My playthrough of Inti’s Mega Man successors led into this, since it was also released recently and features Gunvolt as a guest character (although I didn’t use him). Lacking in experience with the series though I am, it seems a successful reboot of what was good about the original game.

Blaster Master has had several instalments over the years but the first one on NES is the best remembered, naturally. It’s also the best, by all accounts, and Zero seems to be drawing from it for the most part. Enemy sprites, general structure, and level design elements are borrowed directly but many layers of tightening, expansion, and polish by Inti makes Zero feel modern and fresh. The faux-8-bit style may seem played out this point but it’s very well done here and seems natural given how much Zero is leaning on its source.

I’m tickled by how the plot seems to make an attempt to reconcile or at least reference the various canons the series built up early on: the original Japanese Famicom game is quite different from its localised release, which was then adapted to a novelisation whose lore supposedly fed into the sequel. Zero makes the silly story about a boy and his frog fit into a cool sci-fi technoworld, losing some of the piss-take quality but gaining coherence.

But anyway, what is this game? It’s a sidescrolling light Metroidvania where you’re a tank, but in the way that The Guardian Legend had segments of a quite different genre, Blaster Master has you hopping out of your tank to take on short overhead-view dungeons as a powersuit man. This man is quite vulnerable in the tank sections but you’re cleverly required to traverse this way sometimes. In the overhead sections he quickly becomes a beast as you upgrade his gun, with each upgrade step having a quite different effect—but get hit and you lose a notch of gun power as well as health. The difficulty ramps up in the last few areas but is always manageable, especially if you take the time to get optional upgrades.

The spritework is just lovely, as expected of our friends at Inti Creates. The chiptunes too are pleasing. As with Mighty Gunvolt Burst, there are DLC characters for this game; this time there are guests from other franchises. I managed to get Shantae and Shovel Knight during their free period, but after playing the game in its default state, I didn’t feel the desire to do it all over again, especially because the game is designed around Jason (the aforementioned man) so the others felt a little weird. Anyway, the final area and climax are so cool and fun that going back to the start felt it would undercut my enjoyment of the arc that had been getting to that point. Recommended!