YMMV / Thexder

• Awesome Music: The original Thexder background music is still fondly remembered - despite being the only music in the game except for the (slightly different) opening and the Moonlight Sonata. Fire Hawk gave you different songs for each mission (especially the tune for Mission 8); Thexder Neo started by remastering the original theme, then made more tracks.
• Difficulty Spike: Level 1 is populated with swarms of One-Hit-Point Wonder Red Tribars, and other enemies fight in small groups at a time. Level 2 ambushes the player with a swarm of two dozen enemies in a wide open space.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The ports to Western systems were hugely popular.
• Goddamned Bats: Enemies had a variety of movement patterns, but the vast majority are swift, diagonally-flying foes who rarely appeared in groups of less than 4 at a time. In the first game, if you were unlucky enough to become surrounded by several enemies, the Collision Damage would be multipled per enemy, and this would usually be fatal. The only safe way to engage multiple foes was to retreat into a tunnel (trap them against the terrain, etc.) and slowly take them out one at a time with the jet mode laser.
  • Black Tribars may qualify as Demonic Spiders, considering the Difficulty Spike they presented to the player in the original's second level.
  • Mission 4 in Fire Hawk sees the introduction of enemies that fly horizontally and vertically, which may catch the player off-guard once they're used to taking out the diagonally-flying ones.
• Good Bad Bugs: In the original game, when flying through a horizontal tunnel in jet form, pressing UP or DOWN would cause the jet to effectively hover in place as it attempts to veer in that direction (only to be blocked by the walls of the tunnel). Repeatedly pausing/unpausing the game with precise timing allowed a player to adjust which angle they are facing while in the tunnel, in some cases allowing them to park near the entrance to a wide-open space (such as level 2's infamous swarm of black Tribars) and adjust their firing angle to snipe foes from behind cover. (Attempting to do this in Fire Hawk will result in the jet circling in place, which is more convenient as precise timing on the Pause button is not required.)