XP Arcade: Blazing Star

The Neo Geo was not known for shoot-em-ups in the same way it was for fighters, but Blazing Star is one of the former that's still worth playing.

This column is “XP Arcade,” in which I’ll focus on a game from the arcades, or one that is clearly inspired by arcade titles, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

It’s possible you have never played Blazing Star, but you have seen Blazing Star. Because you saw someone else playing it? Maybe not. In meme form, due to its legendarily poor localization? Absolutely. If you’re going to have a messy localization, a shoot-em-up is definitely the genre you want it to happen in, because it generally just ends up being kind of funny. Blazing Star might not have anything quite on the level if “All your base are belong to us” too cling to, but since text appears on screen whenever you die, whenever power ups or collectibles or a boss show up, it’s a much more constant series of goofs than a single line of dialogue was.

For me, it doesn’t detract at all from the fun of Blazing Star, and none of the localization issues adversely impact gameplay, like they do in, say, a JRPG like Breath of Fire II. If anything, it’s enjoyable for the game to attempt to chide me when I’m blown out of the sky by saying something as odd as, “Hey, poor player!” or asking me if I’m just “Waking up?” after a quick death. It ends up quirky instead of annoying that the game tells you that you’ve “Collected all panels!” before you ever do, and then tells you to “Collect all panels!” after you have actually done so. “Watch out, the big one is closing in!” isn’t necessarily poor localization so much as it is continually funny to see before boss fights, and it doesn’t take much effort to recognize the game meant “Watch out! This boss destroyed the space colony!” when it says “Watch out! Destroyed the space colony!” It’s all more “You spoony bard!” than anything, and I hope they never clean up the text.

This horizontally scrolling shoot-em-up, released on the Neo Geo in 1998, is considered a classic now, but when it first arrived it was something of a disappointment for some critics. There were those who appreciated that the Neo Geo was keeping the feel of a certain era of shoot-em-ups alive, this late into the console’s lifespan, but plenty of others who didn’t feel that it was pushing graphical boundaries quite enough, or that, even if they did like how it looked, felt it was inferior to its predecessor, Pulstar. Which is funny on its own, considering Pulstar was, as good as it is, panned enough (mostly for its unyielding difficulty) that SNK wanted to sever the association* between the two titles in order to give Blazing Star a fresh start. So, the pilot from Pulstar is actually one of the playable characters in Blazing Star, but basically you’re not supposed to know that unless you already know Pulstar. And since all of the game’s story is contained within its untranslated manual (that has been helpfully translated in an unofficial capacity, along with all of the profiles of the pilots), well, you’d have to know where to look to even be able to figure out what is going on other than pew pew pew.

It helps, too, that the developer, Yumekobo, had a new name this time around: while Blazing Star was technically Yumekobo’s first game, they were simply a re-branded Aicom, which had developed Pulstar and was formed way back in 1988. The re-branding occurred because SNK had begun to fund them after they were no longer part of Sammy Industry. When SNK no longer had systems to support, the developer was no more. That would be a few games from this point in time, though, but not all that many years.

I understand the idea that Blazing Star didn’t look as great as it advertised itself to look — the game’s packaging claimed that “The shooter with the Ultimate in Neo Geo computer graphics is here!!” for instance — but it’s still got a good look to it, and, in my opinion, at least, the pre-rendered ships and enemies look good, too. There are little touches you can make happen with pre-rendered graphics that might have been tougher with straight 2D pixels, like when you move the ship up or down on the screen it angles its top or bottom, respectively, in that direction as well, and enemies arrive from the background in a way that ensures you know exactly when something is in the background and on its way to fight you, and when it’s in the foreground and is actually fighting you. The backgrounds, too, hold up pretty well, and are all designed to look pretty different from the last stage you were in: some stages use multiple backgrounds, like in moving you from inside a massive structure into the cold dark of space, or in changing from horizontal scrolling to downward vertical scrolling down some kind of shaft, and so on.

