Yuki, the heroine of Pop Breaker, guides a tank named Diana (or “Daiana” as it appears in the game) through overhead stages of drones and turrets and other bullet-spewing hazards. Both tank and pilot are seemingly drawn from the pages of Masamune Shirow’s Dominion Tank Police, with Yuki resembling Leona quite a bit and Diana resembling Bonaparte only a little. The game adds some small strategy when you select just where to mount Diana’s cannon. It can be stuck in the middle or placed on either side, for that Bonaparte look, and it plays a big role in how you’ll face the game’s challenges.
It helps to consider Pop Breaker a puzzle game above all else. The tank scoots along gradually and fires slowly, and from the first stage it’s apparent that strategy is the only way forward. You’re even given the chance to look over an entire level before starting (and again by pausing), and this lets you figure out how to use the barriers and power-ups and bullet-bouncing mirrors to your advantage. The game doesn’t run all that smoothly and Diana is an uncommonly large target, taking up a good chunk of the screen and having armor so thin that just one shot sends it up in flames. Even so, that brings a certain satisfaction when you finish a level.
Beating each stage also brings up an intermission screen, one that serves no apparent purpose other than to show Yuki chilling in the cockpit of the tank. No, the player’s score isn’t tabulated here; that happens on another screen. The intermission is just there to exhibit an impressive pixel portrait of a woman and her workplace.
Yet that adds something. In Pop Breaker’s scrap of storyline Yuki is piloting Diana through the rigorous tests for a special-forces police unit, and the intermission is a reminder that it’s all just a game, that Yuki’s taking it one stage at a time and allowing herself a cocksure moment with each small triumph. Games of this vintage often skip the details, especially when they’re cramming a lot into a handheld’s screen, but Pop Breaker wants to make sure it evokes the feel of Dominion Tank Police and the surrounding school of anime heroines and bulky vehicles. We can find plenty of games that combine those two elements today, but they’re rarely done in that casual, fluffy-haired 1980s style that so clearly influenced Pop Breaker.
Also appreciated is the game-over screen, where we see a green-haired coworker greeting a slightly embarrassed Yuki with a banner that reads "Game Over" in hiragana. You know, just to rub it in. There’s no smoldering wreckage of bitter defeat to be seen, since it's just an entrance exam. Maybe that’s why Diana is so fragile and enemy fire so damaging: this academy only accepts perfect scores.
The game’s ending is also short and comforting. Yuki passes the course and gets her official uniform, now resembling Dominon’s Leona even more, and poses triumphantly before a Diana that now looks like a low-slung Metal Gear mech. Pop Breaker avoids any soberingly Pyrrhic twist or a DonPachi-level revelation that you were fighting and killing your fellow soldiers the whole time. Nope, none of that. It just shows another cheerful picture.
So I salute Pop Breaker, a sluggish but generally enjoyable action-puzzle game with just enough touches to evoke a charming and largely dormant style of anime and manga style. It’s a neat little find among Microcabin’s varied offerings, and it deserves to be remembered now that it’s forced to share search engine results with an identically named smartphone puzzle game.
By the way, actual Pop Breaker cartridges are curious in that they only work on Japanese Game Gears—not by design like certain Mega Drive games, but because of a bug. That’s an obstacle for anyone who wants to play the game in its only officially released form, but Pop Breaker is all about facing obstacles and taking them in stride.
