Ray Series/YMMV


 * Crowning Music of Awesome: Especially the soundtrack to Crisis.
 * Genius Bonus: If you're good at history of the Roman Empire, you'll understand a lot more about RayStorm, including the bosses and the storyline.
 * Most Annoying Sound: If you're not very good at RayCrisis's Special Mode, the Encroachment meter will often spike above 90%, resulting in repeated alerts of "Encroachment over 90%!"
 * Narm: The Japanese version of RayCrisis has one of the bosses named "Sem-Slut", renamed to "Sem-Strut" in the English localization. This wasn't the case with the European PC port.
 * Porting Disaster: RayForce's (Layer Section) PC port is serviceable, but it comes with some glaring problems that has gotten worse over time. One of them being the game screen itself, which has been reduced to a square to fit in a 4:3 aspect ratio that was never intended for the game, making the game harder than it should since you can't anticipate oncoming enemies or lock-on to them as efficiently as you could in the arcade, console, and mobile version. Unlike the PC ports of its sequels, the fullscreen scaling does not work properly on newer Windows operating systems and 16:9 monitors, which often results a smaller screen size with color distortion despite being running in 640×480. Another game-breaking issue is the game's speed, where it plays ridiculously fast on faster computers to the point of it being unplayable. While the latter can be addressed with a simple .dll fix if you have the game disc, but fullscreen issue can only fixed by a third-party program DirectX wrapper such as DXGL to play the game with proper scaling. Other problems includes missing effects and backgrounds, some of the music tracks don't play at all (such as the Game Over music), and you don't have the disc into your CD drive, then enjoy playing the game with no music at all.
 * The Sega Saturn port of RayStorm (Layer Section II) introduces some novelties it has over the PlayStation version, such as new CGI cinematics in between stages and a playable R-GRAY 0 outside of 13-Plane Mode, but due to the Saturn's notorious 3D handicap, the graphics were understandably downgraded but its biggest problem was its frame-rate, which bogs down substantially when the action intensifies and can cause input lag.
 * Scrappy Mechanic:
 * Only one word for RayCrisis -- "Encroachment".
 * Working Designs did a bit of Easy-Mode Mockery and Difficulty by Region for RayStorm's PS1 port. First, the default difficulty has been bumped from 2 in the Japanese version to 4. Second, if you set any stage's difficulty below 4, the game puts you in "Training Mode", which ends the game after Stage 4. The game lets you set Stages 5-8 to below level 4 difficulty, but in a display of oversight on Working Design's part, you will still be denied entry to those stages. In other words, it's Streets of Rage 3 all over again.
 * That One Attack: The tricky-to-dodge "Taito Homing Lasers", which have also appeared in the Darius series.