PJOrange

Well, with the game as it is, Taito has done a true retro callback to the days of the Blockbuster rental. It's the type of game you'd rent, play a bunch of, then get frustrated and return it the next day.

As it turns out, that other review I linked in mine was wrong - the Bub upgrades aren't a post game thing. No, rather you need to reach level 40 in the Sugar Dungeon before the option is allowed to you.

Here's a video of the producer playing the game (trying his best, I would hope). In case you don't want to watch the whole thing... he dies at level 21. Not a bad level to die at, but it's funny - sometimes when I'm struggling at a challenging part of a game, I say to myself that I wish I could see how the developers would play it. Well, Taito has now literally given us that, and now I have the baseline to be able to say:

This game is fucking bullshit. Sorry Bub.

There's a Japanese comment under that same video that perfectly describes it,

"I was looking for a game where you cycle through strengthening because you can't clear it, but unlocking the enhancement condition as a reward for clearing it feels like a game where the means and the end are reversed."

Here I was thinking that in order to beat the Jelly Castle, I'd need to get better through the dungeons first, which is a perfectly reasonable gameplay curve. But as it turns out, even the super difficult Jelly Castle is probably easier and more worth my time to beat than reaching the ridiculous upgrade requirement that even the developer can't get close to scratching. And as that same comment also points out before the above quote, this is just level two of a five level upgrade system. Granted, you probably just use the gems you collect to finish the upgrades (right???), but still.

Look, maybe you can argue that a super difficult game isn't bad, and that this game doesn't deserve a one-star rating. But then I had a conversation with a commenter under my video advertising my review (and I'm pretty sure they followed this Tumblr so... hi if you're reading this LOL), and it illuminated some other aspects. It turns out this game has a bunch of unused data which indicates more stages and even potentially more characters, and that Bubble Bobble 4 Friends had a disappointing release that was later rounded out with an update (which I didn't know since as I said in the review, I'm new to Bubble Bobble).

When I read that, I thought everything had clicked and suddenly made sense - "oh, the 2026 physical release date in Japan, now I get it" - this global release is a playtest for them by pushing out an early version to territories where the IP is already weak, typo on the box's spine and all. It's basically the Mega64 Play Date video.

But here's the thing, none of that matters. None of that explains why the upgrade requirements are so ridiculously high as to completely ruin any satisfying or even logical game progression. How could any playtester or developer not realize that this is totally ridiculous?

For some insane reason, in the original review I said that I recommended the game to newcomers. Actually, it's the exact opposite, because both the commenter under my video and the Japanese commenter on Bub's Broadcast were able to confirm that this game is one of, if not THE most brutal game in the series.

So we have a brutally, disqualifyingly difficult game with poor design that probably isn't even complete, along with all the other deficiencies I mentioned in the original review. I can't in good conscience recommend that to ANYBODY.

When I said that Taito made a callback to the days of the Blockbuster rental, that wasn't a joke, because that's exactly what this is. I've seen plenty of reviews talk about how bubbly and cha-cha-cha this game is, but I wonder if they really got past the "rental" period - the initial few hours where you feel like the game is probably fun and good. But then when you go and "buy" the game and put some real time and effort in, you come to realize just how utterly broken it is.

I got too caught up in getting featured on Bub's Broadcast and the excitement of a new game that I forgot to sit down with it and get my complete thoughts before writing a review... classic case of bias. Now I've experienced that within myself, I understand it more than I ever did before. And now that I've reminded myself of the modern video game industry's tricks, I'm going to discourage this type of behavior and give the game what it honestly deserves in its current state.

★☆☆☆ Better left to history

If that theorized update comes out, then maybe I'll do yet another update. But unless they do some serious rebalancing, this game is just too fundamentally flawed to really be worth anybody's time.