I will say, though, that it’s probably a lot easier for someone like myself, in 2021, to be fine with how Blazing Star looks, and appreciative of what it does get right graphically, in a way that some critics in 1998 just could not seem to manage, and that’s because of the time period’s obsession with 3D. Take a look around at game reviews from that day and age, for games that decided they wanted to be 2D or 2.5D even though the industry as a whole had shifted toward 3D. There is a harshness to many of those reviews that seems wholly unnecessary, especially since, in many cases, what was achieved with 2D or 2.5D graphics on systems with the power to produce full 3D with polygons is impressive on its own.

Not being in 3D was a sin too great for some in ‘98, however, but each era has its own little problem that we know is goofy at the time and only looks worse in retrospect. Some bright, colorful Wii games with enduring art styles were dismissed as lacking in the visual department in favor of some extremely brown and boring Playstation 3 art — there was a lot less Uncharted and a lot more Resistance in much of the art direction and asset quality in the early days of that console — because the latter was in HD. We went through an overly long stretch of time where every single-player experience that didn’t also include online multiplayer was considered an unfinished, or unsatisfying, product, even if it didn’t make sense for it to have that kind of component.

Anyway. Blazing Star looks good enough to this day, and especially so when one of its large bosses shows up on screen. This is just a static image, so you’ll just have to trust me when I say that the way they move and transform into other shapes is a nifty trick:

The above screenshot contains a whole lot of information about Blazing Star and how it plays or can be played, so let’s run down that list. For one, it’s a game capable of supporting two ships at once, as is shown above. There are six ships to choose from, and each plays differently: they have different kinds of standard weaponry (all different colors and shapes, too, which makes differentiating who is which ship a lot easier in co-op) as well as different charged shots, and they also move at varying speeds. One of the ships isn’t able to collect power-ups at all, but on the other hand, its base loadout is much more powerful than what you’ll find in the other ships.

My general play style in shoot-em-ups, when given the choice of speeds, is to play at what you’d consider a “normal” speed, often the second of two levels, but even the more sluggish ships in Blazing Star move at a decent enough clip to avoid enemy fire or ships when needed. Especially since the slower ones tend to pack a bit more of a punch in some way or another, to help balance out the lack of quickness. There’s plenty of room to find the ship that’s just right for you, but you can also challenge yourself to try to complete Blazing Star in a less comfortable, different way, too, which gives it plenty of replay value to help counter its relative brevity. And when you die, you can also choose a different ship. The game doesn’t give you any info on what each ship does in this scenario, but if you’ve familiarized yourself with the game over time, it’s a little easier to recall which ones are which.

The “SHOT” meter is for the aforementioned charge shots, which you can improve the strength of by collecting power-ups throughout the stage. You can’t hold down the fire button to shoot in Blazing Star, but instead have to press it every time you want to fire. That’s because holding the button charges up for a more powerful blast, one that for some ships is a single, larger projectile that can clear through a row of enemies, and for others might be a sustained, rapid-fire blast of more powerful shots than your standard cannon. You will want to utilize the charged shot often, too, if you care about high scores at all. Defeating enemies with a charged shot increases the multiplier because of the speed it can blow up enemies with. If you’re quick, with the regular beam, you can pick up some 2x multiplier kills, but with a well-placed charged shot and plenty of foes to nail with it, you’ll see that jump from 2x to 4x to 8 to 16 and so on. Charging can be dangerous, since you can’t fire while doing so, but it’s worth the risk if it means you can maybe clear the screen of all the enemy buildup in one shot that’s also going to score you exponentially more points than you would have nabbed otherwise.

Lastly, we have the word “LUCKY” on screen, in the bottom middle. You have to collect each letter of that word throughout the stage, and they don’t just appear. You have to clear a specific part of a stage of a specific wave of enemies, for instance, to get one of the letters to appear, so failure to wipe out an incoming wave can mean you don’t end up spelling the whole word when your post-level score is counted up. And that’s no small thing, either, as each letter is worth just 1,000 points, unless you collect all five, and then they’re worth 50,000 as a group. And those completionist traits stack, too, as a second level with all five letters of LUCKY will grant you 100,000 bonus points. It’s not the end of the world if you don’t spell the word, but, especially on the Arcade Archives release of the game that includes online leaderboards, you’re going to want to try to find out how to trigger each letter panel in the game in order to maximize your score.

