Recently i've been thinking about how a pacifist challenge would go on bomberman games, while most of them need you to kill all enemies to proceed a stage there is a few who only require you to break the cores, like the one i played for this challenge which is super bomberman 3. You still need to kill bosses and core walkers (enemies that have a core with them) but aside from those anything can be spared so the challenge IS possible, however the more i played the more i realised how hard things get in later stages, as it turns out avoiding accidental deaths is pretty tough when theres 6 enemies on screen that often track your position and sometimes shoot things that can force your bomb to blow up, even if you avoid killing them you can end up getting cornered which is just as bad.

I played through most of super bomberman 3 with save states and i think that clearing the whole game this way is possible, however i genuinely doubt someone could do a full run with no save states, but if they wanted to... then here is some info that i've gathered on my attempts:

1- Most things that are good in a normal playthrough are still good here, time bomb is still the best item, pink louie is still strong, the one major difference is that fire up items felt like a detriment, the higher range made it easier to kill enemies accidentally so at some point i started avoiding them altogether and just played with the minimum range for the entire run.

2- A lot of enemies have a specific behavior that you can (sometimes) take advantage of and this is crucial for surviving, some enemies only walk straight lines, other enemies track you, some hide as blocks etc. Each of them has a specific behavior and knowing how they work is very important, but the biggest thing to keep in mind is that most enemies can't kill you if you're standing on a bomb/block, so if you're cornered you can do "bomb stalls" where you place a bomb and stay on that tile until the enemy goes away. Another tactic is "luring" where if the enemy tracks your position you lure it to one side of the area and kick bombs at the other side to avoid accidental deaths.

3- Layout RNG is a thing and you'll have to deal with it, sometimes enemies spawn completely trapped and you can leave them there forever which makes your life much easier, but sometimes the opposite happens and then you have to play a harder version of the stage.

4- Pink louie is still OP. Seriously, get the pink louie it helps the run so much.


And that's about it, i think the challenge is interesting and might be worth a try but a real run with no save states is probably too much, the final world in specific is just hell with the enemies breaking blocks, going through blocks, tracking your position all the time and then the stage hazards on top of that.

Another thing is that you could try this challenge in another game, i went with super bomberman 3 because it's easy to emulate but it can probably be done in 94 and saturn bomberman as well.

If anyone is interested i have a few videos of individual stage clears on a playlist here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLebTBkam6CME&si=NPlnFo-OgyqL2qGT

Not gonna lie, a pacifist challenge in the 2D games sounds nightmarish, but then I kinda suck, so there's that.

I've been thinking though about a "minimum bomb" challenge for the 3D games. Like beating the games while using as few bombs as possible. The rules would be something like:

Placing a bomb or creating one counts as a use. Kicking or picking up an already-existing bomb does not.

ACE (arbitrary code execution) is not allowed. Other exploits like glitches are fair game.

If going for a 100% completion, 100% means all stages finished and all collectibles obtained.

That's honestly about it. I think it could be a fun challenge for anyone who wants to try.

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Bomberman for Smash!