Game Review: Blaster Master Zero 2
2020-May-07, Thursday 19:06![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
It's frankly amazing to me that Blaster Master Zero ever got made at all, considering the mess that were the Blaster Master sequels throughout the years. And it's even more of a miracle that it was so good, since Inti Creates mined the original Blaster Master, the Worlds of Power: Blaster Master, and the Japanese 超惑星戦記メタファイト (chō wakusei senki metafaito, "Super Planetary War Record: Metafight"), threw them all into an oven, and somehow created a delicious cake from the results. And what's more, they did it again with a sequel and it was still good!
It is definitely anime as hell, though.
A perfectly ordinary planet.
Blaster Master Zero 2 continues where the good ending of Blaster Master Zero left off, with Eve infected by mutant cells and she and Jason traveling the universe hoping to make it back to Planet Sophia and find a cure. That provides the major difference between this game and its predecessor--Blaster Master Zero was a remake of the first game, taking place entirely in a series of interconnected tunnels in the depths of the Earth. BMZ2 begins as the "Gaia-Sophia," a new Metal Attacker built by Jason, approaches and lands on a planet, and after completing it and repairing the damaged hover module, the universe opens open. Jason and Eve can travel from planet to planetoid, exploring each of them for upgrades, bosses, and keys to the dimensional rifts that allow traveling between the various dimensional areas.
I'm a little unclear on the exact layout of the universe BMZ2 takes place in, since each Area is separate from the others and there don't appear to be any stars that these planets are orbiting around, but I appreciate the gameplay benefits. BMZ all took place on a single planet, and while its proto-Metroidvania-style map with later stages accessible from earlier ones once Sophia III has the appropriate upgrades was directly draw from Blaster Master, it did limit the possible level designs. Since every level in BMZ2 is an entirely separate area, they can all be set up as self-contained puzzles with the assumption that Sophia III reaches it with full resources and health. While the planets are large areas with dozens of screens, multiple dungeons, and bosses, the planetoids were much more specialized. Some of them were boss fights, some of them were platforming puzzles that require Jason to leave Sophia to gain an upgrade, some of them led directly to dungeons, and some of them were more standard Sophia platforming challenges. There are dozens of these planetoids scattered throughout the game and every one of them has some upgrade or discovery in them, so there's always a reason to go, and it's possible to scan the planets from space and learn whether therea are still any remaining upgrades there, so the objective is always clear. Some of the element of discovery is lost, since you're no longer searching through a series of interconnected tunnels for that last life upgrade to get the good ending, but the switch to discrete challenges means every planetoid is a new surprise and a delight.
The planets were much more similar to individual BMZ stages, with each having multiple upgrades and dungeons, a final boss, and a theme. What caught me by surprise was that Planet Stranga, home of the Metal Attacker pilot Kanna
, with its docile enemies with flowers on their heads, strange plant life, floating water, and general weirdness, was an extended reference to the old Game Boy game Trip World, which is definitely a sentence I never expected to type. What clinched it was that Kanna's support animal is a round rabbit-looking thing named Yacopu, the protagonist of Trip World. Looking it up, apparently Planet Montoj is also a reference, to a game I've never heard of called Ikki (一揆, "Peasant uprising"). No wonder it was neo-feudal Edo Jidai in space.
Burning ranger.
Since BMZ was a remake, it mostly limited itself to the set of upgrades from the original game, including driving on walls and ceilings being separate upgrades. BMZ2 doesn't have that restriction, and while hover, dive, and the crusher cannon carry over, almost everything else is new. Most of them are new subweapons, since BMZ2 doesn't have the same need to gate new areas behind novel means of traversal, but even some of those "subweapons" are new means of traversal--there's a drill to break through blocks beneath G-Sophia, and Repulsion Upper is literally a trampoline. You might ask why not just increase Gaia-Sophia's jump height, and the answer is because a trampoline can affect both the Metal Attacker and the pilot, so it's used for more jumping puzzles.
While BMZ had fewer subweapons and more main cannon upgrades, BMZ2 has two main cannon replacements, a machine gun and a heavy artillery-style large projectile, but both of them consumed SP so I never used them. I spent my time using the much wider variety of subweapons, like the radius-effect Impact Wave or the Burn Spark dash, but I have to admit, 95% of my subweapon usage was the homing Hexa Missiles. The utility of a homing weapon that could even go off the screen, turn around, and come back to attack again if it missed originally meant that it was by far the best choice to use my SP in most situations.
The "Gaia" part of Gaia-Sophia's name comes from the Gaia System, which allows Gaia-Sophia to drain energy from the surrounding environment. Mechanically, this manifests as regaining SP whenever contacting an enemy or their projectiles, or when falling from a height. The higher the height, the more SP regained, and it's possible to regain the entire bar if falling from more than a screen's height. The boss areas are built around this mechanic, and a couple are explicitly designed around it. Running out of SP means that Gaia-Sophia reverts back to the unupgraded Sophia III form, with no SP-using upgrades available and the crusher cannon disabled, while the SP meter slowly regenerates. I could have spent a lot of time planning my actions around jumping and maintaining my SP levels, but what I actually did is spam homing missiles constantly and run around in a panic whenever I ran out of SP. And it worked, so how bad could it be?
Some battles, especially later, I'm pretty sure I kept my SP up because I kept taking damage but grabbing health restores, so G-Sophia's health was mostly in balance while I was getting SP back as fast as it went out in the form of homing missiles. Hey, whatever works. It's not like there's an engine maintenance minigame.
The dungeon sections are broadly the same as they were in BMZ2's predecessor, but some changes to Jason's kit affect how they're played. In BMZ, much like in the original Blaster Master, the way to win every dungeon forever was to power up Jason's gun to the Wave level and just slaughter everything in an unrelenting hail of bullets. BMZ2 rebalances all the gun levels so that Wave is no longer the obvious choice in every situation. Now the top gun level is the Wide Blaster, which files a wall-piercing wave shot, but which becomes less and less effective with repeated shots. There's a short-range Whip, the homing Seeker, the chargeable EX-Charge, or the cone-shaped Splasher, among others, and there's reason to use those even if Wide Beam is available. EX-Charge even has the ability to take on the elemental characteristics of the subweapons that Jason finds, which, well, joke's on me because I didn't realize that until literally just now. Some of those boss fights would have been a bit easier if I had been paying attention, I think.
I honestly didn't even use anything other than grenades. Oops.
The other major change is that Jason now has a cape, which in addition to looking fantastic allows him to use the Blast Counter mechanic, a kind of pre-emptive counterattack. When mutants are about to attack, they get a targeting reticle and pressing the Blast Counter button unleashes an attack. With the basic version, Jason spins around and fires, and it's possible to chain this multiple times into a dance of bullet death. There are other upgrades to Blaster Counter, including an aura that reflects all bullets and one that charges in close to the enemy. As before, I can think of situations where these would have been useful if I had remembered to use them. I guess I played the game on impromptu hard mode.
Welcome to neo-feudal retro future Japan in space.
As I said, this game is anime as hell.
I didn't play Blaster Master Zero 2 in Japanese because, to be honest, I was being lazy. I started it up in Japanese, ran into a few neologisms like 超惑星間万能戦闘車両 (chō wakuseikan bannō sentō sharyō, "Super Interplanetary All-Purpose War Vehicle"), and switched over to English, but once I beat the game, I replayed the last battle in Japanese and most of the dialogue isn't that hard to understand. It also confirmed that the game is barely localized, in the sense that I could usually determine what the Japanese original had been just from the cadence of the English. And sometimes it feels like it's been deliberately stylized in the manner of a weirdly translated NES game. Boss battles begin with a title card with Japanese in the background and a foreground that says "The Hostility of [Title]" and then their name--for example, Gonbei's foreground has "The Legendary Takeyari Master" in English and the background says 一揆当千 (ikki tōsen, "An uprising that can defeat a thousand"), which is a pun on 一騎当千, pronounced the same and meaning "one horseman who can defeat a thousand [horsemen]," and then his name, "Gonbei." The mutant cocoon's Japanese title is 災厄の揺籠 (saiyaku no yurikago, "The Calamity Cradle"), which is frankly amazing and I'm a little mystified why even in the Japanese, they just call it "the mutant cocoon."
