Publisher: Taito
Developer: Taito
Two Player
Arcade / Sega Saturn
The origin of Bubble Symphony is its prequel Bubble Bobble (1986), a highly well regarded arcade game which, alongside its many conversations to home computers of the era like the Commodore 64, became an iconic series for Taito. Based around cute dragons blowing bubbles to defeat enemies, some may know this series through the spin-off Puzzle Bobble or Bust-A-Move, a prolific puzzle game series where you fired corresponding coloured bubbles up screen at bubbles to remove them. Bubble Bobble however was a one-screen platformer where, with multiple levels, you play characters turned into bubble blowing dragons and have to clear screens of enemies to get to the next level. You blow a bubble at the right time, capture an enemy, and have a short amount of time before they escape to jump at it to pop them.
Bubble Symphony is the lavish sequel where, increasing the cast from two male dragons to include two female dragons, with their own differences, this also becomes a tribute to Taito itself whilst living up to its title, a symphony both in music and visuals. Lavishly cute, multicolour and bright, you have to completely levels to reach the amusingly named Hyper Drunk, a magician who turns the four child leads into dragons after they unleash him from the books they are reading. The game is split into worlds with individual levels and a boss, entirely one screen for each level. Clearing through the enemies, you can fall off the screen and appear falling from the top, and can get power ups alongside trinkets, from fruit to gems, to gain points. You can speed up or slow down your fall and, unlike me who struggled with this, if you can pull it off you can bounce off your own bubble to reach higher. Failing to complete a level quickly and the Skel-Monsta (a.k.a. Baron von Blubba) is summoned, an indestructible white ghost who only leaves if you lose a life or finish the level. The bosses require you to collect a special power up for that screen and fight them with new special bubbles, be it thunder bolts the go the direction opposite to you, or the mini-twisters that go up wards as ammo. For the Japanese Sega Saturn version, which becomes a huge virtue, you have unlimited lives and just have to plough through continues and/or get better with how to play.
Bubble Symphony's interesting twist is that, after the first world, you get an option of four doors to choose from and, onwards with two doors, if you complete a world you can choose which world to go to next. With name like TV Land or Radish Land, this gets more interesting as you can have levels referencing Taito's legacy, such as a Darius themed world based on the serious scrolling shooting, an intergalactic one with aquatic based themes. It says a great deal of the game's charms when, in the end credits, the characters and even individual enemies get their own credits, including all the cameos. Bubble Symphony can be frustrating at points - the bubble jump was difficult to pull off and, due to the layout of some levels, you can find yourself stuck or having little window to get past enemies. It also has frustrating mechanic that, if you want to true ending, you need to collect music note tokens in esoteric moments to get four keys, which is annoying. But this is still a game I loved in playing because of its vibrancy, and those frustrations do not, in the slightest, ruin so many of the virtues on display.
It is a cute, beautiful looking game. The music is poppy and pretty, whilst even structured around rigid platforms of a dreamt world than a logical reality, it is magical in terms of the worlds you enter as you play. This game does emphasise the magic of the 2D sprite era of games, of even the "To Continue" option being here instead a crying dragon in the corner you start the level from, a little animation to tug at the heart strings if you are not raring already to get back into the game, with Bubble Symphony's ease for the most part to understand the mechanics of helping. The boss battles in particular have a memorability in themselves, be it literally turning into Space Invaders, or fighting a female tanuki (racoon dog) in a shrine priestess human form, or the Darius World ending in turning into a hybrid between a one stage platformer and a shooter, all against of all things a giant hermit crab whose shell is a war ship.
This franchise has lasted into the modern day, with the likes of Bubble Bobble 4 Friends (2019), though in an interesting turn, for another review, the Puzzle Bobble franchise itself far from just a spin-off became just as prolific and distinct in its own way. Taito, founded by a Ukrainian Jewish businessman Michael “Misha” Kogan in 1953, is fascinating as a company who, when it was founded, began as a vodka distillery (the first company to produce vodka in Japan) and an importer of peanut vending machines and perfume machines1. To think they would become the minds behind the legendary Space Invaders (1978) game, and become well regarded as a gaming company, amuses me. They were bought by Square Enix in 2005, and in the 2010s, a lot of their work was for smart phones and tablets. By the end of the 2010s, they have been making games for the likes of the Nintendo Switch, which is a positive though. As for Bubble Symphony itself, it would be a pleasure if this ever got a re-release in the future, as honestly this is the kind of game that is ageless and adorably well constructed anyone could admire. Its title is not false advertising in the slightest, and even a spin-off which played with this game's aesthetic, bright colours and embracing the heritage of this gaming company in a playful nostalgia, would be something to love in the modern day.
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1) As referred to HERE.
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