Let’s back up a second and talk about the game’s characters and their conversion from shmup to platformer. You even start to get some Metroid vibes - well, in terms of progression, not in terms of Metroid’s actual vibes - as stages become more maze-like, more enclosed, and secrets need to be unlocked by way of experimental blasting and punching your way through walls instead of through flying into the stratosphere.Ĭombine all that with TwinBee’s own characters and style, the idea that hidden keys open up additional exits which unlock additional pathways in previously played levels, and a more customized path through the game world, and you’ve got yourself a platformer that isn’t much like anything else out there, even if it so clearly pulled from everything around it. (you can jump on enemies’ heads to defeat them), Rocket Knight Adventures (the chaotic flying and charged beam weaponry), and even the original Sonic the Hedgehog (multiple pathway level design that works both horizontally and vertically, the speed to ensure you can get to your exit in a hurry if you want to play it that way, and a system where after taking damage you can briefly try to collect your lost upgrades again like you would rings in Sonic). It pulls clear influence and feel from a number of other platforming or action franchises, like Super Mario Bros. Largely, though, Rainbow Bell Adventures isn’t like any one thing, outside of itself.
In fact, you can sense a little bit of their Rocket Knight Adventures in Rainbow Bell Adventures, in the sense that you can fly around in eight directions at high speeds, and not necessarily while fully in control of where you’ll end up, either. TwinBee might have been developed as a shmup half-a-dozen times before Rainbow Bell Adventures changed up the franchise’s genre, but Konami was no stranger to the side-scrolling platformer.
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You’re going to have to download this to play it either way, so make the right call and go with the patched Japanese edition.
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Oh, and you have to use a password system in order to save your progress, whereas Japan’s version has an autosaving battery backup. You complete the levels in a specific order, so if you get stuck, you’re stuck. Whereas the Japanese version of Rainbow Bell Adventures is structured around the idea of being able to unlock new levels to play by choosing alternative level exits, and therefore being able to work your way around the world map how you would like to and with the ability to pause on any stage you’re stuck on and work on another in the meantime, the European version is more linear. You don’t want to play that version, though: the English-patched Japanese original is the way to go, as there were significant changes made to the game’s structure for its European release, and as referenced before, the story bits were thrown out the window in its conversion from Japanese. Rainbow Bell Adventures never received a North American release, which is part of how I hadn’t played it until recently, but there is an English version floating around out there since it did end up the SNES in Europe. They didn’t just make Gradius and thrive off of that, but even made a cute-em-up parody of it called Parodius that has its own success and following! TwinBee is certainly on the cute-em-up side of things, visually, but being cute doesn’t mean it’s easy or simplistic. That is not to say that even these reduced-in-scope outings aren’t fun or anything like that, because they are: Konami, at its peak, was an incredible source of shmups, both vertical and horizontal, able to nail mechanics, feel, and sound seemingly with ease. It’s a little tougher to do a recurring and fleshed out cast of characters if you reduce them all to just another ship in a shoot-em-up, is all, and that’s how Konami tended to treat the localized versions of TwinBee. Meanwhile, the North American (and European) versions of TwinBee games would often remove any dialogue or story bits, leaving you with just the gameplay.
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Have you ever played a TwinBee game? You can certainly be forgiven if not, since Konami didn’t always support the series in North America, and much of its popularity in Japan comes not just from the games, but from its expansion into other media, like anime. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link. This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before - of which there are still many despite my habits - and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice.