Source: Mega Play – Issue Number 15 – April May 1993
The original Blaster Master was published in 1988 for the NES. The sequel, appropriately titled Blaster Master 2, took a pretty long time to come along. Apparently it was originally intended to be released on the Super Nintendo being mentioned a couple of times in Nintendo Power in 1992. However, it ended up being released on the Sega Genesis in 1993 instead though I have no idea what prompted the platform change.
Blaster Master 2 kept a similar style to the original with both side-scrolling platform parts and overhead view parts. There are more levels and power-ups and of course being on a 16-bit system the graphics and sound were improved. Most of the time you are inside SOPHIA, your robotic tank-like vehicle, however, you can jump out as an armored Jason (the protagonist) at any time.
As with most action games, the plot is pretty simple. Your goal is to defeat the Plutonium Boss who is apparently back trying to destroy the Earth. You (Jason) were knocked unconscious and parts of SOPHIA were stolen for his robotic army. After redesigning (and rebuilding) SOPHIA, it’s off to battle.
Blaster Master 2 is a pretty good sequel and if you like the original, there’s no reason you shouldn’t like this one. It doesn’t deviate a lot from the original design. Just new levels and a few new game play elements along with some different power-ups. But when the original game is good, what more do you need? For whatever reason, this one didn’t seem to have the popularity of the original though. Maybe that’s just my perception because of marketing. I seem to remember seeing commercials involving the original Blaster Master.
While most people probably think of this as the second game in the series, that’s not quite the case. RoboWarrior came a year earlier and while it doesn’t exactly fit in the Blaster Master series, a lot of the game mechanics were borrowed for Blaster Master. Also, before Blaster Master 2 came along, Blaster Master Boy was released for the Game Boy in 1991. Interestingly, this is a sequel to RoboWarrior as opposed to being a sequel to Blaster Master. There have also been a number of additional sequels throughout the years, sometimes with big gaps between them. These include Blaster Master: Enemy Below for the Game Boy Color released in 2000, Blaster Master: Blasting Again for the PlayStation released in 2001, Blaster Master: Overdrive for the Wii Virtual Console released in 2010, Blaster Master Zero for the Nintendo 3DS and Switch released in 2017 (and later for Windows, PS4 and Xbox One), Blaster Master Zero 2 for the Nintendo Switch, Windows, PS4, and Xbox One released in 2019-2021, and Blaster Master Zero 3 released in 2021 for the Switch, PS4 and Windows.
However, if you want to play Blaster Master 2, as far as I know, the original Genesis version is all that there is. So you will either have to track down an original copy…or make do with emulation.
