Blaster Master is a platform and run and gun video game released by Sunsoft for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

It is a localized version of a Japanese Famicom game titled Chō Wakusei Senki Metafight (超惑星戦記メタファイト, lit.

The player controls Jason and the tank Sophia the 3rd through eight levels of gameplay to find the whereabouts of Fred and to defeat the mutants and their leader, the Plutonium Boss.

The game takes place on the planet Sophia the 3rd, located near the center of the Epsilon Galaxy, in which an advanced civilization flourished.

In the year 2052 of the space age calendar, the Invem Dark Star Army, led by the universe's most feared tyrant Goez, invade and conquer Sophia the 3rd.

The Science Academy of NORA, a satellite orbiting near Sophia the 3rd that somehow managed to avoid the invasion, built a weapon, an all-purpose tank called the "Metal Attacker", in a last-ditch effort to defeat Goez's army.

[3] The plot of the adapted Western release (Blaster Master) is shown at the beginning in a cinematic slideshow as ominous music plays in the background.

[5] There, he finds an armored tank named SOPHIA THE 3RD – a vehicle designed to battle radioactive mutants that live inside the Earth.

[9] While Jason is inside SOPHIA in the 2D platforming mode, the player can attack the mutants with the main cannon (which can shoot up, left, and right determined by the orientation of the tank) or with one of three special weapons.

[11] The player switches between the 2D platforming mode and the top-down perspective by leaving the tank and entering small doorways located throughout the game.

It was also released in North America for the 3DS on July 24, 2014 (2014-07-24), along with another Sunsoft game, Ufouria: The Saga for the Wii U. Blaster Master was created by Kenji Sada (credited as Senta), who also led the development of The Wing of Madoola and wrote its main code.

The game was made by a part-time development team of about five people, which included team leader and main-programmer Sada, sub-programmer Kenji Kajita (Kanz), character designer Hiroyuki Kagoya (Fanky), art designer Yoshiaki Iwata (PGM F-1), and sound programmer Naohisa Morota (Marumo).

Iwata, who would direct the re-imagining Blaster Master: Overdrive, did the game's opening sequence and designed the map, overall layout, and bosses.

With SOPHIA (the game's vehicle), we wanted to bring to life a sense of action that incorporated all 360° of the environment in a way that players hadn't really experienced up to that point.

Iwata credited him for giving the company a good reputation for video game music in the late 1980s and lamented that "none of those people are working together anymore since they've all separated from Sunsoft [over the years]".

He created the top-down portions to allow Jason to shoot in all directions and to enable the team to "express large bosses that really had an impact".

He did not want to design the gameplay in a linear progression; instead he drew inspiration from and was influenced by Nintendo's Metroid to create a game that allowed players to freely move between levels.

The original staff also omitted a portion of the map in the fourth level in which "the player was forced to control Jason and make a desperate suicide-leap for a ladder suspended in mid-air", after complaints from the U.S.

IGN's Levi Buchanan mentioned the lack of passwords or save features as used in Metroid; the game had to be completed in one sitting.

[14] Buchanan criticized the game for its difficulty in the on-foot portions, saying that the bosses are too difficult to beat, that the enemies regenerate upon re-entering a screen, and that players can lose a life from falling too far in the 2D platforming mode.

[6] Parish criticized the game for having a limited number of continues and for the graphics in the top-down perspective, saying that the display is "incredibly cutesy compared to the tank sections, with the protagonist's head providing about 50% of his total body mass".

[14] Thomas echoed Buchanan's concerns in a later review, adding that this requires players to mentally adjust and to target enemies off-center.

He said:[20]It's kind of funny that the first time I ever really had any sense of the game's success was about 10 years following the original release of Blaster Master, when a young staff member from the U.S. office said something to me like, "You'd definitely have become a super-famous game designer if you were an American".Alex Neuse, creator of the Bit.Trip series, reminisced his memories of playing Blaster Master as a child.

He acknowledged that the game was a clone of Metroid that featured a tank that could jump and a corny storyline, but he said it was all "presented in a way that it felt meaningful".

[56] At the 1992 Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Sunsoft announced that they were planning to develop a sequel for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, but it never came to be.

A re-imagining of the first game, Blaster Master: Overdrive, was released for Nintendo's WiiWare service in North America on February 8, 2010 (2010-02-08).

[59] In November 2016, at the 20th Anniversary Fan Festa event in Ichikawa, Japan, Inti Creates acquired the license of the original Blaster Master game from Sunsoft, and on March 9, 2017, Blaster Master Zero, a retro 8-bit style reboot of the original NES game, was released for the Nintendo 3DS eShop and Nintendo Switch.

[62] Sophia III appears as an unlockable transformation in Shantae: Half-Genie Hero, added as part of an update on July 31, 2018.