 TWINBY was the star of a vertically-scrolling shoot-'em-up series popular in Japan. For example, on the Super Famicom, there was Poppin' Twinbee, a reasonably decent shooter. Then from out of nowhere, the developer Konami decides, hey, what the hell, let's take these Twinbee characters and make a platformer. This was kind of unprecedented. I mean, why go in such a drastically different direction? Well, that's actually an easy answer, because this game is really good. TWINBY Rainbow Bell Adventure or Poppin' Twinbee Rainbow Bell Adventures as its PAL release was titled? It's one of those hugely spacious, wide-open platformers that gives the player a gazillion different weapons, attacks, and abilities and provides vast open space to play around with them. And this game isn't just a gimmick or a pie-in-the-sky idea, it really kind of does play like if a shoot-'em-up were a platformer. You have three characters to choose from, TWINBY, WINBY, and GWINBY. All the standard platforming stuff is here, run to the right, jump on enemies and collect a hundred little bells to get an extra guy, but man alive, there's an endless list of other things you can do, and they come in the form of these colored bells, just like in the shoot-'em-up games. You can punch, and you can charge your punch and use it to break through barriers. You can charge your jump and fly around bouncing off everything just like in Rocket Night Adventures. You can collect a ton of weapons and carry two at a time, one for short range and one for long range. There's those tag-along option things, just like in a shoot-'em-up. There's shields, there's homing missiles, there's invincibility. You can throw a baseball around, sure okay. What are you, Ken Griffey Jr.? TWINBY Rainbow Bellaventure is almost like a sandbox type of game where you can just mess around with the crazy amount of weapons and abilities available to you. That's the main thing I want to get across here, the freedom to just do anything and go anywhere. There's differences between the three playable characters as well. GWINBY is the strong slow type, WINBY is the quicker faster character, and TWINBY is the more balanced between the two. Multiple characters of course means this game is multiplayer, both co-op and versus. Co-op is a little weird, usually in games like this, you have a limited range of motion, and the screen just kind of locks, so you both stay in the same general spot. Here, the camera follows whoever's ahead, and the one behind can just go wherever. There's an arrow on the side of the screen that indicates where they are, and that player can either press select to get the camera on them, or press Y to warp to where the other player is. It works pretty well, all considered. There's also a one-on-one battle mode that's kind of reminiscent of the same sort of thing in Sonic 2. If I had to pick out any flaws in TWINBY Rainbow Bellaventure, the boss fights are kind of blah. The aesthetics between levels aren't distinct enough, so the game kind of runs together as one massive level after a while, and the PAL cartridge doesn't have a battery save, just a password system. Also, for all the freedom this game offers, sometimes you're prone to flail out of control, especially with the jump boost. You careen into an enemy or obstacle more often than not, but the strength far outweigh the weaknesses though. Like I said, this is as close to a sandbox platformer as you can get on the SNES or the Super Famicom, and as close as you can get to a shoot-em-up platformer too, if that makes any sense. So yeah, TWINBY Rainbow Bellaventure is right up there with Doremi Fantasy as one of the best 16-bit games never to be released in North America, and it's still not over here either. It's only on the Wii U Virtual Console in Europe. Still, this is a great English-friendly Super Famicom cartridge if you can find it.