The SNES Classic Mk. II: Episode XXV: End of the Rainbow

The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as those in the first SNES Classic, but have equally stood the test of time. The rules, list of games considered so far, and links to previous episodes can all be found at The SNES Classic Mk II Intro and Contents.

Episode XXV: End of the Rainbow

The Candidate: Konami's Pop'n TwinBee: Rainbow Bell Adventures

At first blush this seems like Mento's back on his pastel-colored anime platformer bullshit again. However, Pop'n TwinBee: Rainbow Bell Adventures has a few notable quirks in addition to being a pretty rad game, and has since become one of those bizarre cautionary tales about the perils of shoddy localizations. To begin with, we should probably address the fact that Pop'n TwinBee is famously Konami's answer to Sega's Fantasy Zone (in terms of cutesy visuals) and Namco's Xevious (in terms of gameplay): a saccharine shoot 'em up franchise starring a bunch of kids in spherical mechs who fly across the skies shooting down equally adorable monsters and collecting multi-colored bells as power-ups. What's perhaps odder still is that this sole platformer outing for the series was heavily influenced by Konami's Rocket Knight Adventures, which at the time only had the one Genesis game to its name. As with Rocket Knight Adventures, players can charge up a rocket boost and effectively fly around the map in one of eight fixed directions, ricocheting off walls until the gauge runs out.

The second unusual thing about Rainbow Bell Adventures is that, while it didn't have a North American localization, it did receive one for Europe. However, the PAL version of the game was monumentally compromised: not only did it scrub all of the game's incidental dialogue between levels, but greatly changed the gameplay itself. Y'see, the original Rainbow Bell Adventures also includes on its list of influences Super Mario World; in particular the way that levels would branch off via secret exits, leading to different areas on the world map. RBA's world map resembles a grid with various arrows separating each square, each indicating a different exit. There's multiple paths through the game, though eventually the player must walk them all if they're to defeat every boss in every world and recover all the titular rainbow bells. After this they can enter the final areas of the game and defeat the game's antagonist, the Dr. Wily-esque Dr. Wormwood. Throughout all this the game is tracking various milestones: the number of collectible fairies you've found, the number of exits completed, and the number of warp doors taken (all of which are locked until the player finds the right key and revisits those levels to open them, leading to items and fairies). Depending on their final score they get one of five endings each better than the last. The PAL version of the game does away with almost all of this: instead, the game has been pruned down to a linear series of levels with only one default ending (the worst one) and a password system instead of the original game's auto-saved battery back-up. It's kind of amazing how badly they botched the port job, frankly.

Which brings us back to the chief reason I wanted to cover the game for this feature: I'd actually played the PAL version before way back when I was renting SNES games in the 90s and had only recently learned just how feature-rich the original game was. While the PAL version retained the exploration-heavy and rocket-charged gameplay, by eschewing all the secret exits and collectible-based endings it was but a pale shadow of the true experience. I also didn't realize how much I missed the interstitial dialogue between Light (the male teen who pilots TwinBee, the blue mech), Pastel (the female teen who pilots WinBee, the pink mech), and Mint (the infant who pilots GwinBee, the green mech) and their leader/grandfather Professor Cinnamon: they have some funny convos about Light's destructive tendencies, Pastel's habit of being too reckless, Dr. Wormwood's flagrantly flawed boss robot designs, and one horrifying discussion where it's revealed that Mint's GwinBee wasn't "taking on water" during the aquatic world but was actually full of baby urine.

All this silliness helps to better frame the gameplay too, as it's just as chaotic and unpredictable as the story. Each level is effectively a maze, where the player is given a general map: it shows which direction the exits are and areas of interest like keys and warp doors but none of the level's walls or boundaries. Sometimes levels will wrap around horizontally or vertically, meaning you might have to go backwards, forwards, upwards or downwards to make progress, and picking out the critical path is half the struggle. If you want to find those fairies for the best ending, though, you have to explore every nook and cranny for secret or destructible walls, and come back with the right keys if there's one or more locked warp doors. A great number of levels are simply boss fights, or have some other gimmick: for instance, one has you chased by an invincible, high-speed minion who needs to be outwitted if you're going to reach the end. The ability to fly anywhere in short controlled bursts alleviates some of the challenge of making your way to the exit on foot, but it can be a hindrance just as often, sending you careening into spikes and other hazards instead. It's a bit like Sonic the Hedgehog in that respect: you could move at mach speed towards the exit (if you know the route), but the faster you go the more likely you are to collide with something fatal at high velocity.

