As enjoyable as the game is, BlaZeon screams 'wasted potential' on a galactic pitch.
Now I mention the ex-Toaplan Cave in this review because Blaze On feels a lot like a shmup that was INSPIRED by the works of Toaplan, back when they were making relentless shmups that seemed to last for hours thanks to the old antagonists of shmups Dr. Checkpoint System from Hell and Mr. Long-@$$ Levels.
Atlus seemed to look on Toaplan's shooter game tactics and decided to omit the Checkpoint System (Yay!) and replace it with unlimited continues that put you at the beginning of the level you died on (oh...). They also decided to increase the difficulty by making the average long @$$ Toaplan levels and personally lengthening each level to the point where it's the equivalent of film padding. I'm SO glad Cave worked with these guys, even only twice. I might not be the biggest fan of DoDonPachi, but at least a game that kicks your butt every two seconds is more thrilling than two minutes of straight-up inactivity.
Anyway the plot consists of some dumb empire in space that uses Bioroids or BioBots to rule over Earth. Something that warrants a rebellion initiated by people armed with quite possibly the stupidest ship in shoot em' up history on nearly every account, The Garland, so they can go around blasting the Empire to bits and destroying any and all BioBorg factories and thus freeing Earth of the Bio-Bots-droids... something, I dunno, I can't find the manual to the damn game and it's so rare I HAD to get a copy that came without it!
Now gameplay wise, the game is rathe- Wait a minute... what did I just say earlier, about the ship..? Is that REALLY what it's called? The Garland?? What the Hell?!
I know what a Garland is and it is a tasteful name seeing how it reminds me of Lisa Garland, but why? Why Garland? It's not named after anyone like the Sol-Feace, it's not a serial number like the R-9 or the CNCS-1, it doesn't absorb molecules and fires them back in a huge stream of plasmatic/acidic death like the Black Fly, it's not aggressive like the Hunting Dog... Those ship names make sense! But a garland is a sort of wreath that you use to decorate your head for a festivity or a Christmas tree and in this case it's the name of a ship that has the ability to assume control over certain mechs. That doesn't make any sense!!
I can be hard on some horizontal side-scrollers for possessing dumb looking or broken ships in an otherwise dire and intense situation, but the Garland is quite possibly the dumbest of all space-borne horizontal shooters I've ever experienced! Okay, the back and center of the ship doesn't look TOO bad, but the R-Type bubble dome just ruins it, especially when the ship is colored in blue with a pink dome. Sure it comes in two other colors seeing how the color of the ship changes depending on what difficulty you play the game on, but nothing can erase that stupid dome. Not only does The Garland look poor, it handles poorly, too. You'd think a ship this dinky would have some good handling, but this thing is like driving an entire recycling center in the bed of a car-truck.
Now I dunno about you, but I tend to like shmups that give you very little to fight with, but Blaze On is where I draw the line. You get one rapid fire weapon and this little space torpedo called the Tranquilander, a puny little thing that's about as weak as the rapid fire shot. This is where the game's innovation lies however because throughout the game there are certain enemies that you can shoot with the Tranquilander once or a certain number of times until they become immobile, prompting you to float into them and become them!
You have access to a total of seven different mechs... well okay, six mechs and one kamikaze ship that you can experiment with. Each one has different shots and special abilities: the ship you can commander can turn invincible for ten seconds and is extremely fast, the third mech you get comes with two different blasters you can set in different positions and can actually fire through backgrounds (!!), you even get a mech armed with a rapid fire Swirl-Cutter with almost as much power (from Deep Blue)!
However, all of this mech possessing boils down to busy work that will get annoying REALLY fast. Sometimes it's necessary to get through the levels with a certain mech and if you don't play through a level good enough and keep the mech in perfect condition, you're done for, you'll have to start all over again. And sometimes the game will pull a Sol-Feace/Deace on you and will try to kick your @$$ with everything it has the minute get a mech that works. I remember the last level had a mini-boss that knocked me out of my mech in no time sharp (more on that later) and from then on the lower enemies were nice to me, but when I later defeated the mini-boss in the same mech, unharmed, the game started throwing out enemies that hadn't been there previously, some of which required every bomb necessary just to keep them from damaging my mech.
Another problem with the mechs is that it's difficult to tell just how messed up your mech is seeing how your only indication is the actual physical damage it displays once it's hit. It makes sense with the ship you can take-over that it only takes one hit, but with the bigger, clunkier mechs, sometimes it takes three, sometimes it takes five. This may sound like a nit-pick, but it's important to note because you'll constantly encounter moments where you have to decide on which mech to choose for the next mission and when you're in a mech that takes five hits, you'll want to get damaged as soon as possible when you encounter a better mech. But facing a cooler mech you need that stays on-screen for about THREE-SECONDS makes getting out of the old mech and commandeering the new one a very cumbersome experience, especially when the three-second mech takes three punches with the Tranquilander to commandeer. And sometimes that one wily mech won't want to be commandeered by a stupid looking ship and will fight back before completely zipping off-screen, leaving you with one less life and no mech.
As I mentioned, the game borrows a little from Toaplan games in that it pads out levels and the game itself to the point where you could amass the game's total length and realize that it's enough time to make pasta on your own, boil it up and serve it.
From the first level on, there will be moments where the length of the level itself will needlessly spread on without ANYTHING happening or any enemies attacking you. I really have no idea what Atlus was thinking here, I mean the point of a shoot em' up is to throw out some intense action at paces ranging between fast to light speed and to keep the flow of the game going, but there are so many moments in Blaze On that will bore you to death as you sit back waiting for something to happen! I waited for something to happen during the first level after fighting a handful of enemies when the boss alert blared out of the TV and made me jump so high in my seat it hurt when I landed.
