For YMMV exclusive to the Blaster Master Zero trilogy, click here for I, here for II, and here for III.
- Adaptation Displacement: When the PS1 sequel Blaster Master: Blasting Again was released in Japan, instead of following the original Metafight plot, it actually followed the plot of the American version.
- Anti-Climax Boss: Enemy Below's third boss. Considering he was fairly hard in the first game... Here, he's a complete joke and can be dispatched without him getting a single hit against you.
- Awesome Music: The first game has lots of it, such as this frenetic, yet catchy tune
from Area 7, the classic theme from Area 1, and the Area 3 techno theme. - Contested Sequel: Every game released between the NES original and Zero ended up being this. 2 is considered to be outright bad, Jr. isn't truly a part of the series, Enemy Below is sometimes seen as too similar to the original, Blasting Again is an okay-but-not-great Video Game 3D Leap, and Overdrive suffers from the limitations of WiiWare (mainly in asset reuse). They still have their fans, but the NES game and the Zero series are much more popular.
- Cult Classic: Although it's not as well known as some of the bigger hits on the system, the original NES title is one of the most beloved video games out there. The sequels before Zero... Well, not so much.
- First Installment Wins: For a long time, the only game in the series that got major recognition was the first game, both in its NES form and as the semi-remake Zero. It wasn't until Zero II that a game with completely new content managed to stand out on its own.
- Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
- Metafight is not particularly well-remembered in Japan, probably due to the somewhat non-linear action-based gameplay. For the same reason, Blaster Master is beloved by gamers who cut their teeth in the NES era, as the game practically out-Metroided the original Metroid. The awesome tunes helped this.
- This is so fantastically prominent that while Metafight practically fell by the wayside, America got a UK-developed exclusive sequel, a novelization, inspired several Game Boy ports, and by the time the Blasting Again rolled around, the American plotline superceded the Japanese one, even in Japan. And the game got a re-release on the Virtual Console due to, you guessed it, American pressure.
- Interestingly, the remake of the original by Inti Creates, Blaster Master Zero, quite clearly uses the Blaster Master name and aspects of the Blaster Master NES story, but in an entirely new continuity closer in tone to Metafight - for instance, Jason is a robotics engineer who has the design of Kane Gardner from Metafight, Fred is an alien creature rather than a normal frog, humanity has been driven underground for a time by an ice age before they came back to the surface and restored it, and Eve is present with the design of Dr. Jennifer Cornet from the original Metafight.
- Good Bad Bugs:
- The "grenade-pause" trick in the first game.
- The UK version of the original is horribly glitched; pausing can negate Fall Damage, getting trapped in a wall now shoots you upwards, and combining these two with the door glitch allows you to complete the game without fighting the first seven bosses and leaving SOPHIA at the start of the game.
- Hilarious in Hindsight: Sunsoft's April Fools' Day prank for 2010 was Blaster Master: Destination Fred, a Retraux adventure where Jason spends the entire game trying to stop an infection spreading through his dearest companion caused by the previous game's boss. Blaster Master Zero II had a different Jason doing the same for his companion Eve 9 years later, though he wouldn't have to go through a "Fantastic Voyage" Plot to cure her.
- Player Punch: The seventh boss battle, if one reads the aforementioned Scholastic Publishing tie-in, becomes one, as it turns out that the boss is Jason's escaped pet frog, Fred. But when you beat the game, you see Jason and Fred sitting on SOPHIA's roof watching the enemy's stronghold crumble, so either Fred turned back to normal after being defeated and the game never bothered to show it or neither of the frog bosses was Fred and Jason found him somewhere between beating the final boss and escaping the enemy stronghold. The Worlds of Power novelization explains that the frog boss' appearance was merely a disguise, meant to torment Jason psychologically. The real Fred was alive and well.
- Sequelitis: Blaster Master 2 is notoriously bad, to the point where it just feels like a cash-in on the original game's success. The games that followed weren't nearly as terrible, but fell into So Okay, It's Average territory until Zero.
- Signature Scene: Even people who've never played it remember SOPHIA III's initial start up. Zero replicates that as well as doing one for SOPHIA Zero before the True Final Boss. Zero III replicates the shot during the true ending sequence.
- So Bad, It's Good: The English voice acting in Blasting Again is incredibly bad; the characters sound like they're reading off the script 90% of the time and fail to put in the correct emotions (or correct amount of emotions) in virtually every cutscene. It gets to the point where the voice acting passes Narm territory and loops back around to comical.
- So Okay, It's Average: Part of the reason the pre-Zero sequels aren't particularly well remembered is that they weren't really outstanding in any degree like the NES game was. Sure, they're far from terrible games, but they aren't great either.
- That One Boss: In the first game, the sixth and seventh bosses. Not to mention the fifth boss if you didn't enter his room with your gun fully powered-up.
- That One Level: The bulk of Area 5 as until you get the dive upgrade, you have to traverse the level out of your tank and avoid enemies. It's telling that Zero had a Fandom Nod where Jason just at the first screen says This Is Gonna Suck word for word.
- Tough Act to Follow: Several attempts to replicate the success of the original Blaster Master were made, but none succeeded until Zero came along decades later.
- Woolseyism:
- The Famicom version, Chō Wakusei Senki (Super Planetary War Chronicle) Metafight had a pretty standard space opera plot and setting. The game was set in the distant future on an alien planet and instead of a young boy looking for his missing frog, the main character was a space soldier sent to destroy an alien overlord. However, most of the plot is detailed only in the manual and only the opening and ending are actually different.
- The name of Metafight's planet, "Sophia III", being given to the Metal Attacker tank in the American release, making the Cool Tank even cooler.
Worlds of Power
- Complete Monster: The Plutonium Boss is a sadistic Planetary Parasite who feeds on a planet's radiation. Ingraining itself into a planet's core and slowly killing it as it feasts on the core's radiation, once the Plutonium Boss has had its fill, it arises from the ground and annihilates everyone on the planet. Doing this to Eve's home planet Signar-el before moving on to Earth, the Plutonium Boss experiments on organisms to make them its mutated warriors, including a teenage human named Alex. Kidnapping Eve to lure Jason Frudnick and Alex to its lair, the Plutonium Boss reveals to the trio the Psychlotron machine, which will speed up both the feeding process and the destruction of Earth at a much faster rate.