Pulstar might have been considered too difficult, but Blazing Star, for the most part, feels just right. The early stages are lacking a bit in terms of dangerous foes and structural impediments, but the game is also getting you used to some of its systems, like what it is power-ups do for you and the reveal and collection of the LUCKY panels, so it’s easy enough to forgive that in conjunction with the massive, enjoyable boss fights and the level design that improves the deeper into the game you get. It helps, too, that if you think Blazing Star is too easy, you can simply increase the difficulty the next time you play, unless you’re playing the arcade version — the MVS one. On the at-home, AES edition of the game, though, you’ve got your pick. There is Easiest, Easy, Normal, MVS, Hard, Hardest, and Godly, so you’ve got quite a bit of space in between “Normal” and “oh God why am I doing this to myself?” to work within if you just want things to be a little tougher, but not frustratingly so.

The game is also good about power-ups being available quite regularly, and has your ship restart from where you died even if you get a Game Over, so you can power through eventually even on the toughest difficulties. Your score just might not look nearly as good, since that will reset with each Game Over.

The Arcade Archives version of Blazing Star (available on Nintendo Switch, Playstations 4 and 5, and Xbox One/Series X and S) also has a Caravan Mode to go along with the high scores: for those unfamiliar, a Caravan Mode is a timed score-attack game mode, where you get some number of minutes to get as far as you can and rack up as many points as you can. It used to be a real big thing back in the early days of shooters, with in-person “Caravan” tournaments held by Hudson Soft for their shooters the central focus of much of it, and eventually, the mode itself became a standard part of their games, too. Shoot-em-ups aren’t the only games that have had Caravan tournaments or Caravan-style tournaments, but the mode has kind of persisted throughout the years, and is a logical choice to include in the present-day re-releases of older shmups that didn’t have them to begin with, given online leaderboards are a thing.

Between the Arcade Archives release and the iOS/Android port from 2012, most of the people who have ever played or could play Blazing Star aren’t in that position thanks to the original arcade or at-home Neo Geo release. Even the Wii Virtual Console release was Japan-only, and that came toward the end of the system’s life (though not the end of the life of the Wii’s Virtual Console service: that’d come in 2019). My own relationship with Blazing Star involves none of those releases: it’s a game that I had emulated on my PSP for a while, until I was able to get an official copy of the game thanks to the release of the Neo Geo Mini, which is a tiny replica arcade cabinet with 40 games in it, one of which is the AES edition of Blazing Star. You would think it would be tough to play on the small screen given the mini cabinet isn’t exactly shaped like a portable gaming device, but the games actually look alright since they’re at a lower resolution than they would be on a large, modern television. The Neo Geo Mini is not the greatest way to play (nor does it have the highest-quality screen or stick), even with one of the included gamepads — I’d have to say the Arcade Archives release on a system that will allow you to use an arcade stick would be the superior way to play — but it gets the job done in a far more satisfying fashion than touch controls on a smartphone would, so we’re making progress on that front.

I have kind of split the difference, as I’ve been playing the MVS version of Blazing Star on my Neo Geo Arcade Stick Pro — hey, it’s a backup when you already own a copy of the game elsewhere, you know — so I can use a superior controller option and not have to stare so intently at a small screen up close, but the caravan mode of the Arcade Archives version means I’m probably going to be tempted to to pick that up at some point, too… and then play it with the ASP’s controller functionality, anyways. The ASP works as its own mini, but also as a controller for the Switch, PS4, and PS3, so, it gets around in this house.

What can I say? Blazing Star is a better game than 1998 gave it credit for, one I won’t mind doubling up on for a new game mode and a definitive way to play. If you’re into shmups but have never tried this one before, it’s one worth diving into, even in the currently crowded retro shmup marketplace.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter.