Completing these two lead to the final boss, Chaostikhan (the one responsible for stealing color from the worlds, and supposedly the mastermind behind the previous game's villains) and the true ending.

[3] Unlike many other games in the series, Parasol Stars was never released to arcades[4] - it was originally developed for the NEC PC Engine, and later converted to a number of other home systems.

Parasol Stars was misreported as being the third coin-op in the Bubble Bobble series by many magazines at the time,[5] and there are rumours about prototypes for an arcade version.

The Amiga, Atari ST, NES, and Game Boy versions were produced by Ocean Software and published exclusively in Europe in 1992.

[9] The compilation release Bubble Bobble featuring Rainbow Islands for the Sega Saturn, Sony PlayStation, and PC was originally going to include Parasol Stars as well,[10] but was dropped from the lineup mid-development.

[2] However, it's also possible that Parasol Stars could be a side story, or "gaiden" to the series occurring after Rainbow Islands, but before Bubble Memories.

The game's boss fight music is a variation of the 1989 summer hit "Lambada" by the French-Brazilian pop group Kaoma.

[12] Entertainment Weekly picked the game as the #15 greatest game available in 1991, saying: "This one's even more fun to play than it is to describe: Bubby (or Bobby when two play simultaneously) uses his umbrella to flick bizarre meanies across the screen and turn them into pieces of cake, apples, mushrooms, etc., which he then gobbles up in order to earn points".