YMMV / Sol Cresta

• Awesome Music: The music, reminiscent of the original Terra Cresta game, is done by none other than Yuzo Koshiro, and it shows.
• Best Boss Ever: The final battle with Mandler in this game makes all the other battles against Mandler in the previous Terra Cresta games look tame by comparison. It starts with a rematch against Mandler in its first form from the first Terra Cresta game, you defeat it and it does its usual Kaizo Trap with the core ejecting the body and shooting bullets at you. Then Mandler reemerges as Sol Mandler, with Mandler using an elemental barrier to defend itself until it eventually turns gold. It's even better in the Dramatic Mode, as it ups the ante by having you Hold the Line for a cutscene, until Yamato powers up to its 11th-Hour Superpower before finally finishing off Mandler for good.
• Director Displacement: While Takanori Sato is the director of the game, Hideki Kamiya was very much involved with the game, and the main gameplay concept was his idea.
• Game-Breaker: The phoenix formation is easily the most powerful formation attack, not only inflicting tons of Collision Damage to enemies but also rendering you completely invincible for its duration. You do need to pick up all the other formation tokens first when you begin each stage, but it's not a terribly difficult task. On Platinum Hard, where using a formation attack uses up its token and requires you to get another one of that same token, as long as you don't use any other formation attack, after using the phoenix formation you can pick up any formation token to regain access to it.
• Moral Event Horizon: Chandor locking Kethu inside his doomed ship to provide data for Mandler. Even Dita is disgusted by his actions.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The Special Bonus and Secret Bonus jingles, both of which were taken right from Moon Cresta. Also Stage 5 and 7 starting up with the "Game Start" jingle and the "last life" jingle respectively, both of which are taken from Terra Cresta.
• Porting Disaster: The Nintendo Switch version is regarded as the worst of the lot, featuring framerate issues and about 8 frames of input lag.
• Salvaged Gameplay Mechanic: The Escape Sequence at the end of the game was hated due to taking place after the Final Boss, squashing a victorious moment unless one is either very skilled or has a stockpile of lives. This was changed in the version 1.05 update so that this section is now an "extra stage" where you temporarily have infinite lives and the only penalty for getting killed is a reduced bonus at the end.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Arcade Mode loops every time you beat it. For score-minded players, this is rather problematic, as it renders the rather intricate scoring mechanics somewhat moot, and turns the game into a test of endurance instead. Dramatic Mode doesn't loop, but it's still quite long at about two hours to complete, has many Fake Longevity segments with only a few things to do while the dialogue plays out, and is only playable on Easy and Normal difficulties.
• Scrappy Weapon: The Delta Formation. While by no means a bad weapon, sometimes trying to change the ships' formations can unintentionally cause it to activate despite not being in the shape, and can even cause a player to unintentionally crash into an obstacle.
• Shocking Moments: Nobody expected not only a new Cresta game in 2022, but one by PlatinumGames of all teams, and with Hideki Kamiya as the director no less! Granted, Kamiya is a big fan of shmups, including the original Cresta duology, but given that all of his prior projects are big-budget three-dimensional games, very few expected him to actually make a shmup. Even more extra shock is that the game is released in the same timeframe as the critically and commercially panned Babylon's Fall by the same developer.
• Spiritual Successor: It's basically a great Radiant Silvergun sequel, with the use of three ships colored red, blue, and yellow, the use of Sprite/Polygon Mix with Sol Cresta's visuals in particular having a 32-bit look similar to Silvergun, and an "Arcade" mode and an extended "Dramatic" mode with cutscenes and longer stages.
• Tear Jerker: Stage 5, Terra, ends with the Wing Galiber, after defeating Chandor, crashing after playing a final message from Noboru Tendo. Go and the others then salute. The music that plays during this scene (as well as one of the more quieter moments of the game) is called "Memory of a Hero".
  Dril: Thanks for everything, Wing Galiber...
  Luna: May your soul find rest, my brave savior...
• That One Attack:
  • Dita's Signature Move is when his fighter splits into three and charges at you in various directions. The problem is in all the battles with him, he does this attack constantly and he is completely invulnerable to any attack when he does this attack.
  • Mandler has an attack that fires four lightning beams at you. They are very unpredictable and can be quite hard to dodge. The problem is, in its final phase, Mandler will sometimes spam that attack constantly.
• That One Boss: Both bosses of Stage 6, Mercury:
  • Budah, the mini-boss, is arguably the toughest in the entire game. Not only is he much harder than Garaka from Stage 4, he's much larger and he unleashes his fighters in a faster rate, with most of them being very unpredictable to dodge and can swarm you very easily.
  • Trimurti's One-Winged Angel form at the end of Mercury. It's armed with rocket punches, can launch a homing Macross Missile Massacre, as well as a spinning laser that can catch you off guard. Its split and charge attack is much harder to dodge this time around also.
• That One Level:
  • Mercury is quite possibly the hardest in the game, with its multiple obstacles and enemies.
  • The end credits. While it's technically a bonus stage like the escape sequence before, good luck trying to get all 83 fireworks to unlock The Stinger.