign overall, but its short length and lack of variety hurt it in the long run.

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But Super Bomberman 5 is all about the multiplayer and this is where the game truly shined the most. There are nine characters to choose from and over 10 maps to play on. A couple of maps were genuinely different and unique from everything that came before with the highlight being that magnetic field that was delightfully unpredictable in movements.

Battling here worked flawlessly. It was so fun, in fact, that I just loved going through every map and trying to win them all against surprisingly strong A.I. opponents. They were so unexpectedly clever at times and so competent that for some maps it took me quite a few tries to win. This spike in difficulty level made this game truly stand out for me.

Another highlight is this new mechanic that lets you go back from the dead. When you die, you are sent to the sides of the screen from where you can throw bombs on the screen. If your bomb successfully kills off another player, you are brought back to life in his place. This element was so good and more than just a gimmick as it gave you a second chance without it ever feeling cheap. I also loved that new power-up that follows the opponent once it is hurled toward him. That was the most powerful new power-up that really worked.

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