Technically speaking the box sold by Homebrew Factory just says Yap, but the original game by CeL does have the full subtitle, which is also a lot easier to search for. Bit of a weird name for a hero. I do like his character design though. He’s like something halfway between a farmer and a mechanic, wielding a slingshot that looks like a weapon for a kid half his age, but hey, if it’s the only weapon you have that can burst magic bubbles, it’s what you’re stuck with. More than the slingshot Yap’s real power is his defense mechanic. But more on that in a moment.
Yap and the Enchanted Bubbles is a Pang clone. The game might be better known as Buster Bros. depending on what territory you live in. You might more easily remember Pang as that game where you play the guy that shoots up a harpoon to blow up bubbles, dividing the bigger bubbles into smaller bubbles. Not to give Pang too much credit, since Bubble Buster for the ZX Spectrum had an identical concept. Nor am I trying to give Yap and the Enchanted Bubbles a hard time for being a variation on this kind of arcade game, which surprisingly enough, was never actually popular enough to get a Game Boy port, despite the gameplay being perfectly suited for a mobile platform.
Yap and the Enchanted Bubbles differs from previous iterations of the genre by making use of limited scrolling and colors. The limited scrolling has the effect of making you feel like you’re on the run. Yap’s magical slingshot is quite slow, at least before getting any power-ups, so if you miss your first shot, it might take awhile before you get another chance. And as you wait, you have to dodge the other bubbles. This is where the colors come in. You have to destroy all of one color before you move on to the next one. Consequently, you might be dodging for quite some time trying to get the last tiny bubble of one color before you can move on to the other ones, which only bounce around slightly upon being hit.
These minor changes actually do quite a bit to distinguish Yap and the Enchanted Bubbles from the existing Pang formula, resulting in the bubbles feeling genuinely menacing despite their entirely predictable trajectories. The game includes a defense mechanic (just press B right before getting hit by a bubble) that doesn’t even the scales quite as much as you’d expect since it requires fairly precise timing. Of the sixty stages across six environments, the last one is the most difficult mainly because the use of fire mechanic makes it harder to escape the bubbles, which until that point, was the best way to play the game.
The levels being devoid of any features aside from the bubbles themselves is a welcome simplification of gameplay. I also liked how it affected the worldbuilding, to the limited extent there even is any worldbuilding. The world of Yap and the Enchanted Bubbles feels almost post-apocalyptic (because of the bubbles presumably destroying everything), with Yap and his magic slingshot being a fairly inexplicable last hope. The bubbles are surprisingly effective antagonists, almost mocking with their geometric precision, such that the showdown with the wizard who created all these bubbles at the very end is a letdown by comparison.
While I enjoyed Yap and the Enchanted Bubbles, I should note that the cartridge I received from Broke Studio had a pretty glaring flaw. The save battery didn’t work. Yap and the Enchanted Bubbles doesn’t strictly speaking need a save battery, as it’s perfectly possible to beat the game in a single sitting, but it definitely benefits a lot from being able to put the game down and take a break after a particularly frustrating loss. CeL hints that this game has a Konami Code but I couldn’t get it to work for the sake of rigging a stage select, which is all the game really needed. I should also note that it’s possible the game itself had faulty save functionality rather than the battery, but I can’t really test that without another cartridge.
You must be logged in to post a comment.