Boom! Shake the room! Bomberman's back and he's set to blow up the N64 with all-new features.
"Planet Bomber was a peaceful planet that had never experienced danger. Suddenly, Altair's huge ship arrived and initiated its attack. Bomberman was stunned as there was nothing he could do to stop the huge ship. Then, Sirius, a mysterious helper appeared in front of him...
Listening to Sirius's advise, Bomberman began his journey to destroy the bases of Altair's allies. What is waiting for Bomberman? Who is Sirius, the mysterious helper? Unless Bomberman destroys the enemies, there will be no peace on Planet Bomber. This is the beginning of Bomberman's battle.
Listening to Sirius's advise, Bomberman began his journey to destroy the bases of Altair's allies. What is waiting for Bomberman? Who is Sirius, the mysterious helper? Unless Bomberman destroys the enemies, there will be no peace on Planet Bomber. This is the beginning of Bomberman's battle.
— Page 7 of the European Manual.
Bomberman 64 is the first game in the Bomberman franchise for the Nintendo 64, released in 1997. It was followed in 1998 by Bomberman Hero, then had a more direct sequel in 1999 with Bomberman 64: The Second Attack!.
A strange fortress descends upon Planet Bomber and begins attacking the inhabitants of Bomber Town. Attached to the fortress are four pieces of other planets that have been conquered by Altair and his Masker Trio. Bomberman, joined by a strange new ally named Sirius, must disconnect the four pieces from the fortress so that he can reach it and defeat this new threat to Planet Bomber.
64 was the first game proper to bring Bomberman into three-dimensions, and the first game not to feature the traditional grid-pattern in either the level design or the bomb explosions; the bombs instead explode in a hemisphere. Most of the powerups from the series retain their original use, although they are adapted for this new gameplay style. The Bomb Kick and Bomb Throw are useable from the very beginning.
Useless trivia: the engine was later reused for the first three Mario Party games, as evidenced by similar assets appearing across the N64 era and a Bomberman sprite appearing among the second game's assets.
This game provides examples of:
- Affably Evil: Regulus compliments your victory over him. He also helps you fight Sirius and transports you from the falling fortress. He compliments you again, while maintaining his hostility.
- Asshole Victim: After Sirius reveals his true nature, he steals the Omni Cube from Altair before disintegrating him. Considering that Altair committed the exact same crimes as Sirius, only to a lesser extent due to his lack of knowledge of the Omni Cube, he really had it coming.
- Big Damn Heroes: Regulus saves you from being disintegrated by Sirius and destroys the Omni Cube, thus being the one who actually saves Planet Bomber.
- Big Bad: Altair is the planet conqueror who, using the Omni-Cube, seems to make Planet Bomber his next conquest. Getting all 100 Gold Cards reveals that Altair actually stole the cube from Sirius, supposedly an ally but really a conqueror himself who decides to destroy Planet Bomber after killing Altair.
- Big "NO!": Sirius gives one of these before blowing up once you defeat him in Rainbow Palace.
- Body Double: After Sirius turns heel and absconds with the Omni Cube to the Rainbow Palace, returning to see him elsewhere in the game will have you encounter what appears to be this, with it having green eyes in its talking portrait instead of blue (though this is not reflected in the in-game model), using yellow text instead of white when speaking, and having more rigid, robotic dialogue.
- Bonus Level of Heaven: Rainbow Palace, only accessible once you get the 100 Gold Cards from the other stages first, and requires complicated bomb jumping just to complete, all set in a castle in the clouds.
- Boss-Only Level: The second and fourth level of each world is a boss fight. In the main four worlds, the second stage is a character duel while the fourth level sees Sirius give you remote control bombs to fight a giant creature/robot, but in Black Fortress and Rainbow Palace, the order is flipped, with the robot boss being in the second stage and the character duel being in the fourth and last stage (Sirius also does not give you remote control bombs in the Rainbow Palace Stage 2 fight, since he's revealed his true colors by that point).
- Convection, Schmonvection: The levels of Red Mountain float dangerously over lava. You'd expect this to cause problems for a hero with explosives as his superpower, but as long as your bombs don't actually touch fire, you're good.
