When I first heard that Inti Creates was going to remake Blaster Master, I was excited. The series petered out originally after only a handful of titles, ending after the release of Blaster Master Blasting Again for the Playstation. Sunsoft attempted a kind of lackluster revival in Blaster Master Overdrive, but awkward controls hindered that game. So, in comes Inti Creates with a plan to redo the original Blaster Master and keep its NES looks. They also set out to clean up the plot. An unenviable task considering that the plots of the American and Japanese releases were wildly different.
In the American release you played as Jason who’s on a mission to save his pet frog, Fred. One day Fred escapes from his tank and happens upon a barrel of toxic waste pushing up from the ground in Jason’s yard which causes Fred to grow in size. Jason gives chase as the ground collapses beneath them both. In the cave that Jason finds himself in, he discovers the tank-like car, Sophia the 3rd, a vehicle designed to fight the mutants that live there. Jason then sets out to find Fred and destroy the mutants.
The Japanese version, called Chō Wakusei Senki Metafight, takes place on the planet Sophia the 3rd and stars Kane Gardner. The planet is invaded by the villain Goez and the Invem Dark Star Army. In an effort to defeat the invaders a tank-like car, called Metal Attacker, is built at NORA, the satellite that orbits Sophia the 3rd.
Instead of choosing one of those plots to work with Inti Creates went headfirst into combining them both in an effort to make them make sense. In Blaster Master Zero this mostly worked. You play as Jason Frudnick, a young genius who’s studying a mysterious frog-like alien lifeform that he dubs Fred. Fred escapes, Jason falls in a hole, and comes upon the Metal Attacker vehicle Sophia the 3rd and eventually the android-like girl, Eve. Technically Eve isn’t new to the Blaster Master series; she first appeared in the Blaster Master novelization and in Blasting Again. Here Eve is the “daughter” of Kane Gardner and she was sent to Earth with Sophia the 3rd from the planet Sophia to battle the mutant threat. Ok, now that I write that all out the plot is still bonkers, but at the very least it was a good effort to try and tie it all together.
Before I get to Zero 3 I guess I should summarize Zero 2 really quickly. After the final battle in Zero, Eve gets infected with mutant cells. Jason decides that the best way to help her is to head to the planet Sophia by converting Sophia Zero, which he got at the end of the first game, into Gaia-Sophia for space travel. Which already begs the question, how did it reach Earth in the first place if it wasn’t already capable of space flight? Jason and Eve make several detours to other planets and meet other pilots who also drive Metal Attackers before finally coming across a giant mutant boss that blocks their way to Sophia. With the boss defeated the path to Sophia is opened, Eve is suddenly cured, and the game ends as mutants make their way to Earth.
Zero 3 begins immediately after the end of Zero 2 with Jason, Eve, and Fred getting captured and separated by the Sophia Force for arriving during a mutant attack. Jason and Fred escape thanks to the mutants creating the new gameplay mechanic, super dimensional rifts, and with the help of Kane Gardner they set out to locate Eve.
There’s really not much to the plot beyond that; the characters spend a lot of time hemming and hawing about super dimensional space and wondering where Eve is. Aside from that, it ignores what happened in the second game almost entirely. Eve was supposedly cured then, but now the game is acting like that didn’t happen at all. Worse, the whole teaser about mutants invading Earth again is just given a quick throwaway line to explain it away. It almost feels like there was a plan to either have Zero 3 be a very different game or have a spinoff, but that clearly didn’t happen so here we are. I can’t say I blame them too much for that. You could take Zero 2 out of the story entirely and you wouldn’t lose what little plot that they had.
If you’ve been keeping track so far you’ll notice that Inti Creates has been using all the names and locations from the original games so obviously you’ll see the Invem Dark Star Army and NORA satellite as well as other callbacks to the original series. Frankly, it gets exhausting and more than a little bit cheesy at times. The plot is incredibly hokey in an effort to wrap this up as a trilogy and to keep the callbacks to the original games coming. At one point they go out of their way to have a character say “this is our metafight.” Come on. That’s 80’s level nonsense right there. It doesn’t even make sense beyond the need to elbow you in the side and say hey, see what we did there? I imagine it’d be even worse if you haven’t played any of the original games because then all these nods just seem out of place and nonsensical.
It also doesn’t help that the characters are little more than anime tropes who have paper thin personalities. Jason is the troubled, young genius, Eve, his love interest who needs constant rescue, and Fred their animal sidekick. This doesn’t even include the handful of side characters that aren’t any better. There’s literally a five-year-old girl who says she’s ok never seeing her father because she knows he loves her. This is not something a child would say. No kid would rationally explain away something like that. Another character flippantly wishes that you would die one way or another through the whole game while actively helping you. This is not how real people act. I’m not saying the original Blaster Master had brilliant characterizations, because it didn’t, but they’re certainly not stretching themselves too hard here. By the end of the game, I didn’t care how the story ended because the payoff felt unearned and irrelevant as the characters were just so one dimensional and boring. Not surprisingly, most of the conflict could have been resolved if the characters took a second to be honest and talk to one another.
