Blazing Star

Blazing Star was released during the very height of SNK's hey-day in the arcade, right before the sharp downturn of both the arcade industry and SNK themselves just two years later. Upon its arcade debut, Blazing Star was a critical darling with critics praising SNK's choice to release a horizontal shooter in an age where this genre was looked at as being passe. Coupled with incredible visuals for the aging hardware and solid mechanics, Blazing Star is a passionate love letter to fans of the classic horizontal shooter genre. 

Aicom, a subsidiary of Sammy corp. and the development studio behind 1992's Viewpoint and 1995's Pulstar, was purchased by and brought in house under the SNK umbrella in the mid-90's. Renamed Yumekobo, the studio's main focus in the later part of the decade was creating a smattering of ports and original software for SNK's Neo-Geo Pocket Color. In addition, they were tasked with creating a sequel to Pulstar that wasn't quite as difficult and had better prospects to sell better in the Western markets. 

Unfortunately, sales numbers for Blazing Star are unavaialbe in our modern age, which is a shame. Given the smaller distribution of the game, and a lack of home ports during the era, we can assume it did not quite reach the heights SNK had hoped. Yumekobo had one more shot at shmup (shoot-em-up) stardom the next year with the a sequel to one of SNK's classics of the 80's in the form of Prehistoric Isle 2. Unlike Blazing Star, though, Prehistoric Isle 2 saw luke-warm reception from critics and gamers upon release and to this day there have been no home ports to other consoles or services. It's a fine game to be sure, but nowhere near the level of panache we see in Blazing Star in this historian's opinion.

While sales data is impossible to find, Blazing Star was highly publicized in Japan before its release in SNK's Neo-Geo Freak magazine and other arcade-centric publications. There were numerous developer interviews released in these various publications, and the wonderful folks at Shmuplations has translated a few of these for your viewing pleasure. Since there is little need to recap what you can easily read over there, I do recommend diving in if you are interested in a behind the scenes look at the creation of one of the Neo-Geo's very best games...that isn't a fighting game.  

At the outset of Blazing Star you choose one of 5 characters/ships to begin your journey. Each ship has its own strengths and weaknesses that will affect not only overall gameplay difficulty (apart from the difficulty settings), but will also fit your play style. Ships range from all-around fighters like Hellhound, more defensive ships like the Peplos (which has an exploitable score glitch), and even the powerful Dino 246 from Pulstar makes an appearance. Each ship has their own unique type of normal shot and charge shot. Finding the ship that works for you is paramount for your enjoyment of the game. My personal favorites are the Hellound and Dino 246. If you've never played before, I recommend the Windina as it has the widest normal shot that covers a good bit of the screen in front of the ship at full power and is an excellent choice for score runs and caravan rankings. 

Even though Blazing Star is a spiritual sequel to Pulstar, aside from a charge shot mechanic the two games could not be more different. Pulstar definitely pulls its inspiration from Irem's classic R-Type series, and Blazing Star feels a bit more like Tecnosoft's Thunder Force series in its moment to moment gameplay. Rather than filling the screen with baddies and bullets like Pulstar, Blazing Star has more choreography and a bit less chaos in its enemy patterns. As such, it never feels quite as frantic - until the end game. Blazing Star has 6 full stages and a 7th stage that comprises the final boss battle. Despite the focus on creating a more approachable game, there is a stark difficulty spike on stage 4 that continues to build through the end of stage 6. 

The general gameplay loop is mostly what you'd expect from a late 90's horizontal shmup with a few twists. Like most shooters, players power-up their ship by collecting power-up items. You can collect 4 power-up items to reach your ship's maximum power level. These affect the size and spread of your normal shot as well as your charged shot. 

Rather than having a screen clearing bomb like most other shmups, once you unleash a charged shot you can press the B button to break up and scatter your fire to fill more of the screen. The more power-ups you've collected, the stronger this mechanic will be. Be careful with the scatter shot, though, as your charge will enter a cool-down period before you can charge up another blast. Additionally, the faster you press the shot button, the more powerful each normal shot will be - indicated by a change in the color and frequency of your normal shot. 

Along with your power-up items, Blazing Star also has multiple types of score multipliers you can collect. There are five LUCKY panels hidden in each stage you can collect by shooting down a specific enemy type. If you collect all five LUCKY panels you get a huge score bonus at the end of the stage. There are also normal score icons to collect that vary in color and point density as well. Then there are these little angel looking things called Event Icons that are tied to a score ranking system that can multiply your score up to 128 times if you play correctly. For shmup die-hards, Blazing Star is one of the most played horizontal shooters in the genre for score challenges given the depth of the scoring system compared to similar games. If you want to dive into the score battles online, I recommend watching some score runs of the game on YouTube to get an idea of how you are supposed to play to get the maximum score for each stage.  

While the end game of Blazing Star is no doubt difficult, Yumekobo has implemented some anti-frustration measures to make the game more palatable to a wider array of players. First is the removal of the checkpoint system seen in their prior shooters like Viewpoint and Pulstar. In Blazing Star the player's ship regenerates on the spot when a life is lost. Second is that the ship's power level only goes down by one when the player looses a life. Even then, power-up icons are plentiful in the game so you won't be without power too long. Third, there are no god-awful speed icons to mess with. This is my most hated shmup mechanic, so it's nice to play a well-crafted shooter that doesn't leave you immobile right before a hard boss battle. All of these subtle changes to the way losing a life and continues work make Blazing Star a much faster game overall than the methodical and slower paced feel of Pulstar. 