- Dark Action Girl: Artemis is the only female in the four-person bad guy team, but just as lethal as her compatriots.
- Dark and Troubled Past: As per his account, Sirius once fought Altair but couldn't even scratch him. As a result his planet was destroyed, and his brother and sister with it. Possibly subverted when you get the secret ending and Sirius shows his true colors. He mentions that it was worth feeding Bomberman corny lies to get him on his side, so the account he gives of his backstory is likely a lie.
- Defeat Equals Explosion: Artemis, Orion, Hades, Cerberus, and Sirius.
- Disappointed in You: Sirius outright says he's a little disappointed in Bomberman if you get the normal ending where Altair escapes. Despite saving the world and all, Bomberman apparently takes this very personally because he promptly stumbles over himself in exhaustion, even with the cheery tone of victory persisting. This is the major (and only) clue to the fact that there's a Golden Ending to achieve.
- Didn't Need Those Anyway!: Each big world boss has multiple parts that each provide a Gold Card when destroyed: Draco's head, wings, and tail; Leviathan's tail and antenna; Hades' fists and hat; Mantis' mask and claws; Cerberus' nose and side modules; and Spellmaker's hat and cape.
- Disc-One Final Boss: Altair is one of the main villains in the game, and is the last boss fought in standard play, but if the player collects all the game's Gold Cards through the first 5 worlds, they discover Altair is this trope when Sirius swoops in after Altair is defeated, interrupts his Villain: Exit, Stage Left, steals back the Omni Cube, and then obliterates him and replaces him as the Big Bad.
- Disintegrator Ray: Altair's flying robot fires a projected red beam that disintegrates anything that comes in contact with it, except Altair himself.
- Dual Boss: The first phase of the fight with Altair has Bomberman fighting him and a robot he summons. After they take enough damage, they fuse.
- Dub Name Change: Several, including Cosmic Cube to Omni Cube, Capella to Artemis, Haut to Orion, Drago to Draco, Levia to Leviathan, Spriggan to Hades, White Ice to White Glacier, Ripper to Mantis, Black City to Black Fortress, and Absolute to Cerberus.
- Early-Bird Boss: Inverted; Sirius will give the player remote bombs for each of the large bosses except the very last one in The Very Definitely Final Dungeon. By this point, Sirius had revealed himself as Evil All Along, and isn't willing to help Bomberman any longer.
- Escort Mission: While the game doesn't frame it as such, the condition to claim one of the Gold Cards in the final boss stage works out to this as it requires that Regulus make it through without getting downed. Due to his mind-blowing disinterest in his personal safety, including such feats as waddling back and forth inside the strike zone of a giant laser that he could easily escape or face-mashing against the boss during this laser attack, dropping as many bombs as possible in blissful ignorance of his target's invincibility while firing that laser or the fact that he's constantly blowing himself up, this is much easier said than done. On Normal Mode you can at least try to force-feed him the hearts that he and the boss drop to keep him healthy, but in Hard Mode where Hearts simply disappear this is out of the question and you'll just have to hope for him to act stupid outside of harm's way.
- Evil All Along: Sirius, and only if you're going for 100% no less.
- Evil Laugh: Sirius does this when he reveal himself as a villain by reclaiming the Omni Cube and killing Altair.
- Excuse Plot: Seemingly at first. The Omni Cube is only present in the intro and briefly mentioned by Sirius in Green Garden. It plays an important role after Sirius betrays you.
- Fake Difficulty: Orion is responsible for a Kaizo Trap, and White Glacier 1 on Hard Mode has an aggressively strict time limit, compounded by winds that are capable of blowing you off a ledge. If that happens, you can pretty much kiss that Gold Card for the target time goodbye. You can also get roasted with no warning in Red Mountain 1 thanks to there being no tell when a fireball is going to shoot up through a bridge or the fact that the shadows of the fireballs which fall from above don't cast shadows on bridges.
- Family-Unfriendly Death:
- Altair is disintegrated onscreen.
