Trying to even INSTALL SDLMame to play this thing was one of the scariest things I've ever done in my life. It felt like at any moment, a random red screen would show up and lock my screen and force me to put in my credit card information to free my computer. Doing all sorts of kooky terminal stuff and downloading stuff off websites that look like they haven't been updated since dial-up internet was phased out terrifies me. Call me schizophrenic or whatever, but I really don't trust sites like that. It's like entering an Ancient Egyptian tomb; you don't FUCK with historical sites like that, and this is just the internet equivalent of that.

With that out of the way, let's actually talk about the game. It's classic Bust-A-Move, line up 3 bubbles of a kind and they pop, you know the deal. If you've been keeping up with my past few reviews, I've been on a quest to find one that is colorblind-friendly. This one, unfortunately, is not it. However, it does have a bunch of stuff to (kinda) make up for it though!

First things first, this is AZUMANGA DAIOH, possibly one of the most iconic slice-of-life anime to ever come out. That alone gives this game a full star; the characters and voices you know and love are a million times more charming to me than the Bubble Bobble dinosaur, and you can pretty much choose any member of the main cast to play as! Sorry Kaorin, Nyamo, and Yukari, you're not "main cast" enough for this game.

The menus are in Japanese, so it was a little hard to traverse, but I found three kinds of gamemodes.
The first mode is a classic singleplayer arcade mode where you're given a bunch of levels to clear. It's pretty self-explanatory, so I don't have a lot to say except for the fact that this game loves to block your view with pop-ups of the characters showing up whenever you chain pops? It's kind of annoying after the charm wears off.
The second mode is a classic versus mode, and this one is pretty much what you expect. You're pitted against another character and you have to chain pops in order to send bubbles at their side of the screen, think of it kind of like throwing Garbage Puyo at your opponent in Puyo Puyo. It's kind of neat, I guess, but Kagura kept kicking my ass so I didn't really get too far when I was playing this.
The third mode is probably the most interesting one; it's a co-op game with an expanded screen! Now THAT is a novel idea. Unfortunately I didn't have any friends to play this with, but the fact that it's there is nice. Co-op puzzle games are always a joy. when they're not impossible to play, obvi

All-in-all, definitely a memorable experience for me, even if I really couldn't play it well. If you're NOT colorblind and you like Azumanga Daioh and don't mind skulking through eerie old websites, this should be right up your alley.

Colorblindness Rating: F-
It's really bad. This game doesn't use the typical pixel bubbles that Bust-A-Move loves to use; instead, it uses it's own set of bubbles that are ridiculously hard to tell apart. Trying to distinguish yellow, green, and orange apart from each other in this game is a HERCULEAN task, especially since orange and green have a very similar character inside of their bubbles.

The saga to find a colorblind-friendly Bust-A-Move game continues.