The stage bosses are big, threatening, and well designed overall. Like most horizontal shooters, once you get the boss' patterns down you feel like a god as you rip through them. That is until you get to the last two stages. The stage 6 boss is a multi-stage battle against a gargantuan battleship that takes roughly 7-10 minutes to defeat based on your skill level. The battle is so difficult, and patterns so erratic compared to everything that has come before that it's more of a test of tedium rather than patience and perseverance. The final boss in stage 7 is also a hard, multi-stage battle that is just a bit more difficult than stage 6's end.

Because of the difficulty spike in stage 4, and the ridiculous last two bosses, the overall difficulty ends up feeling a bit uneven. Still, a 1cc run is for sure doable - and much easier to obtain than in Aicom/Yumekobo's prior shmups. That said, any sort of ego you've formed on your performance up to the end game is shattered once you reach the final two bosses. 

Like Pulstar before it, Blazing Star is a beautiful game that mixes CG created assets along with highly detailed hand-drawn pixel art to create a visual style unlike any other shmup of the day. Because of the huge size of the game's memory, Yumekobo had space to include a few FMV sequences that loop in some backgrounds to create a neat sense of depth that blends well with the rest of the sprite work. Enemies are all lavishly animated, and many enemy ships transform into other ship types on the fly. Bosses, as sated before, are huge and highly detailed with loads of animation. Personally, I consider Blazing Star to be better looking than Pulstar, but not by much.

The music and general sound design of Blazing Star is also a high point. Harumi Fujita and Yasuaki Fujita put the Neo-Geo's Yamaha 2610 audio chip to good use with high quality samples mixed with a few channels of FM synth. While I like the overall composition of Pulstar's music better, Blazing Star "sounds" better with crisp audio, punchy sound effects, and a more upbeat tone that keeps up with the brisk pacing of the game. It's a soundtrack worth listening to outside of the game for sure.  

Because Blazing Star is mostly presented in English regardless of your console's territory setting, you'd think Yumekobo would have put a bit more work into ensuring what little text is there makes sense. Unfortunately, or fortunately if you want a good laugh, the "Engrish" is just horrendous. Messages like "Get It More!" and "Hey Poor Player!" pop up when you get a score icon or lose a ship, and each boss has a unique but unintelligible message that comes up right before the fight. It's all wonderfully bad stuff, and gives the game a delicious 90's old-school charm. What's more, every time you grab a score icons the announcer screams "BONUS!" There are a lot of score icons to collect, so while you end up hearing BONUS over and over again through a play though, you eventually drown this out as you get "in the zone."

There are many sources online who purport that the modern usage of the word "fail" (stand alone) originated with Blazing Star's game over message which reads "you fail it." While it's fun to think this is the case, I don't buy it. Blazing Star is a niche game, in a niche genre, that did not get widespread release outside of Japan until 2012 - well after the meme "fail" appeared. 

Blazing Star is a wonderful shooter, and while a bit different in approach, it stands tall with Pulstar as being of of the Neo-Geo's standout shmups and highly sought after games overall. It's not nearly as hard as its predecessor, and because you don't have to worry about speed power-ups and checkpoints, it's infinitely more approachable than Aicom's/Yumekobo's earlier works in the genre. There's a lot of depth here for the hard-core shmup fan, though, especially for those who will take the time to master the scoring mechanics. That said, if you're looking for a sequel to Pulstar that is just as hard and unforgiving as that game, you won't find it here. For you, play 1992's Viewpoint instead. 

For SNK purists, Blazing Star is one of the most illusive games on the Neo-Geo. SNK released a paltry few AES editions only in the Japanese market, and as such Blazing Star is one of the most expensive Japanese Neo-Geo AES games sitting around a staggering $7000 mark in the 2023 retro game market. Prices will only go up for this release, and right now those values are going up fast. In the few years between 2019 and 2023 we've seen the value of Blazing Star more than double in price from around $3000 to $8000 on the high end. If Neo-Geo AES second-hard market trends continue at this pace, Blazing Star could easily double in value over the next five years. At this point there are no "good deals" to be had on this game as even a loose cartridge (a rare commodity indeed) would cost no less than $3000. Basically, if you didn't already have a copy of this game on AES you are generally out of luck - unless you have an insane amount of money to burn. 

Despite a legacy of cost savings in the second-hard market, the arcade MVS cartridge version of Blazing Star can be had for right around $300, give or take...which is still unobtainable for most folks but not entirely out of reach if you absolutely must have a physical copy of this game. A Neo CD version was planned and the unique endings cut from the game's original release were purportedly supposed to be included along with other bonus features. Sadly, this version was cut mid-development like many other planned Neo CD releases during the latter part of the 90's. Why the CD version was cut is a mystery to this day, but the waning popularity of the CD console and the technical wizardry that Yumekobo pulled off to even make this game work on the base MVS/AES hardware may have had something to do with it. 

While it would have been a perfect candidate for release on Sega's Dreamcast in 1999, Blazing Star was never ported to any home consoles of the day which hurt its long-term relevancy in the market until years later. It wouldn't be until 2012 when it was released on mobile devices and the Wii's Virtual Console platform that modern gamers began to discover this classic. Since that time we've seen it release on many platforms and digital storefronts thanks to efforts by Hamster and their Arcade Archives series and its inclusion on the Neo-Geo Mini console and other SNK all-in-one solutions. 

For my Neo-Geo collectors, get this game any way you can if you have the funds to invest in it. I hate to say it, but this game is in "investment" territory on AES and few people that will purchase this game these days will actually play it due to its incredible value in the collector market. The phrase "sought after" doesn't quite do justice to the way high-ball collectors salivate over this release. The modern value of Blazing Star is well out of line with what any sane person should spend on a single video game - but Neo-Geo collectors aren't the most sane people to begin with. I should know...