The series has been redeemed. Easily the best bomberman to come out in years.
There are three different parts of your bomberman that you can customize; the body, the head, and the face. Each has 20 different choices that you earn by collecting gems in game. Unfortunately, the only way to get these gems is to wait for them to pop up randomly in local play, in a game that is at least 2 minutes in length.
You can have up to 8 players in a game. In local play you can have up to 4 human players, and 4 computer players of any difficulty. Online, you can have 8 human players. One of the nice features here is the option to have you and 3 of your friends on the same console go online to face off against 4 other players.
You can get into a game pretty quickly. All the work is done for you after you set your preferences. The only downside is sometimes the game will try to play you into a match that has already started and you'll get a message along those lines. It will get annoying how often that happens actually, but the player community more than makes up for it once you actually get playing.