"Underrated and freaking amazing...unless you go multiplayer."

So, you're itching for more portable Bomberman action and you're thinking about picking up this quietly released game? As of the time I post this there's only one other review for this game (a puny 4), so I figure I'd give a more in-depth counterpoint.

Story Mode:
If you like WarioWare, you should enjoy this mode. Basically you're the white Bomberman who's kidnapped along with black, pink, blue, and green by yellow, the biggest and strongest bomberman. He only wanted to kidnap pink, but his mom said he had to take everyone else too. So he takes you all to this weird pirate theme park and everyone forgets they were kidnapped because they're just hanging out and having fun. The goal is to collect 25 cards of each card suit (hearts, diamonds, jacks, spades) by winning mini-games, finding treasure chests, and beating rivals and bosses. Basically you run around each mini-game in each zone (heart zone, spade zone, etc) and later on your rivals challenge you to duels in the games.

You start off in the spade zone and unlock the others as you open gates with the cards you collect, and find weird paths to each of them such as by mine card, submarine, or zip line. There is a lot of backtracking to be done throughout the game (like Metroid or something along those lines - you find a dead-end so you hunt around for the next place you can go) but it's pretty quick and simple, and once you've been to a zone's information desk it becomes a warp point - you can shoot back to any warp point you've visited so far whenever you go to an info desk. The story itself is pretty hollow - just a fancy way of pointing you here and there to get to more minigames. It's not really tedious though, which is the important part.

As for the mini games, they're fantastic. You've probably seen something like them before, but they're so well-executed and stylized it's like playing something entirely different. A couple examples are: drawing a line from a lit fuse of one color to the matching color bomb; a slots wheel where you match the fuses to a bomb on the far right; a cool rendition of air hockey/hot potato; whack-a-mole; and tons more. My only real complaint about the game is the fact these didn't make it into multi-player.

Graphics are bright and fluid, as they should be. It's leaps and bounds over the initial Bomberman DS. The music is chipper and varied, with plenty of fanfares when you do something right or sad warbles when you fail.

Non-wifi is decent. They left out several of the more important weapons of the Bomberman series, pretty much going back to the NES era. That's right, you only have Kick, Fire Up/Down, and Bomb Up/Down. It's fun anyway, as it always has been, but I've always been a fan of line bombs or virus or really anything they left out of this one. If you're going for pure multiplayer, track down the original DS Bomberman.

Now, Wifi is a strange animal. I was excited as hell when I got home and tried logging into my wireless connection, but when I got on... well, it was pretty sad. It took me over 10 minutes to find a single player worldwide, and when that happened, the game lagged so poorly every second on the clock took a full three seconds to cycle. That's right: ONE THIRD GAME SPEED. So thinking it was my connection I went to McDonald's and Starbucks and any other local wifi joint, but no, the thing is indeed screwy. At least in Southwest Ohio.

So hey, in conclusion, the game is a great buy for single-player but no so much for the multi. It's kind of a paradox for the Bomberman series, but definitely a fresh take.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 11/13/06