Blazing Star is a shoot 'em up video game developed by Yumekobo and published by SNK in 1998 for the Neo Geo arcade and home systems.

It has received greater recognition in retrospective reviews when re-released on smartphones and home consoles through the ACA Neo Geo series.

[1] The story revolves around cyborgs that, remembering their humanity, team up to destroy artificial intelligence systems developing the cybernetic armies they were once a part of.

Upon releasing the fire button during a charge, it will unleash a powerful focused shot which can also be dispersed to cover a large area with smaller bullets.

[3] Blazing Star was the first game developed by Yumekobo, a company formerly known as Aicom but rebranded to mark their new direction of working closely with SNK.

[2] Initial discussions began with the concept for a follow-up to their shooter Pulstar,[4] however they wanted their new game to maintain a degree of independence from the original.

[4][5] With significant changes made to the gameplay style and setting, the team treated their new game as a gaiden and did not want to use Pulstar in the title.

[6] The publisher SNK entered the dispute, saying they did not want Yumekobo's new shooter to be associated to Pulstar in the west because it received poor reception there due to its high difficulty.

The artists had to overcome challenges creating the textures, animation, and reducing the sprites to 16 colors each due to Neo Geo hardware limitations.

[11] The smartphone versions include multiplayer support via Bluetooth and a practice mode that lets the player start from any stage they have cleared.

[16] A port developed by DotEmu for Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux and asm.js was released by SNK Playmore as part of the Humble NEOGEO 25th Anniversary Bundle on December 15, 2015.

[18] Critics commended Blazing Star as a testament to SNK's devotion to the Neo Geo hardware and keeping classic genres such as shoot 'em ups alive.

"[19] Reviewing the Arcade Archives release, Nintendo Life called it a "perfect port", noting that it even retained the frame rate slowdown when the screen is filled with sprites.

Their biggest complaints were the game's aged pre-rendered graphics and the sharp difficulty increase in the latter stages, but they felt these were minor issues.