It's a game that impressed me a lot in its day, and even more now that I've finally had the chance to check out the intact, unscathed original version with all the trappings that I'd come to love in other games of its type. That it has some remarkably ahead-of-its-time ideas like a world map that tells you if there's still collectibles to be had in any given level, or a way to quickly exit an already completed level if you came back for collectibles, or repurposing the series's bell power-ups as more platformer-friendly boons like a one-hit shield or boots that stick to slippery surfaces, or a choice of protagonists with different strengths (WinBee charges her rockets faster, GwinBee charges his special attack faster, and TwinBee is the all-rounder), all couched in a host of goofy dialogue and that gumball-tinted 16-bit Konami graphical magic.

Let's not count our discs before they're toppled though. What does our in-house introspection engine, the Notorious P.O.G.S., has to say?

• Preservation: Suffice it to say, we'll be judging the original Japanese version of Rainbow Bell Adventures, which has since been translated by the Aeon Genesis group. In that regard, it's aged quite nicely, in part because Konami had style to spare in their pixel-based days but also in the way that Rainbow Bell Adventures casts a wide net in procuring the best ideas from all the platformers worth a damn at the time: Super Mario World's branches and secret exits, Rocket Knight Adventures's verticality and jet-powered traversal, or Sonic the Hedgehog's alacrity and power-ups, to name but a few. 4.
• Originality: It's that age-old question of whether a Frankenstein's monster of ideas from other games that's based on an extant IP could ever be considered truly original, but Rainbow Bell Adventures is novel enough for taking Konami's shoot 'em up series and finding its own germane niche in this new genre, smartly adapting what Konami had learned the year prior with Rocket Knight. I think the map system and the way it branches, plus the emphasis on collectibles as the means to earning the best endings and the myriad ways the game makes backtracking tolerable, raise it above the crowd too. 4.
• Gameplay: Despite some difficulty lurches here and there - there are no checkpoints in levels and some can be kinda long, which makes the few hit points you have and the limited means with which to restore them a hassle - it's an overall stellar game. The rocket-propelled movement can make wide-open areas a breeze, though there's plenty to be gained from taking your time and exploring alternate paths. The power-ups can mitigate a lot of that difficulty, especially the shield (purple) and the long-ranged pistol weapon (blue), and the game is ahead of the curve by eliminating extra lives (you just get bopped back to the world map upon death) and letting you re-select your protagonist for the one best suited for the level at hand: WinBee has the easiest time getting around larger areas, but GwinBee is your guy if a boss fight is up next. This is Konami in their prime and it still rankles that the only version we saw was butchered beyond recognition, derived of its most compelling features. 5.
• Style: This is definitely a "your mileage may vary" case depending on how much brightly-colored eyecandy you can withstand, but as might be expected from 1990s Konami everything is drawn and animated beautifully, with a sharp visual language and UI that tells you everything you need to know while still affording a great deal of levity and lighthearted silliness with its presentation. I particularly like the look of the game's overworld map: each icon is a small representation of that world and its aesthetic, and it's an easy map to navigate with all the arrows and circle icons telling you all you need to know. The bosses are neat, even if they all have a somewhat repetitive look, and the levels are filled with color and detail without ever becoming overwhelming. I really like the music too, which is always a big plus. 4.

Total: 17.

Other Images:

The Nominee: Nintendo's Mario Paint

All right, all right, all right, but hear me out. It would be totally unreasonable to have a mouse-driven, non-game on the next SNES Classic. At the same time, what if it was built with Mario Paint in mind? Consider an age where every modern console has a share button for screenshots and video, and a means to upload one's creations (for Nintendo, that would be Super Mario Maker levels and the expressive drawings of the sadly defunct MiiVerse) for all to see. Ideally, you'd want to make a new Mario Paint that has all those internet tools built in, rather than whatever jury-rigged front-end systems you'd need in place on the SNES Classic Mk. II to take that data from the original SNES ROM and transmit it digitally to the waiting and ever-kind global audience of the world wide web. But what if?

