A playthrough of Konami's 1994 action-platformer for the Super Nintendo, Pop'n TwinBee: Rainbow Bell Adventures.

The 16-bit era saw a lot of fun spin-off titles from Konami, and one of the least recognized of those titles was their SNES exclusive Pop'n Twinbee: Rainbow Bell Adventures. Not only is the first time that the TwinBee series broke away from its shoot 'em up roots, but it is also yet another game that received an official English translation but was never released in North America. This playthrough is of the PAL version.

If you'd like to see Pop'n Twinbee, the mainline game from the series on the SNES, you can find my playthrough of it here: [ Ссылка ]

Rainbow Bell Adventures' gameplay is a curious mix of what I can only really describe as Sparkster mixed with Sonic the Hedgehog 2. The levels are huge, maze-like stages featuring secret passages, transporter doors, bonus stages, and a near endless stream of collectable items.

Playing as the series' pastel-hued, bipedal spaceships (TwinBee, WinBee, or GwinBee), the primary goal of each of the stages is to find the exit. You collect bells, like Sonic does rings, to get extra lives and to give yourself a buffer against enemy attacks, and when you get hit the bells scatter.

You kill enemies by jumping on them, or by hitting them with special weapons that you gain from picking up different colored bells, just like in the TwinBee shoot 'em ups (remember Stinger on NES?), and you get around the huge areas by rocketing yourself around like Sparkster does in his SNES and Genesis games. You can boost indefinitely once you have the timing down - I thought it was neat that you can eventually fly into space if you go far enough.

Also like Sonic 2, the game allows for simultaneous 2-player player, though it's way too difficult to try to keep both characters on-screen at the same time.

The gameplay feels great. I'm not generally a fan of this sort of "maze platformer," but this one is pulled off well. There are tons of secrets to find, and each stages has quite a few viable routes you can take to get to the end.

Unfortunately, the English version is something of a botched job. The battery-backed save system was replaced with passwords, most of the cutscenes were completely removed, stages are now cleared in a pre-determined order, and all of the alternate endings were cut. Since the impetus for finding all of the hidden stuff is lost without those endings (and hardly worthwhile since you can no longer save your progress), the game's replayability suffers quite a bit in its localized form.

It's neutered enough that much of the game leaves you scratching your head wondering as to what the point is of having all this content with no apparent purpose. I can only imagine the PAL version was an attempt at shoving a product out the door with the cheapest way possible - by cutting the battery and most of the scenes that would've required a translation, they certainly eased the heavy lifting on the localization. It's just too bad that those choices undermined so much of what made the game special to begin with. I have to say, I was actually a bit shocked at how little respect they showed for their own work here.

The gameplay mechanics are classic Konami - the controls are tight, the difficulty is stiff without being frustrating, and the stages are well designed. The sprite-work is beautiful, the music is solid, the almost-Mega Man intro is cool, and everything smacks of personality. It would been a lot more worthwhile for English-speakers, however, had Konami not eviscerated it with a rusty chainsaw just to save a few pennies. Take the "win" out of "TwinBee" and what's left? T-Bee. Really doesn't sound very appealing, does it? Almost like it's just cheap and hollow imitation. Funny how that works out.

Tsk, tsk, Konami. What a douchebag move.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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