- Hades (the final boss in Red Mountain) blows up and sinks into the lava, with Orion still in it.
- Fiendish Fish: The boss of the Blue Resort stage is Leviathan, a giant purple fish who swims after the player's raft and attempts to crush him with an armored tentacle protruding from its forehead.
- Foreshadowing: A blink-and-you'll-miss-it example in Green Garden: Sirius talks about how the Omni Cube works and says that the reason it's taking Altair so long to destroy Planet Bomber is because he doesn't know how to use it. The implication is that Sirius does know how to use it properly, making it that much more imperative to defeat him after he replaces Altair as the Big Bad.
- Four Is Death: The bad guys are a four-person team of Space Pirates: The Big Bad Altair and his three Co-Dragons, Regulus, Orion, and Artemis.
- Giant Spider: Mantis, the second boss for White Glacier.
- Green Hill Zone: Green Garden is this set in some ruins.
- Guide Dang It!: The game never explains how to get any of the Gold Cards, nor what they do. The fact that collecting 100 of them unlocks the actual ending is never hinted at.
- Getting all of Green Garden 1's Gold Cards, in particular, requires the most difficult bomb jumping tricks in the game.
- 100% Completion: 100 Gold Cards are needed to access the Rainbow Palace, but the player gets extra rewards for collecting all 120, plus beating the game under certain requirements.
- Kaizo Trap: Right after depleting all of Orion's health, he will explode in a blaze of hot fire streams, which will kill you if you don't get out of the way.
- Karmic Death: Orion will try to throw Bomberman into the lava during his first fight. He later dies when the Hades sinks into the lava, with him in it.
- Lethal Lava Land: Red Mountain, which is set in and around a volcano.
- Light Is Not Good: The final boss, your ally Sirius, dresses in white and is in a dungeon called the Rainbow Palace, but he is far more dangerous with the Omni Cube because he knows how to use it, unlike Altair.
- Load-Bearing Boss: Destroying Sirius in the last stage of Rainbow Palace causes his lair to implode and crash into Altair's Black Fortress, destroying both.
- Magical Clown: The penultimate boss of the game, Spellmaker, is a clown with a vast arsenal of magical spells to choose from. Because of this, he's perhaps the most difficult boss in the game due to being so unpredictable.
- Man on Fire: One of the skull effects in multiplayer sets the player on fire, which forces him to use his body to kill off everyone else before the fire kills him.
- Market-Based Title: This Bomberman 64 is known as Baku Bomberman (Explosive Bomberman) in Japan. The Japanese Bomberman 64 is actually a later 2001 2D game
that was never exported. - Most Definitely Not a Villain: An interesting case. Though Sirius actually does a great job at posing as your ally, Hudson Soft kind of ruins his disguise with their descriptions of him in the game and the manual by constantly questioning his true intentions. The fact that the level where Sirius tests Bomberman's battle skills is titled "Friend or Foe?" doesn't exactly help his disguise, either.
- No Fair Cheating: An odd example. By completing the game with every Gold Card, you obtain the "Full Power" option which gives you every upgrade (eight bombs, maximum blasting zone, Remote Bombs, Power Bombs) off the bat, even when they're normally impossible to get in a given stage. Aside from the fact that there are situations where having Full Power will get you killed by your own bombs, Altair's second form will teleport constantly if you hold a pumped Remote Power Bomb, to the point that he's almost impossible to hit. The fight isn't unwinnable, but it is definitely much harder to get the Gold Cards from the fight (if you start a new file on Hard after finishing Normal, for example) than it is if you just leave Full Power turned off.
- Another example lies in one of the ways you can defeat the Maskers in their direct bomber boss fights: stunning them and then hurling them off the field. It's incredibly easy to pull off, and even Altair falls to it with an instant kill for both of his phases. But you don't get all the Gold Cards you can get besides for time by doing this method, meaning that you have to fight them fairly if you want to get the cards.
- Not in This for Your Revolution: Sirius tells Bomberman he's only helping him against Altair for revenge, rather than any noble reason. If you get the secret ending, it's shown he wants revenge less for losing a home, more for taking back what was stolen from him.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Bomberman defeating the alien invaders results in the real villain, Sirius, coming in to take back his world-destroying device.
