YMMV / Thunder Force

• Adaptation Displacement: Remember Thunder Force II on the Genesis / Mega Drive? Yeah, well, remember the Sharp X68000 version that it's a port of?
• Awesome Music: Multiple examples. See the page.
• Badass Decay: The ORN Faust in IV was impervious to all of Rynex's weaponries, even possessing it in the end; in VI it's vulnerable even to Rynex's supposedly-less-powerful mass-produced incarnation, and multiple of them wind up permanently destroyed by Earth and Galaxy Federation forces.
• Broken Base:
  • Thunder Force VI. Is it worthy of the series, or just another inferior installment due to its short and easy gameplay, as well as its constant homages to previous games?
  • Also in the case of V, which one is better? The original Japanese-exclusive Sega Saturn version which features better graphics or the PlayStation version?
• Catharsis Factor: Stage 5 of V. You get a new ship with powerful Wave-Motion Gun weapons that can be used infinitely and then proceed to enjoy one of the easiest stages in the game, blowing the Guardian's defense forces into pieces.
• Contested Sequel: In America, Thunder Force VI did not quite catch the high expectation its previous titles had anticipated, and is overall seen as So Okay, It's Average. In Japan, meanwhile, it received overwhelmingly negative fan reception.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: Although V is divisive among fans in terms of gameplay, its story is often praised as its strongest point.
• Even Better Sequel: Thunder Force III was already a notable improvement over Thunder Force II, with the top down sections removed to refine the horizontal sections with improved graphics and even better music.Thunder Force IV took those improvements and cranked them up to eleven, making it a crown jewel for the series.
• Game-Breaker:
  • In III, Sever is an upgrade to the Twin Shot, firing laser bursts in front of the ship and doing massive damage to anything it touches, and can destroy bosses in seconds. The only drawback is that like with all other non-default weapons, you lose it if you die with the weapon equipped (or die at all on Hard and Mania).
  • IV has the Thunder Sword, an upgrade to the Rynex granted mid-way through the game that allows you to charge up a powerful blast of energy alongside your CLAWs. It's the most powerful weapon in the entire game, capable of decimating bosses in a few shots. It returns in VI as the Rynex-R's Twin Shot Over Weapon, power mostly intact.
  • Free Range in V. It's a conical radar that can be aimed in any direction, and zaps enemies with high-damage beams when they enter the detection range. Even the manual of the North American version describes it as the strongest weapon in the game and encourages you to use it. It was nerfed in VI to have a shorter range and less damage.
  • In VI, the only ship you can initially play as, the Phoenix, starts off with all of its weapons and never loses them, which by Thunder Force standards is pretty broken. In other words, the default ship is more broken than the unlockable Rynex-R.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Fans in America are a bit more forgiving with Thunder Force VI compared to Japan.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: It's already amusing enough that Thunder Spirits is a SNES port of Thunder Force AC and a second-degree port of Thunder Force III, the latter two games being released on Sega hardware. Sega, Nintendo's prime competitor during The 16-bit Era of Console Video Games, would later acquire the rights to Thunder Force after Technosoft kicked the bucket.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: The source of V's divisive status among fans of the series. VI made the problem worse by having its default ship being a total Game-Breaker.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: One of the main reasons VI wasn't so well received.
• Memetic Mutation: The ORN Emperor from VI was a short-lived meme in Korea as mockery towards the game's art director.
• Narm: The intro dialogue in Thunder Force II. The Genesis port erases the "I want to fly now" line, but the gravelly voice sampling renders nearly everything except "good luck" utterly incomprehensible instead.
  "This is Exceliza, I want to fly now." "Roger, good luck."
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The mere existence of Rynex in V. To put it simply, it is one of the most dangerous machines in the entire cosmos. Every single horrific event that transpired in the game, from Guardian going insane to the absolute devastation caused by the conflict, was all because humanity decided to reverse-engineer the legendary starfighter. It really speaks volumes on how terrifying the Rynex is, once fallen into the wrong hands. Just ask Khaos.
  • V's Final Boss starts off with the usual Boss Warning Siren and text "ALERT! The enemy is dead ahead! [...]", only for the AI voice to malfunction and the screen to be filled with "ALERT! ALERT! ALERT! ALERT! ALERT! ALERT! ALERT! ALERT! ALERT! ALERT! ALERT! [...]" with no advance warning.
