B-Daman is a Merchandise-Driven manga and anime franchise produced by Takara Tomy, based around small, customizable figures that shoot marbles from their torsos. The name is derived from the Japanese word for marble, bidama. Marbles used in the game are refered to as "B-Dama", a marketable transliteration of the word, and can be made of many different materials; while the series is mainly known for using clear glass marbles, metal, plastic, rubber, and hybrid marbles are also common. The performance of each B-Daman is determined by the type of core it uses, in addition to other accessories that could improve the ammunition capacity, mobility, accuracy, power, or shooting speed.
It started as a Spin-Off of the Bomberman franchise, which included several different gimmicks including marble-shooting Bomberman characters. The first B-Daman toys were part of the Super Bomberman toyline, featuring characters from the classic video game series. A cartoon expanding on the premise, Bomberman B-Daman Bakugaiden, would be released alongside a new toyline in 1995. It proved popular enough to continue toy production until 1999, when a new series called Super B-Daman would be released alongside Bakugaiden. While successful, its successor Battle B-Daman would be significantly more lucrative due to the introducion of the Direct Hit Battle System (DHB), finally allowing player to simply fight head to head without any additional accessories.
Unfortunately, the brand would take a downturn that it would never really recover from starting with the following series, Crash B-Daman. Being blatantly based on guns, often featuring details based directly on real weapons, the series did not garner the same following and only released a grand total of 40 products. After a 5 year hiatus, B-Daman Crossfire and its sequel B-Daman Fireblast would be the final nails in the coffin for the franchise as poor sales continued to drop. While compatibility with, and even straight reissuing of, Super B-Daman accessories was meant to draw in old fans, many felt like it was a step down with the smoother, more basic figure designs and lack of DHB capability.
Following the cancellation of Fireblast, the concept was reworked and rebranded as Cap Revolution Bottleman. The new line uses the same design language as B-Daman, with a flexible caliper used to launch an object from the toy's torso. However, unlike B-Daman, Bottleman toys use plastic screw caps from drink bottles and encourage players to collect and reuse bottles as accessories, to reduce plastic waste. As an olive branch to older fans, some classic B-Daman designs from Super and Battle were reimagined for the new toyline.
Aspects of the Bakugaiden setting and story would later be reused in the non-B-Daman Bomberman series Bomberman Jetters.
Another series that was indirectly spun off from the Super Bomberman toyline is Beyblade, based off of one of the earlier toyline's customizable tops - Beyblade even retained the ripcord used with the Bomberman tops (among other toys in the series) for its first two generations. Additionally, the character designs for Crash B-Daman were reworked and altered for Beyblade: Metal Fusion, most prominently their main protagonists Hitto Tamaga and Gingka Hagane appearing suspiciously similar.
Works in this franchis include:
- Super Bomberman (1993, 1995)
- Bomberman B-Daman Bakugaiden (1995-1999)
- Super B-Daman (1999)
- Battle B-Daman (2004)
- Crash B-Daman (2006)
- B-Daman Crossfire (2011-2012)
- B-Daman Fireblast (2012-2013)
Common tropes in the B-Daman franchis include:
- Awesome, but Impractical: Some of the accessories come off like this. The Direct Loader Magazine is a jointed tube that either lets the player drop marbles in from the top (fine) or point it down and scoop marbles from the floor straight into it (impractical). This second method can be used to reload and fire very quickly, even continuously, but also tends to make it hard to aim and almost impossible to fire if you aren't using a 1-handed core. Even then, it might be better just to use a wide-topped magazine instead.
- Company Cross References: Being that both B-Daman and Beyblade are Takara Tomy properties, it comes up from time to time.
- Wild Wyvern is also the name of Wakiya Murasaki's first Beyblade in the Anime
- Ifrit is used not only for a number of B-Daman toys and the true protagonis of Crash, but also Beyblades in Shogun Steel and Burst.
- Fighter, Mage, Thief: The three basic core types - Power, Control, and Rapid-Fire respectively. Power is designed to hit harder with slower fire speed, Control is more accurate and sometimes capable of trick shots, and Rapid-Fire can pump out a lot of shots very quickly at the cost of much lower power. Special Type cores usually combine high power with elements of one or both of the other two types.
- Finishing Move: Bakugaiden, Super, Battle, and Crash all had either special features to the toys themselves or equipable accessories that allowed for a special attack option. Crash in particular had numerous sidearms that could be attached for this purpose.
- Gangsta Style: Crash B-Daman toys are designed to look like guns, with the grips turned sideways for ease of use. This may be part of the reason it wasn't as popular in Japan and never got exported.
- Intercontinuity Crossover: A handful of B-Daman "characters" like Cobalt Blade and Wild Wyvern were given updated designs in the successor franchise, Cap Revolution Bottleman. Some have even received multiple forms, such as Bottle Phoenix, which would be updated as Bottle Phoenix Energy, Bottle Phoenix DX, and BottlePhoenix Energy DX.
- Literal Metaphor: The Crash Weapons - sidearms that could be equipped to Crash B-Daman - literally attached to the sides of the arms.
- More Dakka: The bigger and better the magazine a B-Daman has, the faster and longer it can shoot.
- Multishot:
- Triple Gillusion is simply three B-Daman attached to each other.
- Crash allowed the player to add additional sidearms called Crash Weapns to their B-Daman, allowing multiple shots at once or different types of shots at a time.
