Raiden Fighters/YMMV
- Awesome Music: As forgettable as most of the music is in the series, there are a few fan-favorite songs. Most notable is the final stage of the first Raiden Fighters, unofficially titled "Invade Your Mind".
- Demonic Spiders: Sniper Tanks.
- Even Better Sequel: Raiden Fighters 2 and Raiden Fighters Jet.
- Game Breaker: The Slave ship, with its tiny hitbox and incredible firepower, is the ship of choice for the high score leaderboards everywhere.
- Some consider the Judge Spear itself to be a Game Breaker. Fully power it up and give it a Slave formation that makes up for its lack of defensive spread, and you can easily tear through large enemies (and earn QUICK SHOT! bonuses that most other ships would find impossible to earn) and bring down bosses in very little time.
- Better yet, Judge Spear Slave, so that the Slave with its high damage and and small hitbox inherits the Judge Spear's ridiculously powerful bomb and fast movement speed.
- Some consider the Judge Spear itself to be a Game Breaker. Fully power it up and give it a Slave formation that makes up for its lack of defensive spread, and you can easily tear through large enemies (and earn QUICK SHOT! bonuses that most other ships would find impossible to earn) and bring down bosses in very little time.
- Good Bad Bugs: The Fairy in the second entry is still able to graze and fire while firing her flamethrower bomb. Some players exploit this for extra points or take advantage of the long invincibility time. This got nerfed with reduced power and duration in Raiden Fighters Jet, naturally.
- Memetic Mutation: "Falsificare", a shmup lingo term born of a Troll's comments (and the ensuing responses) claiming that Raiden Fighters Aces's 100,000,000-point achievement is impossible to obtain in the US version, never mind replays of US version players proving otherwise.
- Said troll has made so many attempts at preaching their case in different sites, you could make a drinking game out of it. Heck, it'd be simpler to list where they haven't posted yet.
- Scrappy Mechanic: Goddamned Micluses!
- That One Boss: Raiden Fighters Jet has several. Red Eye, the final boss of the second game, reappears as the final boss of the neutral stage path, and difficult as it was in the second game. Most notorious is the first boss of Phase 2, which is a giant tank that moves extremely fast, floods the screen with very slow bullets, and fires off almost undodgeable bullet spam if you destroy its forms at the wrong time.
- Tier-Induced Scrappy:
- Raiden mk-II and Raiden mk-II Beta. The former is more infuriating by being slower than in the Raiden series. The Beta is faster, but has a very crappy Bomb and no rapid-firing capabilities.
- The Endeavor in the first game fits this trope to a T. Sure it has an instant-charge Laser special and the only subweapon that can absorb enemy fire, but its main gun has a very low rate of fire and its Laser weapon does not cover the front of the craft.
- The developers probably realized how much the Endeavor was reviled in general that, in a cameo appearance in Raiden Fighters 2, enemy tanks refused to run over a bunch of them sitting on an airstrip.
- On the high-tier side of things, the Slave, which is so overpowered that there's just no point to using the other ships unless you want to compete on ship-filtered leaderboards.