While I’m on the topic of the characters I want to talk about their designs and how wild they are. And not in a good way. How do you make a character look edgy? Grow out their hair and add a cape. If nothing else, adding a cape or a cloak seems to be the anime standard to make your character seem darker and more mysterious without actually doing anything to show you why they’re like that. I know that Jason’s cape is explained away as a scientific tool that lets him counterattack, but come on, that just sounds ridiculous. At this point it almost seems standard in any medium to make your main character get darker, both in personality and clothes, by the third one in an effort to make them seem like they’re “maturing.” That could be fine if the character actually grows and learns something, but that certainly doesn’t happen here.
In the complete opposite vein the female characters wind up being little more than fan service more often than not. In Zero, Eve starts off dressed as a cat girl with a loose-fitting half shirt and tail. She even has cat faces on her knees. Deciding that this was not sexy enough for Zero 2, Eve ditches the shirt and wears a skintight body suit. Inexplicably, the android’s bust also grows several sizes. She keeps the cat theme going, though, by having a giant, metal cat arm. Zero 3 brings back the half shirt, but it’s shrunk several sizes and the zipper on her bodysuit is unzipped past her chest. Don’t even get me started on the plant girl, Kanna, who has literal melons. I mean, it’s not even subtle. Is there anything wrong with creating sexy characters? No, of course not, but when your characters have the depth of a kiddie pool, slapping fan service on them isn’t a replacement for a personality or character building. Not to mention that the game is rated E10+.
So the story is an alphabet soup of jargon and the characters are unimpressive, but surely the gameplay must make up for it. It does if you were expecting it to be completely identical to Zero 2. You’ve got all the same weapons and vehicle upgrades with a couple exceptions, but it really is just a rehash of what you’ve seen before right down to the NES styled graphics. I’ll give Zero 2 credit for shaking up the gameplay of the first one, but Zero 3 completely rests on its laurels to keep everything pretty near the same. The one big change they’ve added is the super dimensional rifts. They amount to little more than a randomly generated shortcut in the Jason levels and environmental puzzles in the G Sophia levels, although they are sometimes used during boss fights too. In fact, because they’re randomly generated it’s recommended to use them in the Jason levels as they’re incredibly short and they bypass a lot of other combat challenges. Especially helpful since there is no benefit at all to fighting the rank-and-file enemies.
The map screen is the same as it’s been in the last two games though now it’s slightly less helpful. Upgrades are clearly marked with a special icon, but they’re used for both permanent upgrades and a newly added temporary shield upgrade for both Jason and G Sophia. If you’re attempting to get everything, good luck. You’ll have to explore every inch of the game to make sure if the icon is for a permanent upgrade or not. The temp shields are handy though, as the extra hits it grants can save you some trouble when things start to get hectic.
There have been a handful of upgrades to the game which are fairly helpful, such as Jason getting a jetpack in the side scrolling areas and a dodge in the top-down areas. His counterattack has also been improved to be a bit more contextual to deal with long- and short-range attacks. It’s fairly minor, but these new counterattacks can really help when the enemies start to swarm. Once you find the upgrade, your dodge can even start to reflect back enemy projectiles. This one is totally indispensable once you start facing off against some of the later bosses.
I will say that overall the graphics look really nice most of the time. There are quite a few scenes where they have these big, beautifully animated sprites that just look great in action. Seeing Jason activate the VRV to go into super dimensional space is slick. Then you have a couple of bosses who look like their sprites just got enlarged giving them giant boxy pixels. It’s such a weird dichotomy.
I think I’m just surprised with Blaster Master Zero 3. From basically retconning the events of Zero 2 to the awkward dialogue that’s only there to be a callback to the original NES game it just feels like a mixed bag. The sprite work retains the look of the original title, although the color palette is more from the GBC game than the NES one, and the attempt to combine both stories into one narrative was an interesting idea. The overall execution of Blaster Master Zero 3 feels more like a budget attempt from a fledging studio than it does a release from Inti Creates. With the exception of the bosses, the regular enemies you’ve fought throughout the Zero series have all been the same sprites with the same attack patterns for three games now. In fact, almost everything from Zero 3 has been reused from the previous two entries, gameplay included, which really doubles down on the budget title feel. The ending clearly hints at more to come so hopefully Inti Creates uses that to create something truly new and different because playing through a fourth game with the exact same look and feel is not something I’m looking forward to. If you can ignore the plot the game is mostly interesting and some parts of it do shine. Overall, the game feels wholly average to me and doesn’t do a lot to differentiate itself from the prior two titles.
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