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Nintendo Hard: Some of the Gold Cards are an absolute bitch to get, particularly in the boss fights where you have to get them all in one go or they don't count.- This is doubly so for Green Garden's Gold Cards, most of which require difficult-to-perform bomb-jumping maneuvers that are only shown during the credits.
- Permanently Missable Content: Two costume sets, one a random set consisting of the parts 'Clown Smile, Karate Ware, Boxing Gloves, Clogs', and the Gold Armor set, only obtainable by completing the game in under three hours with every Gold Card. The random set is obtained on either Normal or Hard, and the Gold Armor is only obtainable on hard. If your play time exceeds three hours, both sets are impossible to obtain on that file. Indeed, due to the lack of any New Game Plus feature, the Gold Armor is lost forever on a file by simply not playing on Hard mode!note
- Poison Mushroom: An "Evil" item, which when activated creates a stage-wide effect potentially affecting all players. Some effects include a tornado, maxing out everyone's bomb count and explosion size, and an "evil disco light" that saturates the screen with bright colours, making it hard to see the action.
- Quirky Miniboss Squad: Altair's team of space pirates who face off with Bomberman, Regulus, Orion, and Artemis. All three have different abilities and personalities: Artemis is a Dark Action Girl and The Brute, Orion is a Barrier Warrior and an Evil Genius (the second time he fights Bomberman it's in a Giant Mecha), and Regulus is The Dragon and an Anti-Villain who sides with Bomberman after Sirius kills his master.
- Sequential Boss: Both the fight with Altair and the second fight with Sirius are two-stage boss fights. In the former, Altair and a small robot he summons fight together. Once one or the other takes enough damage, a cutscene of them merging plays, then the second stage begins. For Sirius, you first fight him in an Amazing Technicolor Battlefield where he can fly around and fire a laser on the ground, then after enough damage, Regulus swoops in and destroys the Omni Cube, prompting the second stage back in Sirius's throne room with Regulus at your side.
- Slippy-Slidey Ice World: White Glacier, which is one part ski resort and one part ice rink with obtuse camera angles.
- The Smurfette Principle: Artemis, who is the one female member of Altair's gang and the one female boss fought in the game.
- Song Parody: One of the original US commercials for the game featured a "Bomberman" parody of "Spider-Man". It's the page quote for the main Bomberman article.
- Stellar Name: Sirius, Orion, Regulus, Altair, and Vega. There's also Capella, the Japanese name of Artemis.
- Super Title 64 Advance: Bomberman 64.
- There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Altair's robot guardian. It even states in the instruction booklet that he is in fact, quite obsessed with overkill.
- True Final Boss: Sirius is in fact the real Big Bad of the game, but the second and last fight with him and the world it comes with can only be played and the truth learned if the player succeeds in obtaining all the Gold Cards in the game (otherwise, the game ends in Black Fortress with Altair escaping and Sirius leaving).
- Vehicular Assault: The second Orion battle puts him in a giant robot in lava with big fists.
- Villainous Breakdown: Once Regulus destroys the Omni Cube, Sirius absolutely flips out, before promptly spamming the same laser that disintegrated Altair earlier as he goes postal in the ensuing two-versus-one battle.
- Villain: Exit, Stage Left:
- Regulus escapes from Bomberman after he is defeated in White Glacier, unlike Artemis and Orion (Orion does return later in his world controlling a giant robot, but Artemis does not).
- Altair attempts this with Regulus's help after Bomberman defeats him at the end of Black Fortress. If you don't have all the Gold Cards up to that point, he succeeds in escaping, but if you do, Sirius flies in and stops him from leaving, before stealing back the Omni Cube, vaporizing Altair, and revealing he used you all along, prompting the chase to the true final level, the Rainbow Palace.
- Walking Spoiler: Sirius.
- "You!" Exclamation: Sirius to Regulus, before the final final battle.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Spoken word for word by Sirius to Bomberman after Altair has been killed.
