jump to notes

Bomberman 2 DS brief level-by-level notes

Notes intro

These notes are based on Rife's Any% world record route (and his notes), with some tweaks and improvements. Some levels are lacking notes/parts that might benefit from them, especially in the Attack department; I need to do another test run to fix these. This webpage features some recent improvements to the route (October 2025). These include:

• Delaying B-10 until after C-10, and using the same part set for both of those levels, allowing the part set from B-9 to continue into C-1 and saving a couple equip menus
• Significantly altering some lategame levels, including using remote controlled bombs for F7, G3, G4, G5, and G6, and using regular throw instead of long throw for F8, mostly to counteract some stat sacrifices that were made in Rife's route (although to be fair some of my tweaks made them worse)

I have considered using the part file function to save time equipping frequently used part sets, but I don't think there are any sets that are re-equipped often enough throughout an Any% run (they slowly evolve, and often will have minor changes to boost a stat or two)

Regarding language/region

The "Mission Report" screen at the end of each level (or after dying) takes a different amount of time in each language, because the title at the top of the screen must be fully printed out before the information cards appear. I couldn't find any other points in the run where there is "scrolling" text or other impact from the game's language, so I measured the length of this text in all six available languages and drew conclusions from there. English is in the slower-middle ground; French is the slowest; German is the fastest; and Japanese is only slower than German by one frame per level/death. (Note that language does not matter for individual level runs.)

The conclusion: if you want to save about 15 seconds, run the game in Japanese/German (whichever is more convenient, although Japanese is about a second slower). To that end, here is a table of zone names in English/Japanese/German (although I would recommend learning the zones by their menu position since the level names use letters instead of the zone name):

SpeedGuidesLive

The rest of this page below this section is a web version of the level notes. There is also an XML/markdown version for use with the markdown fork of the SpeedGuidesLive component for LiveSplit (using these splits), which has been updated with the 2025 improvements. I should keep it up to date if any further changes to my route are made.

The benefit of using SGL is that once you finish each level, you can view the notes for the upcoming level in isolation, with no need to focus on one section of many, or gradually scroll through a long document. I have used it for several speedgames, and find it very helpful, which is why I am sharing it here.

Notes