Gonbei talks about his "ikki," which is a specific term for Edo-era peasant uprisings, to refer to Montoj's, well, peasant uprising. Each Metal Attacker pilot has a cute and/or elegant support droid. Also, the female characters all have huge racks. Kanna even has a costume with a watermelon design on the bust, which is really laying it on thick, and one of the side effects of Eve's mutant corruption is apparently a pinup girl's figure.
If you're interested in the Japanese version, I found a pictoral Let's Play online: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6.
The power of friendship!
Anyway, Blaster Master Zero had one character for half the game and then two for the rest of it, since only Jason and Eve were down in the depths of the Earth. Now that they're traveling through the universe, there are a lot more characters they encounter. These are all other Metal Attacker pilots, so they always come in groups of pilot and support droid, and again, they're anime as hell. Gonbei is a neo-feudal retro future Japanese peasant uprising leader with a mosquito support animal. Kanna is an easily-distracted plantoid alien who, in Japanese at least, speaks with a ton of plant-based emoji in her dialogue, and her support droid is essentially a Victorian butler. Stein (Japanese: ジョッキ jokki) is a grey-skinned alien who pilots what looks like a steam train and who has an overdressed child as his support droid. And Leibniz...well, that would be telling.
For various reasons, each of these pilots fights Jason when he shows up and he has to overcome them in battle before he can talk to them, and then through speaking to them and doing a fetch quest, he gains their support. This leads to the true ending and the final area, because without the support of the other Metal Attacker pilots, there's no way to overcome the final(?) boss. There's even a straight-up friendship speech before the final battle like a magical girl anime.
There's never so much plot that it gets in the way, fortunately. There's much more than in BMZ, and there's a lot of side conversations that I missed because I forgot that it's possible to talk to Eve through the menu until the very end of the game, but it's not overwhelming. BMZ already set the trend by having an in-game plot at all. Compared to that, BMZ2 isn't much different.
Blasting off again!
Blaster Master Zero was a great game, and an excellent update of the NES original to more modern standards of game design, but it was still fenced in by being a remake of the original game. Blaster Master Zero 2 allowed Inti Creates to change the format and do their own thing, and because of that, BMZ2 is a better game. The on-foot sections are far more interesting, the upgrades are better thought out, and there is far less backtracking necessitated by giant mostly-empty levels.
I still love BMZ because I have nostalgia for the old NES game, but if you only want to play one of the two, play this one.
It is definitely anime as hell, though.
A perfectly ordinary planet.
Blaster Master Zero 2 continues where the good ending of Blaster Master Zero left off, with Eve infected by mutant cells and she and Jason traveling the universe hoping to make it back to Planet Sophia and find a cure. That provides the major difference between this game and its predecessor--Blaster Master Zero was a remake of the first game, taking place entirely in a series of interconnected tunnels in the depths of the Earth. BMZ2 begins as the "Gaia-Sophia," a new Metal Attacker built by Jason, approaches and lands on a planet, and after completing it and repairing the damaged hover module, the universe opens open. Jason and Eve can travel from planet to planetoid, exploring each of them for upgrades, bosses, and keys to the dimensional rifts that allow traveling between the various dimensional areas.
I'm a little unclear on the exact layout of the universe BMZ2 takes place in, since each Area is separate from the others and there don't appear to be any stars that these planets are orbiting around, but I appreciate the gameplay benefits. BMZ all took place on a single planet, and while its proto-Metroidvania-style map with later stages accessible from earlier ones once Sophia III has the appropriate upgrades was directly draw from Blaster Master, it did limit the possible level designs. Since every level in BMZ2 is an entirely separate area, they can all be set up as self-contained puzzles with the assumption that Sophia III reaches it with full resources and health. While the planets are large areas with dozens of screens, multiple dungeons, and bosses, the planetoids were much more specialized. Some of them were boss fights, some of them were platforming puzzles that require Jason to leave Sophia to gain an upgrade, some of them led directly to dungeons, and some of them were more standard Sophia platforming challenges. There are dozens of these planetoids scattered throughout the game and every one of them has some upgrade or discovery in them, so there's always a reason to go, and it's possible to scan the planets from space and learn whether therea are still any remaining upgrades there, so the objective is always clear. Some of the element of discovery is lost, since you're no longer searching through a series of interconnected tunnels for that last life upgrade to get the good ending, but the switch to discrete challenges means every planetoid is a new surprise and a delight.
