BombermanBoard

Duke Serkol · #1 Posted: Thu Apr 10, 2008 9:35 am

Okay I recently got Bomberman Land Wii and, well, it's certainly quite different from the DS one.
In the DS game you could travel freely betwen zones and play games as much as you wanted with no penalties for failing.

None of that holds true in this game. In Bomberman Land Wii you take part in an actual competition, or tournament if you will. You will have to clear every zone in a set order (zones are even divided in sections that open and close arbitrarily) and once you move past a zone, you won't be able to go back in it unless you get demoted.
Before entering a zone you are allowed to practice the new minigames you'll encounter in it... and you want to do that, because when you venture in, you will be given a number of tokens, which you spend to play the minigames, and once those are spent, the results will be in.
You cannot even save while you are in a zone spending your tokens, which means you really need to get a series of victories. If you don't, if you spend all your tokens without getting enough A ranks in the minigames (ranks go from A to E) you are better off hitting reset and starting over. But on a positive note, you don't play all games in a zone in one sitting (remember I mentioned sections opening and closing arbitrarily?) and once you've spent your current tokens you are allowed to save before getting more and trying other minigames. What's more, you have 20 save positions, so you can save without overwirting.
Interestingly, multiplayer games (which in single player mode are, of course, played against comp controlled characters) work in a different way: you don't get points based on rank (you don't get ranked at all) you simply get points for each opponenet you challenge and defeat (though THEY have ranks, and the higher their rank the more points you get).
And this may actually be the biggest problem of the game: there seem to be only 10 multiplayer minigames (5 for two players 5 for four players). What kind of party game has so few?

Anyway, as you can imagine these changes in the basic flow of the game make it very different from Bomberman Land Touch, and I would say quite a bit more challenging (and realistic? I mean, in Touch you could lose to one of your rivals fifty times, then you win once and that's it, you're the winner. Doesn't work like that here).
Hopefully it won't be getting so hard that obtaining the series of victories necessary to get first rank becomes near impossible.
Oh and yes, as I mentioned above, you can get demoted. Depending on your score you can either be promoted to the next zone, held in the current one or be demoted to the previous one. I dunno what sense that can possibly make... I'd just not save and start over (especially since, as I said, there's 20 save positions so you can keep several saves and start back from wherever you want).

I still have to properly try out the battle mode, but it seems interesting enough (although without much variety in terms of items), especially the new Wii controls (they are optional, fear not).