Game:

Blast Wind (1997)

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This month's shmup year on the Junkies discord is 1997, and in the list is Blast Wind. I already tried the game and enjoyed it but never tried to clear it even though it is very accessible in Normal difficulty. So why not go for it? In this run I also didn't mess with the side paths and focused on a "default" path by not touching the route switch panels, so this is quite a vanilla clear of sorts.

This only took me around 2 hours of attempts, and I can imagine some better players will clear even faster. It wasn't very demanding, but it was pretty fun. The music is really good (Stage 1 and the ending are probably my favorite themes), and while the weapon system is nothing original, it does the job and the homing VS forward shot reminds me a bit of Eschatos' simplicity. More noticeable and actively enjoyable than the CAVE shot-laser if you ask me! The system even gets a little extra boost of satisfaction factor thanks to the powerup attack that lets you ram enemies and blast them while invincible. Very cool idea, I dig it!

I always thought Thunder Force games felt like crap to play and there was no real hook to get into them, but Tecnosoft shows with this game that they can make something both cool and enjoyable, instead of wanting to be cool and actually not enjoyable to play. Dying may cost bombs but at least the power recovery is usually not a pain in the ass. It's also a pretty short shmup which is perfectly fitting for the kind of over-the-top loud action the game wants to embody.

Now I gotta say the final boss is kinda dumb as it takes up such a huge amount of space on the screen. Crappy games love to have those, but since this is not supposed to be one, I was a bit surprised. Well, nothing you can't work around with bringing lives and bombs, but still, that's a band-aid solution lol.

I am also playing the relatively recent EN translation patch that adds an EN voiceover to the intro and redubs the final boss intro speech to be much less garbled. But the main reason I went for it is that it rebalances the music! As per terrible tradition in shmupdev land, the OG game had the sound effect overpower the god-tier OST and completely disrespect mankind's sense of hearing. I absolutely fucking loathe how common annoyingly loud SFX are in shmups, it's a goddamn travesty. Two decades after the original release of the game, it's finally possible to enjoy the music even when some explosions are occurring. It's still not perfect...but it's loads better.

EN patch from : https://segaxtreme.net/resources/blast-wind-english-translation.327/
Played on Mednafen