The planets were much more similar to individual BMZ stages, with each having multiple upgrades and dungeons, a final boss, and a theme. What caught me by surprise was that Planet Stranga, home of the Metal Attacker pilot Kanna
, with its docile enemies with flowers on their heads, strange plant life, floating water, and general weirdness, was an extended reference to the old Game Boy game Trip World, which is definitely a sentence I never expected to type. What clinched it was that Kanna's support animal is a round rabbit-looking thing named Yacopu, the protagonist of Trip World. Looking it up, apparently Planet Montoj is also a reference, to a game I've never heard of called Ikki (一揆, "Peasant uprising"). No wonder it was neo-feudal Edo Jidai in space. Burning ranger.
Since BMZ was a remake, it mostly limited itself to the set of upgrades from the original game, including driving on walls and ceilings being separate upgrades. BMZ2 doesn't have that restriction, and while hover, dive, and the crusher cannon carry over, almost everything else is new. Most of them are new subweapons, since BMZ2 doesn't have the same need to gate new areas behind novel means of traversal, but even some of those "subweapons" are new means of traversal--there's a drill to break through blocks beneath G-Sophia, and Repulsion Upper is literally a trampoline. You might ask why not just increase Gaia-Sophia's jump height, and the answer is because a trampoline can affect both the Metal Attacker and the pilot, so it's used for more jumping puzzles.
While BMZ had fewer subweapons and more main cannon upgrades, BMZ2 has two main cannon replacements, a machine gun and a heavy artillery-style large projectile, but both of them consumed SP so I never used them. I spent my time using the much wider variety of subweapons, like the radius-effect Impact Wave or the Burn Spark dash, but I have to admit, 95% of my subweapon usage was the homing Hexa Missiles. The utility of a homing weapon that could even go off the screen, turn around, and come back to attack again if it missed originally meant that it was by far the best choice to use my SP in most situations.
The "Gaia" part of Gaia-Sophia's name comes from the Gaia System, which allows Gaia-Sophia to drain energy from the surrounding environment. Mechanically, this manifests as regaining SP whenever contacting an enemy or their projectiles, or when falling from a height. The higher the height, the more SP regained, and it's possible to regain the entire bar if falling from more than a screen's height. The boss areas are built around this mechanic, and a couple are explicitly designed around it. Running out of SP means that Gaia-Sophia reverts back to the unupgraded Sophia III form, with no SP-using upgrades available and the crusher cannon disabled, while the SP meter slowly regenerates. I could have spent a lot of time planning my actions around jumping and maintaining my SP levels, but what I actually did is spam homing missiles constantly and run around in a panic whenever I ran out of SP. And it worked, so how bad could it be?
Some battles, especially later, I'm pretty sure I kept my SP up because I kept taking damage but grabbing health restores, so G-Sophia's health was mostly in balance while I was getting SP back as fast as it went out in the form of homing missiles. Hey, whatever works. It's not like there's an engine maintenance minigame.
The dungeon sections are broadly the same as they were in BMZ2's predecessor, but some changes to Jason's kit affect how they're played. In BMZ, much like in the original Blaster Master, the way to win every dungeon forever was to power up Jason's gun to the Wave level and just slaughter everything in an unrelenting hail of bullets. BMZ2 rebalances all the gun levels so that Wave is no longer the obvious choice in every situation. Now the top gun level is the Wide Blaster, which files a wall-piercing wave shot, but which becomes less and less effective with repeated shots. There's a short-range Whip, the homing Seeker, the chargeable EX-Charge, or the cone-shaped Splasher, among others, and there's reason to use those even if Wide Beam is available. EX-Charge even has the ability to take on the elemental characteristics of the subweapons that Jason finds, which, well, joke's on me because I didn't realize that until literally just now. Some of those boss fights would have been a bit easier if I had been paying attention, I think.
I honestly didn't even use anything other than grenades. Oops.
The other major change is that Jason now has a cape, which in addition to looking fantastic allows him to use the Blast Counter mechanic, a kind of pre-emptive counterattack. When mutants are about to attack, they get a targeting reticle and pressing the Blast Counter button unleashes an attack. With the basic version, Jason spins around and fires, and it's possible to chain this multiple times into a dance of bullet death. There are other upgrades to Blaster Counter, including an aura that reflects all bullets and one that charges in close to the enemy. As before, I can think of situations where these would have been useful if I had remembered to use them. I guess I played the game on impromptu hard mode.