    • The bad ending for V? Cenes is subject to repeat what happened to Vasteel/Rynex, only instead of ejecting from the ship, she is trapped in it. All while frantic music plays and the Guardian begs her to blow the ship up, despite being unable to.
    • The good ending as well. While heartwarming music plays, the Last Letter scene is still a bit spooky.
  • Enemy/boss design in the games are often pretty Nightmare Fuel-y too, like the Evil Core in IV's eighth stage—a putrescent-looking thing that's served by little white flies that explode. And in its final phase (where a single giant fly is carrying it around), it basically drools its attacks out.
  • The ORN Emperor in VI.
    • The Easy Mode ending as well. It consists of a dark screen of flashing images and the eyes of the ORN Emperor while ominous chanting in the background is heard as ORN Faust calls for Earth's unconditional surrender using a darker version of The Guardian's speech from V.
  • Somehow, C-CTNs-C's (a.k.a. Cenes Crawford) appearance in VI is a bit creepy to some people.
• Only the Creator Does It Right: All the first five instalments of the series were developed by the now-defunct Technosoft, with IV regarded as the best in the series while V being best known for its story. When Sega acquired the rights to the series and developed VI, however...
• Polished Port:
  • Thunder Force II MD had to remove an entire stage from the X68000 version^note More specifically, Stages 3-1 and 4-2; what was Stage 4-1 is now 3-1, Stage 3-2 is kept, and subsequent stages are bumped down a number as well as some graphical effects, but it plays pretty well and buffs some of the weapons (Hunter now fires faster bullets, for example) while replacing some other weapons with more useful ones (Sidewinder was changed from "Laser clone that uses missiles instead of lasers" to a far more useful vertical shot). New music tracks were introduced too, with Stages 3-2 using the old 3-1's music and 4-2 having its own theme, rather than both of these sub-stages reusing the 1-2 and 2-2 themes.
  • The SEGA AGES version of Thunder Force IV on Switch by M2 has everything you'd expect in a console-to-another-console port (screen fitting and filter options, button configuration) and M2's usual top-notch porting standards, but adds a neat new feature: you can now have voices not interrupt the background music! And if you beat the game, you unlock the Styx from III as a playable ship. Last but not least, it has perhaps the lowest amount of input lag of any shmup on the Switch, at only three frames.
  • SEGA AGES: Thunder Force AC is just as smoothly done, including a built-in rapid fire option and backporting two ships from Thunder Force IV: the Rynex and the Mass Production Styx (the latter of which is an NPC ship in IV!). Both AC and IV are very cheap too (only 7.99 USD each), yet have nearly as many quality-of-life features as M2's much-vaunted M2 ShotTriggers releases.
  • The PlayStation port of V is considered quite competent in spite of missing effects.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • In III (on Normal and below) and IV onwards, getting killed takes away the weapon you have equipped, unless it's the Twin Shot or Back Shot. In practice, this means you'll frequently be using the weapon you least need when you're in situations where you feel like you have a reasonable chance of taking a hit.
  • AC has no autofire, expecting players to rapidly tap the fire button to fire as fast as in the Genesis version with autofire turned on. This can be worked around if you're playing on an emulator with an autofire function (either in the emulator or on a controller that has it), or in the home ports (all of which have it), but if you're playing on arcade hardware you'll have to wire an autofire button onto your cabinet, assuming you own it or otherwise have permission from the arcade operator. Spirits also has it off by default and requires a cheat code to use.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • Sidewinder in the original Thunder Force II. It's just a stream of missiles that fire straight ahead. Why this when the Twin Shot and its upgraded version, the Laser, exist? Fortunately it was Rescued from the Scrappy Heap in the Mega Drive / Genesis port, where it was retooled into shots that fire up and down, making it useful for taking out enemies on the floor and ceiling.
  • Blade in IV. Normally, when you shoot an enemy, blue explosions indicate no damage and red explosions indicate damage. However, when hitting enemies with the Blade, all hit explosions are red, meaning you can fire nonstop at a boss and not realize you've been doing no damage to it all along until you're wondering "Why Won't You Die?" 5 minutes later. At least its base counterpart, the Twin Shot, doesn't have this problem. Even worse, when the Rynex was backported into the SEGA AGES port of Thunder Force AC, the Blade kept this behavior, as if M2 expected players to view "I can't tell if my weapon is doing damage" with fond nostalgia.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: Thunder Force III is much easier than II, even on the highest difficulty.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: But Technosoft made up for it with IV, which is far more difficult than either II or III.
