Video Game / TwinBee

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TwinBee is a long-running Cute 'em Up series by Konami, makers of Gradius. It's a much more light-hearted top-down entry into the genre, with the main ships being sentient beings with arms and legs and fighting enemies like watermelon slices and ladybugs.

In its original format, only one of the games managed to be released in North America — Moero TwinBee: Cinamon Hakasei wo Sukue became Stinger upon translation. Unfortunately, that one is widely considered to be the weakest in the series, which resulted in none of the games getting exported for a long time. Much to the United States' detriment, of course, as later games managed to make some great improvements to the basic setup (including a Life Meter and a plot).

However, the series is finally starting to see the light of day internationally: Konami first released the original game as Rainbow Bell as a part of their Konami Arcade Classics collection for the Nintendo DS and some of the games are starting to appear for purchase on download services for each console. Additionally, a new installment, titled Twin Bee Loop!: The Mystery of the Planet of Light and Darkness!! was announced in 2022.

Here's a list of games in the series.

• TwinBee (Arcade/Famicom/MSX, included in Konami Classics Series: Arcade Hits for the DS as Rainbow Bell)
• Moero TwinBee (Famicom, released as Stinger in North America)
• TwinBee 3 (Famicom)
• TwinBee Da!! (Game Boy, released as Pop'n TwinBee in Europe)
• Detana!! TwinBee (Arcade/X68000/PC Engine, had an export arcade release titled Bells & Whistles)
• Pop'n TwinBee (Super Famicom/European SNES)
• TwinBee Rainbow Bell Adventure (Super Famicom/European SNES)
• TwinBee Taisen Puzzle Dama (PlayStation)
• TwinBee Yahho! (Arcade)
• Detana!! TwinBee Yahho! Deluxe Pack (PlayStation/Saturn)
• TwinBee RPG (PlayStation)
• TwinBee Portable (PSP)
• TwinBee (3D Classics; based on the Famicom version)
• Arcade Archives: Bells & Whistles (Nintendo Switch)

There was also a radio drama version named TwinBee Paradise which aired following Pop'n TwinBee, which was popular enough in Japan to last three seasons and a five-episode OVA series.

Has an Awesome Music page.

This series has examples of:

• Badass Adorable: All the ships are adorable and they can kick some butt.
• Border-Occupying Decorations: The 3D Classics release fills leftover space thanks to the 3DS's larger screen ratio with a red curtain.
• Brainy Baby: Mint. He's not able to speak with anything other than blabbles yet, though, so his ship Gwinbee has to translate for the other characters so they can understand the useful advice and comments he gives.
• Brought to You by the Letter "S": Played with. The letters on Light and Pastel's shirts stand for the ships they pilot: TwinBee, and WinBee. Of course, since the pilots didn't have names originally, naturally people just called them TwinBee and WinBee after the ships.
• The Cameo:
  • In the anime, various other Konami characters appear as judges in the beauty pageant.
  • TwinBee first appeared as a cameo in the MSX version of Gradius. This will become the setting for its later reappearance in the Parodius series.
  • TwinBee, WinBee, and GwinBee make a cameo appearance in Otomedius Gorgeous.
  • In the PlayStation and Sega Saturn versions of Snatcher, Light and Pastel appear as clients at the Outer Heaven nightclub among other Konami characters.
  • One of the games in the BishiBashi series has Light and Pastel as playable characters.
  • In Ganbare Goemon 2: Kiteretsu Shōgun Magginesu, Pastel makes an appearance as an NPC in a house at the village which is visited at night.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Dr. Warumon.
• Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Madoka, oh so much. Her grandfather Dr. Mardock/Murdoch counts too, but is a milder case.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The bells and which power-up they grant. Similarly, each of the Bees has their own color.
• Combination Attack: In two-player mode, there are two different ones — one if the players line up horizontally, and one if they line up vertically.
• Cool Ship: TwinBee, WinBee, and GwinBee. They're sentient, and they regularly fight by punching things.
• Cute 'em Up: May be the Trope Maker, along with Sega's Fantasy Zone.
• Denser and Wackier: Upon the introduction of Light and Pastel as pilots, more comedic gags and sillier (than usual) plots were introduced along with their Dr. Wily Expy villain, Dr. Warumon.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The first game's main pilots are named Annamon and Donnamon, who pilot the TwinBee and WinBee respectively. The second game's, Moero TwinBee, main pilots are Squash who pilots TwinBee, Whip who pilots WinBee, and Mellow who pilots GwinBee. The third game and the Game Boy game, TwinBee 3 and TwinBee Da!! respectively, have no names for the pilots.
• Early-Bird Cameo: TwinBee first appeared as a cameo in the MSX version of Gradius. This cameo setting later became the basis for TwinBee's reappearance in the Parodius series.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: We're not kidding about the deadly watermelons.
• Evil Counterpart: Dr. Warumon is this to Dr. Cinnamon (Warumon being a portmanteau of warui and "cinnamon").
  • And of course, there's "Nise" (Fake) TwinBee.
• Eyecatch: Starting with Detana! TwinBee, and TwinBee Yahho! has some good ones. Only the PSP version of TwinBee Da! lacks it.
• "Freaky Friday" Flip: Happens to Pastel and an alley cat in one episode of the anime. It even happens to Light and TwinBee in the same episode.
• Genre Shift: Rainbow Bell Adventure is a side-scrolling platformer, while TwinBee RPG is an RPG.
• Ghibli Hills: All over the series, but the first stage of Detana!! Twinbee/Bells And Whistles takes it literally, going all the way to being a reference to Castle in the Sky, meaning that at some points, the pastoral hills give way to mining cities deep within massive chasms.
• Guest Fighter:
  • Pastel is an unlockable playable character in the 1998 Battle Tryst Fighting Game.
  • Pastel is also a playable character in Konami Krazy Racers.
• Hello, [Insert Name Here]: Present in RPG, since the protagonist is supposed to be the player.
• Idol Singer: Pastel aims to become one and be the best of them.
• Inconsistent Spelling: On this very page, "TwinBee" can be spelled as "Twinbee" or even "Twin Bee" (but that one mostly refers to the plane TwinBee is based on).
• Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain: Despite being the Big Bad of most games of the series and being considered as Light and friends' Arch-Enemy, Dr. Warumon falls square in this trope, as his Evil Plans and his Artifacts of Doom get invariably thwarted and destroyed by the heroes, and like Team Rocket, needs to resort to part-time jobs to fund his next line of evil inventions. He's also made fun of very frequently.
• Kid-Appeal Character: Herb Mint.
• Life Meter: In some of the later games in the series.
• Lighter and Softer: TwinBee is basically a lighter and softer version of the dark and edgy Xevious with elements of Gradius thrown into the mix. Instead of dealing with an Alien Invasion, TwinBee instead faces off against a Fantasy Kitchen Sink of dinner-themed or mundane-themed mascot-like enemies straight out of a Sanrio greeting card.