Welcome to neo-feudal retro future Japan in space.
As I said, this game is anime as hell.
I didn't play Blaster Master Zero 2 in Japanese because, to be honest, I was being lazy. I started it up in Japanese, ran into a few neologisms like 超惑星間万能戦闘車両 (chō wakuseikan bannō sentō sharyō, "Super Interplanetary All-Purpose War Vehicle"), and switched over to English, but once I beat the game, I replayed the last battle in Japanese and most of the dialogue isn't that hard to understand. It also confirmed that the game is barely localized, in the sense that I could usually determine what the Japanese original had been just from the cadence of the English. And sometimes it feels like it's been deliberately stylized in the manner of a weirdly translated NES game. Boss battles begin with a title card with Japanese in the background and a foreground that says "The Hostility of [Title]" and then their name--for example, Gonbei's foreground has "The Legendary Takeyari Master" in English and the background says 一揆当千 (ikki tōsen, "An uprising that can defeat a thousand"), which is a pun on 一騎当千, pronounced the same and meaning "one horseman who can defeat a thousand [horsemen]," and then his name, "Gonbei." The mutant cocoon's Japanese title is 災厄の揺籠 (saiyaku no yurikago, "The Calamity Cradle"), which is frankly amazing and I'm a little mystified why even in the Japanese, they just call it "the mutant cocoon."
Gonbei talks about his "ikki," which is a specific term for Edo-era peasant uprisings, to refer to Montoj's, well, peasant uprising. Each Metal Attacker pilot has a cute and/or elegant support droid. Also, the female characters all have huge racks. Kanna
even has a costume with a watermelon design on the bust, which is really laying it on thick, and one of the side effects of Eve's mutant corruption is apparently a pinup girl's figure. If you're interested in the Japanese version, I found a pictoral Let's Play online: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6.
The power of friendship!
Anyway, Blaster Master Zero had one character for half the game and then two for the rest of it, since only Jason and Eve were down in the depths of the Earth. Now that they're traveling through the universe, there are a lot more characters they encounter. These are all other Metal Attacker pilots, so they always come in groups of pilot and support droid, and again, they're anime as hell. Gonbei is a neo-feudal retro future Japanese peasant uprising leader with a mosquito support animal. Kanna
is an easily-distracted plantoid alien who, in Japanese at least, speaks with a ton of plant-based emoji in her dialogue, and her support droid is essentially a Victorian butler. Stein (Japanese: ジョッキ jokki) is a grey-skinned alien who pilots what looks like a steam train and who has an overdressed child as his support droid. And Leibniz...well, that would be telling.For various reasons, each of these pilots fights Jason when he shows up and he has to overcome them in battle before he can talk to them, and then through speaking to them and doing a fetch quest, he gains their support. This leads to the true ending and the final area, because without the support of the other Metal Attacker pilots, there's no way to overcome the final(?) boss. There's even a straight-up friendship speech before the final battle like a magical girl anime.
There's never so much plot that it gets in the way, fortunately. There's much more than in BMZ, and there's a lot of side conversations that I missed because I forgot that it's possible to talk to Eve through the menu until the very end of the game, but it's not overwhelming. BMZ already set the trend by having an in-game plot at all. Compared to that, BMZ2 isn't much different.
Blasting off again!
Blaster Master Zero was a great game, and an excellent update of the NES original to more modern standards of game design, but it was still fenced in by being a remake of the original game. Blaster Master Zero 2 allowed Inti Creates to change the format and do their own thing, and because of that, BMZ2 is a better game. The on-foot sections are far more interesting, the upgrades are better thought out, and there is far less backtracking necessitated by giant mostly-empty levels.
I still love BMZ because I have nostalgia for the old NES game, but if you only want to play one of the two, play this one.
no subject
Date: 2020-May-08, Friday 05:45 (UTC)Mostly I love the frog though LOL.
no subject
Date: 2020-May-08, Friday 18:58 (UTC)The frog in BMZ2 will teleport you back to the Gaia-Sophia even on the overworld! I only figured that out like 80% of the way through the game.