• Sequel Displacement: Few gamers have heard of the original Thunder Force (it doesn't help that it was released in 1983 on an obscure Japan-only computer platform), and even fewer have played it.
• Sequelitis: VI was released 10 years after V, and came to be a big disappointment among fans, with only six short stages, a radically different soundtrack, excessive homages to past games, weapons as broken as V's, and a new weapon mechanic in which you start with every weapon and never lose any of them.
• Signature Scene: For Thunder Force V, it's Stage 5, in which the player gains access to the Brigandine module and then proceeds to demolish the Sword Fleet, culminating in a Climax Boss fight with the Rynex / Vasteel Original from Thunder Force IV.
• Spiritual Successor: Following the completion of III, some of its developers would depart Technostoft for Red Company where they would make Gate of Thunder, another sci-fi horizontal shmup whose commonalities with Thunder Force include a rocking soundtrack, real-time weapon switching and rotatable attack drones. It would be followed by Lords of Thunder, which switched to a fantasy theme but retains some obvious Thunder Force DNA.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Barring the 6th installment, the series composers sure love their heavy metal.
  • "Metal Squad", the stage 8 theme from IV, is a close soundalike of Loudness's "Soldier of Fortune", right down to the solo.
  • "Lightning Strikes Again", the opening theme from IV, is based on Dokken's song named—get ready for it—"Lightning Strikes Again".
  • The "Love Dream", the Maniac difficulty ending theme in IV, is nicked straight from Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven".
  • "Beginning of War", the intro theme to V and the Gauntlet's leitmotif, takes its riffs from "Live Wire" by Mötley Crüe.
  • "Ruined Green", the stage 1 theme from VI when playing as the Phoenix, sounds very similar "Geometric City" from RayStorm.
  • Compare Full Speed, the stage 5 theme from VI when playing as the Rynex-R, to "Burning Heat" from Gradius.
• Tear Jerker: The ending of V, set to "Last Letter", which reveals that Guardian was Good All Along, and that to ensure the tragedy of Vasteel won't repeat itself again, Vambrace, along with Cenes, will have to be completely destroyed, and it's all capped off with Guardian's last words:
  Guardian: [Soldier/Human], May fortune be with you...
• That One Level:
  • In II, Stage 4-1 (X68K) / 3-1 (MD) is a cavern where you have to carefully navigate through mazes of red walls to get from one base to the next. The difficulty is especially pronounced in the MD version, as the old Stage 3-1 was removed, causing this stage to take its place and thus lacking a more intermediate stage where you can prepare for this one; up until this point, the Deadly Walls were mainly sky fences, skyscrapers, or random tunnels of destructible walls in the open air, but here you are expected to carefully fly through the tunnels at such a high speed. The space where you find the final base is the most aggravating, as it's covered in destructible wall that you have to shoot through while dodging enemy fire at the same time.
  • Haides is the hardest of the initial five stages of III, featuring moving walls that can trap you and a high speed section out of nowhere. It is, however, the only stage out of that first five that has all of the weapon upgrades. Therefore it's recommended by many players to start on Haides to get it out of the way and quickly get all of the weapons.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Spirits gets criticism for replacing Stage 6's Cerberus with an entirely new capital ship as well as changing the music completely.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: At the beginning of VI, the ORN Empire has found its way to Earth despite Cenes Crawford's and the Guardian's best efforts, Earth forces have revived the Sword Fleet just in time to make a stand at their homeworld's orbit, and their most advanced weapon, the RVR-00 Phoenix fighter with Brigadine booster, is about to deal the first blow...... and all we get from that story angle is a mere cutscene.
• Tough Act to Follow: IV is considered to be the apex of the series. V and especially VI had a tough time being as equal as that game.
• Underused Game Mechanic: V features a "Direct" control option that assigns each of the five weapons to its own button, alongside the traditional option of "cycle through weapon list" buttons. Direct weapon switching was sadly not kept for VI.

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