YMMV / Contra III: The Alien Wars

• Game-Breaker: The most powerful weapons in the game include the Laser Gun, which fires at a slow rate but pierces through enemies and kills bosses faster; and the Fire Gun, which does high damage to enemies and kills bosses in seconds if you aim at their weak spots, which is easier since it can get past parts of the enemy that normally block projectiles. Then there's the Crush Missiles, which are supposed to balance their incredible damage with a slow firing rate and not quite fullscreen range, but since the game allows you to instantly switch between two weapons, rapidly spamming two alternating Crush Missiles makes every boss a joke.
• Narm Charm: "Let's attack aggressively." Has so much Dull Surprise it loops back into being manly. Or maybe it's just another Tuesday for our heroes.
• Porting Disaster: Contra: The Alien Wars for the Game Boy and Contra Advance for the GBA, which tried to bring the SNES version to those handheld platform, which weren't that good. Contra Advance, for instance, had a lot of graphic downgrade, removed the top-down POV stages and replaced it with stages from Contra: Hard Corps. Oh, and they switched around the death scream for the player character and a latter motorcycle-riding Mook's, so the player's death (which happens a lot) get rather Narmy.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The Game Over music of sounds quite similar to a snippet of the Mission: Impossible theme.
• Viewer Name Confusion: The giant turtle-like alien that is the first stage boss is named Taka (Hawks in the European version; "taka" meaning "hawk" in Japanese). However, Taka is mistakenly labeled as "Beast Kimkoh" in the English manual, which is a completely different boss who appears much later on. The European manual does not make this mistake.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Alien Wars, alongside Super Castlevania IV, was also an early yet impressive demonstration of the SNES's capabilities.