Raiden Fighters / YMMV

Awesome Music:
- Most notable is the final stage theme of the first ''Raiden Fighters'', unofficially titled "Invade Your Mind". Sadly, its official title is just "Fort(ress) Stage".
- Subverted with the music for Simulation Levels 35 and 50 in Jet, because while the track itself is awesome, the situation it's played in is not awesome (specifically, you just screwed yourself out of the two Real Battle stages). Doubles as a Nightmare Fuel.
Best Level Ever: Stage 6 in the first Raiden Fighters. It starts out high in the sky over an ocean, with the sun reflecting off the surface. As you fight waves of enemies, you notice a giant looming shadow of a giant plane on the ocean. The ocean and shadow disappear under cloud cover, and later, you enter a thunderstorm. Moments later, you fly right past the giant stage boss, Vahrstor, while the thunderstorm's intensity increases immensely. Many players agree that the presentation of this stage is one of the best in the series.
Common Knowledge: Contrary to popular belief, and the fact the games have Raiden in their name, the Raiden Fighters games are not part of the Raiden series. The first game began development under the name Gun Dogs, then Seibu changed the name before release when they discovered the game gained more attention during market tests when it had Raiden in its name.
Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
- The series offers over a dozen playable ships...but to most players, the only ship worth caring about is the Slave.
- Score-pursuing players will restart again and again and again, often to the point of Overly Long Gag, if they mess up in the first stage trying to build up to the "X" medals that are worth 10,000 to 100,000 points. Players who do this sometimes call the game "Restart Fighters".
Demonic Spiders: Sniper Tanks, as per the main Raiden series. And if you think it's safer over the ocean where there's fewer Sniper Tanks, we have Sniper Gunboats that perform the same role.
Even Better Sequel: Raiden Fighters 2 and Raiden Fighters Jet.
Fan Nickname:
- Sniper Tanks: Pretty much a regular feature in Seibu's shmups and the cause of frustration for players.
- Toothpaste Gun (the Raiden mk-II's Plasma Beam)
- Restart Fighters: The series itself, due to the high frequency at which high-level players restart a game, due to how punishing bad starts are in this series.
- Missile Curtain: The Chaser planes' charged Missile weapon attack, which unleashes a flurry of missiles at hapless enemies.
Game-Breaker: The Slave ship, with its tiny hitbox and incredible firepower, is the ship of choice for the high score leaderboards everywhere, much to the complaints of those who prefer the non-Slave ships.
- 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.
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 Jet, naturally.
High-Tier Scrappy: Across all three games, the Slave is a sterling example of how to create a ship that becomes the only ship used in high scoring competitions, ship-specific ones notwithstanding. It's the player version of the "Slave" Attack Drones that are obtained with "S" items, featuring a high-powered rapid-fire Spread Shot and does not have distinct "missile" and "laser" shot types, so any weapon item will power it up. The Slave's ship speed and bomb are inhereited from the fighter you highlight when activating the code to pick the slave, so most players end up using the Ixion version of the Slave due to its high speed, or the Judge Spear version due to having an even more powerful bomb at the expense of being a little too fast to control. While it's certainly a very effective ship, the problem is that it also really puts the "Boring" in Boring, but Practical, as it's not a particularly unique ship in terms of weapons or playstyle, causing many players to groan as they pick this ship for the sake of getting high scores.
Low-Tier Letdown:
- 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. Their slower speeds were latter carried over into Raiden IV where they're slower than standard Fighting Thunder ME-02.
- The Endeavor in the first game may have an instant-charge Laser 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 Missile weapon's bullet-canceling property does not make up for its low damage and its charged version's long charge time. This craft is barely used in serious scoring runs.
Nightmare Fuel: Jet has several examples.
- Simulation Levels 35 and 50 can become more distressing, to the point of No Ending no matter how good you play there.
- In Real Battle missions, getting killed in Phase 1 would lead to a bunch of unknown forces dropping a bomb on an entire city, blowing them up. What they are is not specified, but if they are Crystals, then things get worse from there...
Polished Port: The Aces Compilation Re-release is regarded as the best version of the trilogy, featuring many options to tune the gameplay, highly responsive controls, and the option to play at 60 FPS or the games' native 54 FPS with options to smooth over the uneven refreshing (making it one of the few arcade shmup ports to actually consider the original game's framerate^note versus that of common household televisions).
Scrappy Mechanic: Micluses require hovering your ship over nondescript spots or fulfilling other requirements that are not hinted at at all. You can't ignore them if you're playing for score, as you need to find four to raise the medal value to 100,000 points and thus make Micluses the best sources of points, and each Miclus you fail to uncover (or worse, are unaware of) is 1 million points lost.
Spiritual Adaptation: Jet to Image Fight. Both games feature a format of "play some simulation stages before entering real combat", as well as penalties for failing to perform well enough in the simulation stages (in Image Fight, you get dumped into a Penalty Area with no powerups available, in Jet you don't get to go on to Real Battle).
That One Boss: Jet has several. Red Eye, the True 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.
That One Level: Raiden Fighters Jet's Real Battle Phase 01, the penultimate stage towards the Golden Ending. Taking place in the night sky over a city, you will encounter many fast moving enemies, especially the rushes of medium-sized striker enemies that fire fast tiny bullets that get lost in the enemy explosions. The mooks come in from the sides of the screen, discouraging you from hugging the top of the screen to deal with the striker planes quickly. It is very likely that players will lose at least one life in this stage unless they are fully prepared or they are using the Slave; doing so will lock you out of the True Final Boss fight in the next stage.

YMMV / Raiden Fighters

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