Graphics wise, the game isn't too bad. The enemies and player ship aren't anything to write home to, but the backgrounds have plenty of detail with levels 2 and 5 sticking out as thumbs-up worthy graphics with an incredibly good use of color and shading in some areas. There is some slow-down during the action which is typical of virtually every SNES shoot em' up as much as sprite-break-up was with the average Genesis shoot em' up detriment.
However, the graphics can be deceptive. You get access to big, clunky looking mechs that look like they couldn't fit through a gorge and you'll need commandeer these monsters through small spaces that normally only your ship can go through. But don't be fooled: the bottom of most of the big mechs can go through backgrounds and some of the corners and walls to corridors you encounter you can actually go through without damaging your mech. Of course, this is sporadic at times because sometimes this law won't apply to some levels.
With the sound, well, you could do a lot better. I mean, there's not much to say about the sound, it's very minimal, plenty of explosions will beat out other sounds, your ship sounds as pathetic as it looks and handles and the highlight of the sound department is that none of the sounds are annoying, save for maybe your boss alert.
Interestingly enough, the music is what really shines in Blaze On... well, okay, only partly. It's not the best soundtrack in the world, but it shines in areas that makes me wonder how it could've been overlooked after all these years. The path of the soundtrack reads like the final blip of an ECG scan: it starts out small, an increment at best, then it jumps up and stays up for a good long while, then it just flat lines.
The soundtrack starts out with an average adventurous shooter beat and stays that way for every boss fight with an electronic sort of jazz ensemble. Around level 2 the music slowly kicks in with an easy-going Image Fight sort of sound to it, but otherwise it stays very calm and relaxing. Then halfway through level 2, the soundtrack kicks in full-blast intensity and stays that way all the way through level 3! At this point the long, drawn out levels feel shorter and worth going through, the game actually starts feeling like something more and even though the music won't entirely match the action, it just sounds so cool it gets you pumped up and excited... and then you get to level four and it goes back to being a snooze-fest. And it stays that way.
Easily, Blaze On feels a little uninspiring both in level design and in general design. It's bad enough that the game draws out the shooting experience as long as it possibly can, but then there are those moments where a casual glance will remind you of games Blaze On blatantly rips-off, R-Type particularly: The first level FEELS like the first level of an R-Type game, the Garland looks similar to the R9 ships, the enormous, ugly cruise-ship you fight in level 2 looks a lot like the big green cruise ship in R-Type... you even fight an enemy that comes in three parts with cores you have to hit! At least with R-Type clones like Sinistron the similarities stopped after level 1. I really appreciated some of the biologic monsters you face as bosses in this game, they served as the game's bastions of originality at times... even if the fourth level boss looks a little like the final boss to Sinistron.
I have to say right now with this fresh in my head that whenever a boss is nearby, the boss alert comes in. Typical of most shooters, the Garland has a boss alert which consists of a weird alarm noise and in most cases some text saying 'Hey! A the boss is nerby! This is in not similiation! Aim for soft spot and get the beaw power! "That's a gleat job! Arpha Reader!"' Okay, I got carried away with the Engrish there, but you get the idea.
Blaze On however kind of takes this to a new level: every time you encounter a boss, the alert comes up, you get some text... then you warp into hyper drive, complete with big flashing lights and you wind up in a completely different area. I feel like an idiot being perplexed by this, but I REALLY need to ask: WTF???
I'm sure Atlus was going for something different here, but I... I really don't get. Why do you need to go to hyper-drive just to get to the level's boss? Couldn't you just go to hyper drive whenever you wanted to destroy each boss one at a time? That makes more sense! And why are they in completely different places from the levels you were in? Is it really a big deal that there's a stationary boss nearby the level you're currently at? I understand the second level boss seeing how it's guarded by a cruise-ship that sped ahead of you in space, but to warp from one room to the next... it just doesn't make sense!
And I have to admit, I was really upset with the aforementioned level 2 cruise-ship: they made it too easy to destroy! in fact, the damn thing pretty much self-destructs on you in an anti-climactic fashion for no reason. You don't even need to fight back, the damn thing just detaches itself at you as it drifts in space; it's like fighting a model ship made of duct-tape and paper that explodes if you even poked it. Okay, now I'm nit-picking.
Overall, a part of me REALLY liked playing this game. There was something about levels 2 and 3 and some of the boss fights and mini-bosses that made me feel that the game had something really going for it beyond this really long inactive experience in trying to struggle tooth and nail for the mechs that will save your life and the graphics actually help in keeping you glued to the screen for the most part. I mean, I like the game, I REALLY do, but there's so much about it that gets annoying that it's hard to repress your foot from kicking it.
I can't help but see wasted potential in Blaze On between its over-hyped warp-drive cinematic, its fancy backgrounds and ability to control mechs. Maybe if you had more than seven choices of mech, you could have some actual fun with it rather than just finding the mech you need just to get past different parts of each level and fighting for it for every level so long as you don't nod off during one of the many moments you aren't being forced to shoot other ships or even dodge incoming objects. That and the game has the same end result as Sinistron which tells me that the developers must have been too ashamed of themselves for this that they felt it necessary to keep their names as far away from a credits list as possible.
I give it a 6.0 for effort, but technically speaking, BlaZeon is borderline mediocre. Get it if you can find it or if you want to hear three of the coolest SNES shoot em' up songs ever, but try and get it cheap no matter what.