YMMV / Otomedius

• Accidental Innuendo: All over the place. Especially from Tita, which might not be so accidental. Diol just makes intentional innuendos.
• Americans Hate Tingle: At the time of its release, this series was thoroughly despised by a lot of American Gradius fans and critics for its Hotter and Sexier approach to the series. However, this has cooled down a lot in the decade since the game's release and it's now considered a Cult Classic, with most of the remaining complaints being about the gameplay.
• Angst? What Angst?: Castlevania is dripping with it, but Kokoro is pretty cheerful and upbeat.
  • And that's also in spite of her possible big brother, Julius, disappearing from her life before she was even at elementary school age, and she won't even know he survived until she's about forty. Geez.
• Anti-Climax Boss: Compared to her previous forms, Dark Force's final form is quite easy to fight. But then again, this is still Gradius, so it comes with the territory.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: This game is a Gradius parody game which exchanges the spaceships with scantily-clad females showing off their bosom. This is just too weird for those looking for a Konami-styled shmup, and the series became a tiny niche afterward.
• Awesome Music:
  • The game has eight soundtracks to choose from. From original, orchestrated music to high-energy remixes of older Konami favorites, there's something for everyone.
  • The boss music deserves special mention, though.
  • As does Smash The Bomb.
  • Following tradition, the sequel has a total of eleven soundtracks to choose from, with many notable tracks that appeal to nearly every musical taste, from orchestra to techno to rock and roll. Nearly 30 musicians from all over the world did work on Otomedius Excellent's soundtrack.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: This game is best known for being a 'sexy flying bikers' clone of Gradius. Oh, there's a little something about guest stars from Life Force/Salamander, Castlevania, and Busou Shinki, but when all the promo posters for the game shove the protagonist and her twin 'fuel tanks' in the audience's face, there's only a couple of things that will stand out for them.
• Cult Classic: Getsu Fuuma Den was... obscure, and yet gets a prominent reference in Otomedius in the form of Gesshi Hanafuuma.
• Fandom Rivalry: Some Gradius fans seem to hate Otomedius for "What Konami did to Gradius". The same goes for fans of anything else the game references. Even Castlevania: Lords of Shadow (and that game had assistance from Hideo Kojima) gets less hate than poor Kokoro does from the Castlevania fandom.
• Fanfic Fuel: Fan theories for what an ordinary human girl like Shiori is doing with a piece of Bacterian military hardware. Her dialogue even lampshades it.
  Shiori: Surprised? Here I go! Good luck!
• Game-Breaker:
  • Many of the D-Burst attacks can make very short work of most bosses.
  • Esmeralda's Pulse Laser is unintentionally, ludicrously overpowered. It ignores the damage caps obeyed by all other weapons in the game. Placing an Option inside a boss (easily done with Esmeralda's Whip options) and holding autofire will, essentially, cause the boss to die instantly.
  • In Gorgeous, Gravity Bullet (as used by Poini) was quite broken. In Excellent, it's even nastier.
• Moe: Poini's said to be the lovable little sister of the entire squadron.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Otomedius took Gradius plane design and turned them into flying bikes, and the games can be described by some as Gradius meets Kamen Rider. Kamen Rider Revice borrowed the flying bike ideas from Otomedius more than a decade later.
• Scrappy Mechanic: To get new weapons added to a character's selection, you need to either make money or hope to unlock the weapon card for the first and second game respectively. This effectively forces numerous replays just to get a decent selection. The second game is better about it as weapon cards apply to all characters that can use them compared to the first game where you had to grind for each character. This is often a point of complaint in fan written reviews and articles.
• That One Boss:
  • Big Core DX. The DX is the face you make when it appears. There's just something incredibly intimidating about a Big Core gunship with six Options.
  • If Meta Lium's Big Core DX doesn't trip you up, Titi's Scarab Core definately will.
• Theiss Titillation Theory: There is almost no way the Stripperific outfits that barely cover the breasts of some of the characters can stay on when they are flying.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: At no point is it ever addressed that both Erul's brother David and Kokoro's brother Julius have been missing for a long time (with Erul discovering what happened to David in the first game), and not only do they never commiserate about it, the two girls don't seem to interact at all outside of group gatherings. We could have at least gotten a manga chapter, an anime short or a Contra Returns-style game about them bonding or something.
• Values Dissonance:
  • The name "Poini Coon" is clearly because she's meant to resemble a raccoon, much like Diol looks like a catgirl. However, her last name was changed to "Kune" in the English release as "coon" is a racial slur that the developers likely hadn't been aware of.
  • This game was very controversial in the States at the time of its release (2007) due to its Fanservicey nature. Nowadays however, the game's fanservice feels downright chaste thanks to Konami's later title Bombergirl which is widely considered to be far more provocative than this game. This, along with increased Western awareness of Sexy Parodius, has made some newer Gradius fans wonder what people were getting so worked up over.

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