My final 1cc score https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1156847812378628116/1208187784972607588/image.png

I was very up and down with this game tbh but I can safely say the best ship in the game is the R-Type ship since it lets you save a lot of mental energy from dodging. Using it immensely improved my enjoyment of the game, along with finding some jank ass hiding spots for bullets.

I don't have a huge amount to say about this game ig. I wish there were extends, but it took me under 10 hours which is smol potatoes for an arcade shmup. The pre-rendered aesthetic was really cool and showcased the power of the Neo Geo, but I was creeped out by the Angelfire/Geocities era baby dancing gif that was the final boss lmao.

Also my favourite detail was how the stage 6 boss was visible in the very first screen of the game! I love when games do this.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1156847687476457492/1208188110412849223/image.png
https://youtu.be/8f8i3QfQu_0?t=576

The main problem is how unbalanced the game is. Some ships are just straightup better than others, and the first 5 stages are extremely easy while the last 2 take a LOT of practice and esoteric strategies. It's really weird how the objective best way to beat the game for survival is to avoid as many items as possible and how there are invisible bullets at a high enough rank, it really feels like an unpolished gem. A diamond in the rough game for sure. In a more tightly designed game, there would be extends so that the player would be encouraged to hit a nice risk and reward spot between getting a lot of points for extra lives but not too many points so the enemies were too hard.

Oh and for the love of god please use this romhack and don't play the game on Fightcade or GOG lol
https://www.arcade-projects.com/threads/blazing-star-special-hack-no-bonus-sound.19817/

I love Blazing Star a little more every time I play it. Peak late 90's shmup atmosphere coupled with an excess of engrish that goes around to being hilariously charming in how much the game tries to positively encourage good plays and talks shit about you playing badly lmao.

It helps that Blazing Star has a great scoring system too. The two main aspects of scoring in Blazing Star are using charge shots to build up multipliers and medal chaining. These two aspects compliment each other really well, even in the later parts of the game where the bosses get shamelessly brutal. There's always opportunities to cash in on charge shot multipliers and the medal chaining meets a perfect middle ground of being stimulating but not overly unforgiving. If you really want to flex you can also use the event items at opportune times to get massive multipliers on enemies that you destroy, which can give you some comical jumps in score if timed correctly. (like one of the stage 6 boss enemies who gives over 6 million points if destroyed with a maxed out event item active).

Another thing people should probably know about Blazing Star before playing is that yes, it does have a rank (dynamic difficulty) system, which you'll probably want to manage in survival play. That said, the rank system feels unintrusive for the most part, the main things to keep in mind are to not pick up power up (p) items when you're already at max power and to avoid the "LUCKY" letter items, as both of these will increase your rank significantly for little payoff in regards to score. A cool thing about this though is that higher rank does mean that bosses and larger enemies will spawn more destructible parts, which can lead to higher multipliers and more medals spawning, so Blazing Star encourages you to push the rank as much as you can for score play in a way that feels more natural than most other shmups of its era.

So yeah, Blazing Star is pretty much everything I look for in a retro shmup. It manages to transcend the roots of its predecessor Pulstar - a pretty generic and unassuming R-type clone, and instead is much more of its own thing, that keeps me coming back for more with its variety of good player ships, great scoring system and whacky but also cool presentation.