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Asset Store:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/33631

More of our assets: http://u3d.as/cxf

News: Demo video of soft-edge version of the shader is live now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB4cQ9Ce4_U

No Unity Pro so no heat haze filter otherwise the effect would look even better. The "bloom" effect primally comprises of 2 oversized additive glow textures controlled via particle system.

Performance on older platforms has been taken into consideration so the particle rate and texture resolution of this effect are relatively low compared to those in modern console or desktop games. The whole effect was assembled in Unity Free with no additional asset except for the dissolve shader which is written by my colleague. Cloud texture was just edited from my cloudy sky photo shot with my mobile phone.

The fiery/cloudy texture disperses because the dissolve shader dictates the visibility (only 0 and 1) of each pixel of the texture if its alpha passes the cutout threshold. The cutout transition is controlled via alpha in "color over life" of the particle system which otherwise determines the opacity in other shaders. This has few major advantages over the conventional additive and alpha blend shaders:
1) It can replace animated texture in order to emulate the effect of dissolution which otherwise would be done with multiple frames in Photoshop. Without animated texture the resolution of the base texture can be larger because only 1 image is used. Also you can freely apply slow motion without worrying the incoherence of animated texture.
2) Fading visibility of the fiery texture with additive shader is simply blurry and unrealistic. This is the very reason that the fire effect doesn't look impressive in most games without good animated fiery texture. Dissolve shader allows a more "solid" texture fading.
3) The effect looks abundant with just one or few particles with the right kind of texture because during the dissolution it gives the impression of more particles composing the effect.

Sadly texture cutout/clipping performs badly on mobile platforms due to GPU limitations.

Textures and shaders:
Circular glow - conventional additive (128 × 128 px)
Cloud (billboard) - dissolve alpha blend unlit (256 × 256 px)
Looping cloud (for sphere) - dissolve alpha blend unlit (256 × 256 px)

Particle composition and count:
-Camera of higher depth, depth only-
Medium orange glow for light ray, stretched × 10
Full screen orange glow × 1
Medium large orange glow × 1
-Main camera-
Small orange glow for flying sparks, stretched by speed × 15
Orange cloud × 6
Dark brown cloud × 3
Orange looping cloud on sphere mesh × 2

Unity web player (with sound effect):
http://www.geocities.jp/ifurkend/unity/magic_attack_fire3.html

Older version without camera pan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1uO3QCY0Sc

Fire and Fire 2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J278KNxx_9Y