• Lethal Chef: Madoka, regarding cookies. She never gives up at trying to make delicious ones, but each attempt is a failure that either horribly food poisons the unfortunate people who taste them, or make ovens explode. In any other kind of food than that one, however, she's a Supreme Chef.
• Mad Scientist: Dr. Warumon for the evil version, Dr. Mardock for the heroic yet Cloud Cuckoo Lander version.
• Market-Based Title: The few games that were released internationally were sometimes retitled — the second Famicom game was released in America as Stinger, while Europe received TwinBee Da!! and Rainbow Bell Adventure under the Pop'n TwinBee moniker (since the SNES version was the first game in the series released there).
• Named by the Adaptation: Light and Pastel first got their names in the radio drama, which came out after they first appeared in "Detana!!..." .
• Obviously Evil: Dr. Warumon is a textbook example. He has the villainous goatee, the evil monocle, the Ominous Opera Cape, and the smug smile. And of course, his ultimate goal is to Take Over The Whole Universe.
• Pink Girl, Blue Boy: Pastel and Light, and their respective ships.
• P.O.V. Boy, Poster Girl: Light and Pastel are a non-romantic example.
• Princesses Rule: Princess Melora, who's actually the gentle Queen of Planet Mel (the world of TwinBee), yet is called with the "Princess" title.
• The Professor: Dr. Cinnamon.
• Punny Name: The "Waru" in Dr. Warumon's name comes from the Japanese word for "bad". Similarly, the "Nise" in Nise TwinBee means "Fake".
• Ret-Canon: Much of the series' story was fleshed out in the TwinBee Paradise radio drama and then brought back to the game. For example, the pilots of TwinBee and WinBee were originally nameless and were given the names Light and Pastel in the radio drama.
• Rose-Haired Sweetie: Pastel.
• Sapient Ship: All three of the ships are sentient.
• Secret Character:
  • If an MSX TwinBee game cartridge were placed in the second slot while the Gradius cart remained in the first slot, the TwinBee ship should replace Vic Viper and become the main ship.
  • TwinBee is an unlockable aircraft in Airforce Delta Strike if you beat the game with any pilot from 2nd Element.
  • In most of the Parodius series, TwinBee and WinBee end up as playable characters while Shooting Star (the enemy red ship in TwinBee Yahho!) is playable in Sexy Parodius.
• Scenery Porn: The first three games did have little dull scrolling backgrounds, but starting from Bells & Whistles, the lands or the skies you fly over are extremely detailed and beautiful, constantly changing as you go on.
  • The first level of Bells & Whistles really feels like flying over a small, but very wonderful land. You start flying above the forest, and then arrive into a small town: soon you're flying in mountain scapes which have train tracks on them, then you arrive into a large construction site... Just see it for yourself.
  • TwinBee Yahho!, being the pinnacle of the series and thus having the best backgrounds of the series, mixes this with awesome emotional parallax scrolling and voice acting, giving out the feeling that of an 90's action anime episodes. A memorable moment is when TwinBee makes a somersault in the air at the first stage, background changing like if you were on the cockpit.(See at 2:54) It gets much better at the third stage.
• Ship Tease: The ending of TwinBee Yahho! teases the possibility of Ace/Queen Melody.
• Sidelined Protagonist Crossover: It should be noted that TwinBee's and WinBee's pilots Light and Pastel don't appear in the Parodius series in any form except as a visual reference in Jikkyō Oshaberi Parodius: Forever With Me.
• Spotlight-Stealing Squad: Pastel and WinBee, ordinarily the second player, have proven much more popular than Light and TwinBee (the first player), and as such are used as the poster figures of the franchise.
• Suspend Save: 3D Classics: TwinBee lets you Quick Save at any time, but your save is deleted upon loading, meaning you have to start from the beginning if you get a Game Over. However, this can easily be cheesed with the Nintendo 3DS's built-in Save-Data Backup feature.
• Tertiary Sexual Characteristics: Winbee, the female ship, has a cockpit in the shape of a heart (though it also goes into the theme design of the ships).
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: Pastel and Madoka.
• Unlockable Content:
  • In Contra: Returns, TwinBee and WinBee appear collectively as a Pet Spotlight.
  • In VS! Bomberman, Light and Pastel are available as costumes by Bomberman.
  • The Goonies Famicom/NES videogame lets you collect TwinBee as an item for 5,000 points.
  • In Otomedius Gorgeous, you need to beat the game using Madoka in order to unlock the cameo appearance of TwinBee, WinBee, and GwinBee.
  • TwinBee makes an appearance as a secret item in Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, and Castlevania: Harmony of Despair.