Adaptation Displacement: Most people seem to believe the NES version that was also on Virtual Console was the original while available on the NES Classic Edition. The arcade version was first, but its source code has been lost.
Cult Classic: Despite not being anywhere near as big as Taito's main arcade juggernaut, Bubble Bobble as a whole has held tightly onto a following of arcade enthusiasts.
Fanon Discontinuity: As far as people are concerned, the Bubble Dragon forms are the real forms of the protagonists.
First Installment Wins: Despite this game receiving four sequels, the first game is the most remembered out of all of them. It certainly doesn't help that most of the games after Rainbow Islands saw limited release in America, and home conversions of Bubble Symphony and Bubble Memoriesnever left Japan.
Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Bubble Bobble always had modest popularity in Japan and is a cult classic elsewhere, but South Korea was where it really took off, being a major catalyst for the popularity of elimination platformers, spawning a fair share of imitators, and even having exclusive ports released only in Korean.
The bad ending of the arcade original, achieved by finishing with only one player active rather than two, has some surprisingly creepy music.
On that note, the bad ending music of Parasol Stars. It starts out fine and a little bouncy, but devolves into a surprisingly disturbing cacophony about halfway through.
If you dawdle around too long, you'll get a nasty surprise in the from of Baron von Blubba, a pale, red-eyed, invincible version of the standard Monsta enemy who will relentlessly chase Bub and Bob until either he kills them or the player finishes the stage. And there can be up to two of them. Fortunately, if there are two of them, they're designed so that they won't gang up on one player; one Baron will chase down Bub, the other will chase down Bob.
Bubble Memories features arguably one of freakiest villains: Super Dark Great Dragon. He looks just as cute◊ as the protagonists... at first. However, whenever he opens his mouth, you get to see it in full detail and, if that's not enough, his deranged facial expression are far more detailed than they should be for a game with cute characters, making him clash a lot with the game's tone, which only accentuates his scary factor. Witness it with this sprite sheet (WARNING: the sprite sheet contains spoilers).
Porting Disaster: Most of the non-arcade versions were not well-received. The port-bashing section of the first game's Wikipedia article vastly outsized anything else for a while.
Incineration deaths in the arcade are only otherwise seen in ports on any of the Game Boys and the DS, and although the original GB version kept the style of the arcade sprites during incineration, over half its frames are cut out resulting in a quicker and choppy animation. The GBC game "Classic Bubble Bobble", which generally took the character sprites from Part 2/Junior, uses a wholly different and jarring incineration animation.
The squish-yourself-against-bubbles animations are implemented (fully but poorly) only in the Game Boy Advance and DS ports of the original.
In the GBA/DS ports, deaths did not match the arcade implementations. In the port, you freeze in midair when you start spinning out instead of just before you poof away into magic dust. Also, the standing-non-dead sprite frame is used, followed by the sitting-down-dead sprite frame only when your character spins out.
The PC port by NovaLogic is notable for having a serious bug where if the PC is faster than 486DX-33MHz, the game starts to slow down, and the faster the CPU is, the slower the game runs. The bug starts rearing its ugly head if you have a 486DX2-66 or faster. This actually required a fan-made patch to fix. Also, as mentioned under Guide Dang It!, the port made use of switches to enable AdLib or PCjr audio, defaulting to PC Speaker if no switch is present. Other games of the era autodetects the available sound options, or use a config.exe program. And the switches are only mentioned in the manual- if you got the game second hand without the manual, and you didn't know the switches, you're stuck with PC Speaker audio.
Replacement Scrappy: For the DS, we have Robolun and Lovelun (a just-as-defenseless robot, and a pink unknown-gender bubble dragon, respectively), and a cousin (red male bubble dragon) named Bubu. They replace Kululun and Cororon, Bubblun and Bobblun's partners who are generally well-liked.
Level 57 of the NES version of the first game (starts at 1:19), with a single Monsta and 4 Space Invaders shooting beams at you from the top of the screen with no platforms to reach them. You have to jump on columns of bubbles to get up, but it isn't always safe since the beams' patterns keep changing, and you need a lot of bubbles in single-player to get up there.
Level 96 on the NES version is impossible to complete without dying at least twice.
Level 99 is also guaranteed to cause some headaches!
The Level 99 in the NES/VC version is even worse. Players are suddenly required to get a crystal ball so they can go through a secret path and get a good ending. And items will disappear after a while.
And Level 35 is pretty much the end of the game to anybody who can't figure out the bubble jump mechanic, or are not aware of the arcade's Attract Mode in which it shows how to do the bubble jump, making this a Gimmick Level. It doesn't help that this jump is made even harder in the C64 version.
Bubble Bobble's NES manual and Puzzle Bobble/Bust-A-Move's SNES port rely on such names as Bubble Buster for the iconic wind-up toy Zen-chan, Stoner for Mighta, Super Socket for the Invader, Willy Whistle for Drunk, etc. Puzzle Bobble gave the secret room Invincible Minor Minion Rascal the name Rubblen. But then Bubble Bobble Part 2's NES manual gives them wholly different names.
Self-contradictory in the NES/Virtual Console version of the first game in that if one beats the game with the best ending, a screen with both protagonists and all enemies show up credited with their original names.
Although Bub and Bob's short 3-letter names have been products of Woolseyism, they work better.
, with its enemies in an enclosed space.
