Raiden/YMMV


 * Crowning Music of Awesome: Starting with "Gallantry", the music of the first game's Stage 1.
 * Most of the music in IV are remixes from the first two games. They are awesome.
 * Demonic Spiders: Tanks, but only when the Dynamic Difficulty gets pumped up. They will shoot a fast and accurate shot as soon as they enter the screen, and is probably one of the main causes of Yet Another Stupid Death.
 * Porting Disaster: The SNES version of Raiden Trad has terrible graphics, ton of slowdowns and arbitrary changes to the gameplay.
 * Serial Numbers Filed Off: The first game is in many ways a retread of the earlier Toaplan shmup Twin Cobra. The homing missiles also seem to have taken their trajectory routines from Toaplan's Slap Fight/ALCON. On top of that, "Gallantry", the song for stages 1 and 4, shares a phrase with "Mystic Green" from Toaplan's Hellfire, and "Lightning War" (2 and 7) sounds like an extended version of the second half of "Against the Attack", the st. 2 song of Flying/Sky Shark by...Toaplan, again. The first Raiden was, basically, a doujin of Toaplan precepts.
 * They Changed It Now It Sucks: The Proton Laser in III. Instead of being purple and twirling all over the damn place, it's green and only swings from left to right depending on the player's movement. (At least it dependably got foes behind that big vessel...) The outcry was such that in Raiden IV, you get to choose between the Plasma Laser and a triple-beam (and purple) version of the Proton Laser.
 * On the other hand, the way the Plasma Laser coils in IV is dissimilar to previous editions. The suspicion among some fans is that Seibu had simply lost the original algorithms, and only created the Proton Laser the way they did because of that.