Games › Super Famicom › 1996
Cover art © its publisher, shown small to identify the game (source). Request removal.
1996 · Super Famicom
Facts from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA). Spot a mistake or a gap? Fix it yourself or tell us.
Bagular's brain survived his saucer blowing up. On the shuttle home, four lights crash into White and Black Bomber, open a hole in time and drop them in the prehistoric age. Great Bomber and the Four Bomber Kings, working to Bagular's plan, are hunting them through history.
You lay bombs to clear blocks and catch enemies in the blast, and try not to catch yourself. Power-ups stretch the blast, let you kick or punch a bomb, or pick it up and throw it. New here: beaten enemies leave eggs, and an egg hatches a creature, living or mechanical, that you ride. The story mode has five worlds of eight levels; the Bomber Kings wait at level seven and the world boss at eight. Two people can play it together, and some cages hold allies who knock down blocks for you.
Produce developed it and Hudson Soft released it on the Super Famicom on 26 April 1996, in Japan only. Shogakukan published a 114-page full-colour official guide a month later. Jun Chikuma wrote the music, and much of it is borrowed: the map theme from Bomberman '93, world one, world five and the final boss from Bomberman '94, and the battle music from Super Bomberman 3.
Critics who imported it liked it a lot. It had no English release for thirty years, until the Super Bomberman Collection in 2026.
The battle mode is the reason to own it, and it is generous: up to five players, teams, three levels of computer opponent, revenge carts, and ten stages. Champion mode lets one or two players take on the Bomber Kings in a row, and Maniac mode lets you choose which items drop and how many hits each player can take. You can play as the Bomber Kings too, each with a special trick, though a few of them pay for theirs with ten seconds of slower, weaker bombing.
The story mode is better with two. Some warps to bonus stages only open when one player picks up the other with the Power Glove and throws them in, which is the kind of rule that makes a couch laugh.
Bomberman is a game where your own bomb can kill you, and so can your friend's, and everyone knows it. Five people round one screen, each about to make a mistake, and the room lives on that knowledge.
Durkheim called it collective effervescence: the charged energy of people gathered in one activity, which binds them. Super Bomberman 4 is built for that feeling. Its best rule, throwing your partner into a secret warp, only exists if there are two of you, and it only works if you trust them.
You have been training these without noticing. Here is how to do it on purpose, and where it pays off away from the couch. All the skills games teach →
In the game. Story mode is better with two, and some bonus warps only open when one player picks the other up with the Power Glove and throws them in.
Do it on purpose. Play story with a mate and agree on who's the thrower and who's the target before each world.
Off the couch. Working as a pair, a mate on a road trip or a partner on a big job, is all about trust. Being reliable is attractive.
In the game. Maniac mode lets you choose which items drop and how many hits each player can take. Change one setting and the whole battle changes.
Do it on purpose. Change one Maniac setting per session and watch how it shifts the way everyone plays.
Off the couch. Tweaking one thing at a time and watching the result is how you sort out your budget, your training or a messy routine.
In the game. You can kick, punch, pick up and throw bombs, and beaten enemies leave eggs you can ride. The grid gets busy fast.
Do it on purpose. Do one round only throwing bombs, never placing them. It makes you picture where they'll land.
Off the couch. Picturing where things will end up before you move, in sport or packing a car boot, saves heaps of hassle.
Verdict · 8/10
A rich, busy battle game with a story mode built for two. Worth tracking down; now you can read the menus.