That's largely why I chose Mario Paint here, in lieu of almost any other mouse-driven game on the system. I have to sell you on the idea of including Mario Paint first before I can try any of the others. The SNES saw a number of (not great, admittedly) PC ports with mouse-driven interfaces I could've included in this feature, not least of which Populous, Civilization and Mega-Lo-Mania. It would certainly lend more stock to prior nominees Lemmings, Cannon Fodder and King Arthur's World, none of which fare too well with the basic SNES controller due to the reaction speeds you'd need for the later levels (though conversely I think you'd be just fine with SimCity and its unhurried pace). However, if you're going to include a Nintendo mouse with the new miniature console, you'd also have to include the art & music creation set that mouse (and its hard plastic mousepad) was bundled with.

If you needed a primer on what Mario Paint includes, precisely: It is first and foremost a painting program that lets you use various brushes and other common tools like fills and line tools on a blank canvas or preset backdrop of your choosing. You can also use decal-like stamps - it's where the Wii U's underappreciated MiiVerse stamps came from, as seen in some of the more recent Mario games as collectibles - to create realistic facsimiles of Super Mario World levels. What's more, there's an animation studio where you can link multiple images together in a sequence as well as a music composition tool which can be used to score your animated creations. Finally, there's the stress-eliminating (but, really, compounding) "take a break" mini-game where you use the mouse to swat fast-moving flies as quickly as possible. It's no big shocker that Nintendo would later lift most of Mario Paint's aesthetic for their similarly user content creation-focused Super Mario Maker, including the music, the "working" animations, the "Undo Dog" (it's a pun! And I only got it when he showed up in Super Mario Maker), and a version of that same fly-swatting game.

Mario Paint is, like it or lump it, a part of Nintendo history. A major part, I'd argue. Some have consigned it to the same gimmicky trash fire of peripheral tie-ins as the Super Scope 6 and the obscure installment-based games of the Super Famicom Satellaview, but preserving SNES history in miniature form also means addressing the wild swings it took along the way, for better and for worse.

Talking of better or worse, let's see if the chaos and imagination of the Mario Paint application does anything for the P.O.G.S. system. How will such a delicately-tuned machine react to something that isn't, technically speaking, a video game?

• Preservation: Well, there's no denying that practically every art tool currently available outdoes it in terms of options and utility. But then that was true back in 1992 also, competing with the likes of MS Paint precursor Paintbrush, nascent editions of Adobe Illustrator, and Corel Photo-Paint. Mario Paint's big draw was that it was accessible to kids, sitting in their libraries next to Super Mario Kart and Super Mario World waiting for the day when little Timmy felt like drawing cocks all over Yoshi's head (he's a rascal). I'd argue that's still the case today, because who's going to give their five-year-old a $300 Wacom? (Oh, right, rich people.) 4.
• Originality: I feel like we're getting deep into the "there's nothing in the rules that says a dog can't play football" equivalent here, because how can you argue a painting program isn't an original take on a video game? There were a few other art programs for the SNES, notably Fun 'N Games and ACME Animation Factory, but they didn't have the same pedigree or mastery over the system's capabilities as Nintendo's own R&D studios. They certainly surpassed the NES's best art program: Color a Dinosaur. 4.
• Gameplay: The only thing that qualifies for this category is that fly-swatting game and, ladies and gents, that shit ain't gonna cut it. I mean, it is fun in short bursts - what it was intended for - but not the sort of thing you can play for hours. If the tedium doesn't kill you, the repetitive strain injury in your wrists will. 2.
• Style: You might argue that Mario Paint is only as stylish as the person playing it, since they're the ones creating the art and music. However, Mario Paint has a certain playfulness evident from the title screen - if you click the letters they do things! - and a mixture of catchy tunes and little idiosyncrasies that Super Mario Maker was smart to lift and co-director Hirofumi Matsuoka would put to even better use in the off-kilter WarioWare franchise. It wanted to be an art program that could inspire you to play around and get silly, and that counts for a lot with a burgeoning creative mind (not that it got me anywhere; see last GOTY's stickpeople comics for further proof). 4.

Total: 14.

Other Images:

< Back to Intro and Contents