The game’s mechanical designs were handled by Mika Akitaka, best remembered today for his work on Martian Successor Nadesico, but also responsible for the original MS Girls phenomenon of the late ‘80s. This worked out well, as Sunrise had been interested in working on a project utilizing computer graphics. Regardless, all three were too busy to take on the project and Square ultimately just collaborated with Sunrise. According to the second issue of Challenge!! Pasocon ADV & RPG, originally Square had been considering collaborating with Buichi Terasawa ( Cobra), Yasuhiko Yoshikazu ( Mobile Suit Gundam, Venus Wars), or Hayao Miyazaki for the game’s animation, although it’s unclear if they were planning to deal with those creators directly or with them and Sunrise. Mechanical design and animation for Blassty were handled by Sunrise, a production studio that was riding the ‘80s giant robot wave by having a hand in nearly every major mecha show of the era. It was remade for the Super Famicom in 2000, well after the release of that system’s successor, the Nintendo 64. It used a specialized chip for its detailed graphics and came out so late in the Famicom’s life cycle that the Super Famicom had already been released. One noticeable exception to this was Metal Slader Glory by HAL Laboratory, released for the Famicom. That style of game was well-suited to emulating anime, however, as it had the detail and fidelity to replicate hand drawn animation. As a result, adventure games were commonplace on PCs, with impressive graphics that were big on detail. PC hardware of the era was better suited for displaying detailed, but largely static, images rather than the numerous sprites necessary for traditional action games like you’d find on the Nintendo Famicom (NES). The popularity of mecha anime served as inspiration for numerous games during the 1980s, although hardware performance typically limited how well they emulated their video inspiration. That’s certainly not an ideal format for a game about fast-moving robots in space, but the limited movement in space is explained with the existence of “anti-matter” meteors that hinder your movement. The game centers on a space station called Ondina and a rebellion against the organization that runs it named the “Commune.” Bounty hunter Inker Mars pilots the titular mecha through a series of battles, both inside the station and in space, that look a lot like Wizardry and every other “3D” dungeon crawling game of the time. Despite some impressive graphics, Blassty’s dungeon-style gameplay didn’t match its outer space sci-fi setting and three decades later it proves to be exceptionally difficult game to recommend playing. Efforts to replicate the look of contemporary anime in video games during the ‘80s were inherently limited, as rudimentary graphics couldn’t quite match the over-the-top animation of the era – but if anyone was going to do it, surely it’d be those two companies, right?Ĭruise Chaser Blassty was released in 1986, when the pasocon were basic and Square was largely known for Japanese PC games like The Death Trap. In retrospect, combining the mecha animation prowess of Nippon Sunrise ( Mobile Suit Gundam, Fang of the Sun Dougram, Space Runaway Ideon) with the game design talent of Square ( Bushido Blade, Front Mission, Final Fantasy), seems like a wonderful idea. It wasn’t just the involvement of a legendary animation studio and staff that would go on to create one of the biggest game franchises in history, but it became more than just a game and seemed destined for more. Plenty of video games in the 1980s borrowed the look and style of contemporary anime, but Cruise Chaser Blassty was unusual.
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