YMMV / Aero Fighters

• Awesome Music: The boss theme from Aero Fighters 3. It starts off with Gratuitous English lyrics that make as much sense as they are intelligible, and then turns into a bass-thumping drum-and-bass piece with generous use of Amen break to set the mood for destroying a large battleship/tank/whatever.
  Hey you idiot!
  Make a move or you will be finished
  Show me all you've go-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-t!!
• Demonic Spiders: In Assault, the Rafale and EFA enemy planes. The Rafale is the enemy version of your FS-X, meaning it has the Ninja Beam and excellent dogfighting ability. It can give you a headache if it chooses to engage you, or you do so and lose sight of it. The EFA has Phoenix missiles, meaning it can be quite dangerous to your team as a whole if it gets more than one in its sights, as well as being as maneuverable as the Rafale.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: While the games aren't necessarily bad, they are better known for the pilots' hilarious and sometimes nonsensical lines and conversations between stages.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Spanky. Most people's reason for giving the franchise a look is because they heard a talking dolphin is among the cast.
  • Mao Mao is yet another one, to the point where she has several Image Songs.
• Game-Breaker: Assault takes this to a 3-dimension level:
  • The Ninja Beam does insane amounts of damage. In a Boss Game where one of these will leave most bosses half-dead, or damn near One-Hit Kill it. In multiplayer, this can One-Hit Kill your opponents.
  • Spanky's plane's main gun, the "Beam Sabre", which is essentially a weaker Ninja Beam with infinite ammo and shorter range.
  • Glenda in single-player only. For a Boss Game, bosses are nearly immobile and Glenda has all the tools to go straight to them and defeat them quickly. Her great defense not only makes her resistant to attacks, but completion with high health increases point score enough to unlock the 1st bonus stage and going straight to bosses quickly with less chance of death unlocks the 2nd bonus stage. Her 30 MM gun having no recoil allows her to destroy the lesser enemies quickly, quickly interrupts air pilot fights if your teammates are in the defensive (especially in the Antarctica mission that is just the air pilot fight and no giant boss), and continuously do damage to bosses. Her rockets, while not homing and her only weakness, still hits the bosses and does great damage. Her special weapon (FAE) is the ace of it all, doing great damage to bosses and everything else around it. Most will choose her just to complete the game and unlock Spanky quickly.
• Goddamned Bats: The F-22As in Assault main game, wherein they are quite fast, loving to fly outside your range and then coming to bombard you head on. They also have a built-in stealth factor that prevents missile lock until you get pretty close. Which is, of course, AI-only.
• Good Bad Bugs: In 3, if you play as Mao Mao and hold down the bomb button, the time stop will occur as usual...but the five-orb spread she fires out will remain in place around her ship until you let go of the button, letting you save it up for a later attack.
• Good Bad Translation: Lots of them.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In the second game, one level you can visit New York City and destroy the World Trade Center for points. Yikes!
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The Aero Fighters series share many similarities with its Spiritual Successor series Strikers 1945, made by former Video System staff at Psikyo. Both series feature a Reformulated Game of the second entry on a competing system (Aero Fighters Special on Sony ZN-1; Strikers 1945 Plus on Neo Geo), and a third game featuring completely different planes (World War II fighters in Aero Fighters 3; modern fighters in Strikers 1945 III)
• Memetic Mutation:
  Spanky: "I never thought I'd be frying over a jungle."
• Narm: The bad guys organization in Assault have the less than threatening name Phutta Morgana.
• Quirky Work: Mainly because of the huge contrast. The characters and some of the final bosses are wacky, but the rest of the game looks like any other generic military shoot'em up.
• Sequelitis: Aerofighters Assault features none of the quirks and jokes from the Shoot 'Em Up games aside from returning characters and Call-Back Final Boss, the game wasn't even made by the original developers, and the game plays like a poor man's Ace Combat with poor controls and terribly hard difficulty. It received mediocre-to-low overall reviews.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • The first Aero Fighters was one to Turbo Force.
  • After the first game was released, its director Shin Nakamura left Video System over Creative Differences (Nakamura wanted to keep making vertical shmups in the traditional 3:4 aspect ratio, while Video System wanted to focus on the Neo Geo which only supported a standard 4:3 aspect ratio) and founded Psikyo, which used Aero Fighters as the blueprint for the many vertically-scrolling shmups it would release until its bankruptcy in 2001. Psikyo's first two games, Sengoku Ace and Gunbird were especially similar to Aero Fighters as they retained the mechanic of the highest power-up level having limited ammo.
• That One Boss: In Assault, the Spriggan and the Fortress, both being Damage Sponge Bosses as well as Mighty Glaciers.
  • The Spriggan is made hard primarily because of its accompanying enemy aircraft which will annoy you all throughout the level, as well as the time ticking by and how you'll be hit hard and mercilessly by its weapons if you aren't smart about it.
  • The Fortress is extremely resilient, and protected by a ton of Anti-Air emplacements, making a head-on attack suicidal. It also has enemy aircraft around, like always. Even if/when you take everything out but the boss, remember the Fortress itself is target-less once its adjacent SAM sites are gone. In other words, you have to manually aim your weapons at it, and at a specific area to boot. This makes your missiles (the best and usually your main way to kill enemies) virtually useless..
• That One Level: In Assault, the Air Battle and Fortress levels.
  • Air Battle is annoying because the best way to finish it quickly is to damage the boss as much as possible before it fully spreads its wings, as it won't fire back until it does. The problem is that there's lots of B-22s shooting at anything above their altitude level, and several enemy aircraft trying to kill your team, with there being at least 2 F-22As. If you ignore them, you'll find yourself eating a lot of bullets from one tailing you, and your team can easily be picked off without your support. If you go for them and don't down them quickly, you'll find yourself hard pressed for time to kill the boss before it destroys New York.
  • Fortress, meanwhile, gives you 15 minutes to destroy the Fortress, which may not be a lot of time. Going straight for the boss is suicide, since there's a TON of SAM sites around it that will shred you to pieces quickly if you don't pick them off one by one outside their targeting range. There's, of course, aircraft around to delay you. And when you DO destroy every SAM site around the boss, you'll find there's no target to lock on to—The boss is right there alright, but you can't lock onto it, meaning missile types where the damage done is reliant on lock-on are made virtually useless (for reference, most of your characters suffer from this problem; Glenda doesn't because her Rockets don't lock on, and Volk because his is just one missile, locked-on or not). To make matters worse, although the Fortress won't shoot back once it has no more SAM sites, it is very, very, VERY resistant to damage, meaning you may find yourself pressed for time if you don't do everything up to this point effectively. And if you do run out of time, no worries, you don't get a Game Over... The Fortress will simply shoot at you. With Ninja Beams. Repeatedly. The sad thing is, it can easily kill you with just one.
• Watch It for the Meme: The game is pretty standard as far as vertically-scrolling shooters go; it's instead best known for having dialogue for every possible combination of pilots available, sometimes due to amusing premise (you have a dolphin for a fighter pilot and that's just one tip of the iceberg), sometimes due to questionable translation quality.