BombermanBoard

Plasma Bomber · #2 Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2017 1:20 pm

I and other members could write entire articles regarding this issue. Most of the time it was things like an altered title, things being renamed or mistranslated. Other times, a whole lot of in-game content got tweaked for the western release.

You can find a lot of documented regional differences on Ragey's site. Not all of them, but more than you would likely find elsewhere.

I guess to make this post a little less of a "there's way too much for me to jot down in this thread" sort of thing, I can talk about Super Bomberman 3.

In the game manual's story, in the Japanese version, all that is basically stated through the story manga is that Professor Bagura/Bugler appears, revives the 5 Bad Bombers, and sends them out to capture the Mother Computer Chips in order to conquer Bomber Nebula as the beginning of his plan for universal conquest.

The European manual is... not so accurate to this. It explicitly states that Professor Bugler created the 5 Bad Bombers, which is not confirmed until much later in the series, and introduces the concept that the five planets were under control of a certain "United Planet Federation" and that the Mother Computers kept peace in the galaxy. Absolutely none of this appears in the Japanese sources, including the lengthy guidebook.

All five Normal Game worlds were renamed, save for the sixth, Battleship. Surprisingly, an effort was made to transliterate the boss's names, though the first three bosses were given rather messy English versions (Bakeron became Bakkelon, Doggan became Dokgun, and Gamepuku became Gammebook... probably would have been better to translate the meanings and come up with new names).

In the Battle Game, the PK Bomber mode became Soccer Bomber in the west. Every single battle map was renamed. Surprisingly, Bomber Chun and Bomber Kid were properly translated here (as opposed to the Party Edition release, which redubbed them Bomber Chen and Bomber the Kid), though Bomber Uhho was given the strange transliteration of Bomber Uhoo.

Some items were oddly renamed. For the sake of brevity, the strangest renames were Rubber Bomb becoming Slime Bomb, and Pierce Bomb becoming Super Bomb, as well as both "Pass" items being named "Passer", possibly as a misunderstanding.

With that out of the way, in the actual game, the main changes that I'm aware of, outside of translation, were in the Battle Game selection. You can see them here. Amusingly, though they corrected the spelling of "Kenya", they still left its flag in South America...