Hebereke's Popoon

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Hebereke's Popoon
"Chaaarge!" - Hebe
Protagonist(s): Hebe Oh-Chan Sukezaemon Jennifer Genre(s): Puzzle Platform(s): Super Nintendo Entertainment System Arcade Release Date: SNES December 22, 1993 (Japan) 1994 (Europe) Arcade June 1994 (Japan) Developer(s): Falcon (SNES) Success, Sunsoft and KID (Arcade) Publisher(s): Sunsoft Country: Japan Series: Hebereke Predecessor: Ufouria: The Saga Successor: Hebereke's Popoitto (de facto) Amazing Hebereke (de jure)

Hebereke's Popoon (へべれけのぽぷーん, Hebereke no Popūn) is a 1993 two-player puzzle video game developed and published by Sunsoft. The game was first released for the Super Famicom in 1993 in Japan, and the SNES in Europe one year later, and was also ported to the arcades in 1994 in Japan only. It is the second game in the Hebereke series. Hebereke means drunk or untrustworthy, while Popoon is an onomatopoeia for the sound made by the game pieces when they explode.

Why It Deserves A "Shōri!"

1. Although the game seems to look like a Puyo Puyo clone at first glance, the formula is different, in which the Popoons can explode by aligning three of them either linearly, or diagonally, or aligning one linearly with a Poroporo.
2. The soundtrack for the game is amazing. It literally sounds like it should belong in a dance party.
3. For a SNES game, the graphics are very well made, especially with the anti-aliasing, therefore taking advantage of the limited color palette.
4. The VS Mode, besides allowing you to choose a character, also allows you to choose the difficulty, which adds significantly more challenge to the gameplay. Heck, you can even play the VS Mode with only one player and therefore battle against the CPU.
   1. And speaking of VS Mode, in game you can even sometimes trigger abilities if you're skilled enough, which makes said mode extra fun.
5. Speaking of before, you can also choose the difficulty in story mode, which can help unexperienced players.
6. There's even a tournament mode. You can choose up to eight players, and two of each has its own controllers, so you can invite others in order to continue.
7. As per Hebereke standards, the character designs and even their voices tend to be very cute. Especially Hebe, Oh-Chan and Pen-Chan.
8. The voice clips, especially the "Sansofuto" and "Hebereke no Popūn" voices, sound very high-quality for a SNES games, and to be fair, there's a lot of voice clips in this game, which is very impressive given hardware limitations.
9. An arcade version exists, and there, you can choose the character you want to play as in story mode. It even assigns a blue-tinted color palette to the fake Hebe, which can remove confusion for either unexperienced or colorblind players. Heck, there's even cutscenes, instead of the typical speech bubbles.
10. Overall, a very well-executed idea for a puzzle game based on one of Sunsoft's mascots, and would pave the way for more Hebereke spin-offs throughout the '90s.

"Degyopī" Qualities

1. The voice clips in the game tend to be very annoying easily. And let's not talk about some of the game's songs, especially the infamous "character select" theme, although luckily there's a patch for it.
2. The arcade version's graphics overall tend to be more simplified than the SNES version. It also removed the VS Mode, and overall has a mediocre soundtrack.
3. As stated in WIDAS#6, the tournament mode requieres players to take turns, similar to early Super Mario titles, and therefore missed the opportunity to use the Super Multitap, which was already out by the time this game released.
4. The aforementioned arcade version is also extremely rare to find, and was only sold as a conversion kit for Shanghai III, and not as a dedicated cabinet, which turns off many arcades who wanted for example to have this game separately.
5. Even with the lowest difficulty settings, the game can still be somewhat difficult, even more so with the Poroporos falling constantly.
6. Don't get us started on its rather mediocre sequel.

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Trivia

• Two deleted tracks from the SNES version were included on the Takusan Hebereke CD: "Wobbling Pen-Chan" and "Bobodori's Forest". In the arcade version, both tracks are present, but only the latter is used.
  • Similarly, the song "I Am Mister Unyon", as well as a long and low-quality voice clip of Hebe, are present in the SNES version, but unused.
• Unlike the mainline Hebereke game, which was brought over to PAL regions as Ufouria: The Saga, this one has no character design changes whatsoever.
• Unlike the Japanese version, the European version has an exclusive region lockout screen. Interestingly, the word "designed" in that screen is misspelled as "desigined".
• A US prototype was rumored to exist and an alleged ROM surfaced at one point, which turned out to be a region-unlocked ROM hack of the European version.
• This is the first Hebereke game to have a dedicated sound test, as well as the first one to be released on the SNES and on arcades.

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