YMMV / Tyrian

Tyrian

• Anticlimax Boss: The Final Boss of the whole game in the final chapter is a giant pineapple ship of Zinglon's cult that goes down rather quickly in a bog-standard fight and isn't as intense compared to several previous climax bosses (such as the horned ship in Tyrian, the Gryphon, the Microsol Fleet, the Ixmucane core, Javi's Dreadnaught, Muldar's Brainiac, and even Vykromod transformed into Zinglon's Nose).
• Awesome Music: The music of the very first level, "Tyrian", the battle music against the green ship, "Deli Shop Quartet", the music of the first level of Episode 4, "Rock Garden", and many more. The game's SETUP and SHIPEDIT programs have a "Jukebox" mode where you can just sit back and listen to the music.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The green-and-purple platform-like ships in the Deliani levels. They come in threes, fire fast-moving aimed dual shots at quite a fast rate, take a good while to die, and stay on screen for a good bit of time (they travel down to the bottom, fly back up, before charging downwards off screen). At one point in the first Deliani level you have to face six at one go◊, all of them firing at you which can kill you quickly if you aren't quick enough.
  • On the higher difficulty levels, nearly every enemy becomes a Demonic Spider thanks to massive health levels and faster firing rates, especially in Super Arcade Mode and Super Tyrian where you have no rear gun and crappy shields. As for the green platforms mentioned above, even the almighty SDF Main Gun will take several shots to kill one of them.
• Fandom Rivalry: Fans of this game, along with other early or similar Western shmups such as Raptor: Call of the Shadows and Jets'n'Guns, have a bit of grudge with fans of more arcade-style Japanese-developed shooters. The latter dismisses "euroshmups" as a mess that's either too easy or too hard, rely more on equipment and grinding instead of skills, have no such thing as hitboxes, and awkward controls, while the former feels that the latter are as linear and as deep as Call of Duty that arcade shooters are too unforgiving. The overwhelming popularity of Bullet Hell shmups in recent years has made it worse, as fans of the traditional Western shmups disdain danmaku games for having a greater focus towards playing for score and producing artificial difficulty by simply having enemies spamming the screen with lots of projectiles rather than actual level design challenge in the vein of certain shmups like R-Type. Both camps are very defensive of their opinions.
  • Became Hilarious in Hindsight as nowadays there are mobile freemium games, usually made in Japan and China, that rely more on equipment instead of pure skills, such examples are Yongshi's Azur Lane and even CAVE's ''Gothic wa Mahou Otome''.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Penetration weapons, such as the Mega Cannon and Zica Flamethrower may not seem all that powerful, until you realize that you can "affect" many enemies, including bosses, with them and One-Hit Kill a lot of them by ramming your ship into them. You should die from doing this in a realistic sense, but you don't. The Zica Flamethrower makes capitalizing easy thanks to its constant fire and it lets you have a powerful raw-damage front weapon for enemies that happen to be immune to collisions.
  • Penetration weapons are nasty enough, but in a secret level of Episode 4, you can find a Wave-Motion Gun on steroids, the obscene "SDF Main Gun". It combines penetration into a huge blue laser the width of your entire ship! On top of a Front Laser/Zica Laser, your damage rate alone is enough to make bosses dead in seconds.
  • The Atom Bomb sidekicks really live up to their name. Ammo is plentiful and the missiles will melt through bosses like a blowtorch to ice. Their ammo maximum is surprisingly generous and it regenerates over time but that just means you need to save the bombs for the targets that really matter and you'll rarely need to worry about running out.
  • Any ship that allows you to convert your shields into armor makes survival of all but most intense levels a breeze. If used at the most opportune time, you can never run low on armor. In fact, you can often abandon the more expensive ships in favor of a "Gencore Maelstorm" just because it can refill it's armor with an easy Twiddle Command, something the late-game "Stalker III", and lesser "Gencore Phoenix" can accomplish as well.
• Goddamned Bats: The small purple ships that resemble claw nails in Gryphon Station. They appear from behind and in groups, travel diagonally upwards or straight upwards, and they deal huge amounts of Collision Damage if they make contact with you. Thankfully, they're not difficult to avoid and destroy, and the game gives you a warning before a good number of waves of these appear.
• Good Bad Bugs: If you activate the invincibility cheat in story mode, quit, and then start a game in one of the arcade modes or Super Tyrian (which disables cheat codes), you'll still be invincible as long as you don't press any keys during levels. You can still play the game with the mouse.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The fact that the game was only available for DOS despite portraying Microsof... er... Microsol as the antagonistic force is hilarious enough, but then the game is also available for Microsoft Store in attempt to make it playable on XBOX.
• Nightmare Fuel: "Eyespy" is filled with disembodied body parts, especially eyes. That fact that they can spawn smaller wriggling eyes doesn't help a bit.
  • Savara V in Episode 1. You know those waves and waves of ships and blimps that you can casually mow through with your guns? Read the data cubes before the level starts, and you will discover that they're all full of civilians fleeing from the boss of the level.
    • This is not helped by the fact that you get extra credits for destroying them.
    • Not only that, but in Arcade Mode, the blimps are an essential source of weapon powerups. They easily drop a half-dozen or more apiece.
  • Episode 1 ending. If not, things could become unpleasant. (That's a disembodied head with vertebrae attached to it, impaled on a spike!)
• Scrappy Mechanic: If you choose to play with anything besides a mouse, be prepared for a bad time when you notice that your ship has a bit of momentum any time you release the movement controls, which can make precision maneuvers difficult.
  • This is flipped against the mouse itself because mouse has to deal with acceleration, which means rapid movement can range from bumping into everything on the way to not making it there.
• Scrappy Weapon: There's a nice selection of weapons, but some of the weapons are under-powered, even when fully upgraded. This is especially glaring on harder difficulties as enemy health is increased dramatically.
  • The Multi Cannon looks like it could be helpful for spreading your fire out to hit multiple enemies, but each shot does mediocre damage and the weapon fires too slowly to make up for this. It doesn't help that even the basic Pulse Cannon has better damage and you can focus it where it's truly needed.
  • For rear weapons: compared with the Sonic Wave, Heavy Guided Bombs, and Rear Mega Pulse, the other choices tend to be underwhelming, but the rear Multi Cannon tends to stand out in this regard {like its front counterpart). The Sonic Wave can fill the Multi Cannon's role and also be directed forward as a powerful front weapon.
  • Too many of the side kicks to list all of them: many are underwhelming in power and just can't beat Atom Bombs at your sides for sustainable bursts of damage, or the Plasma Storm for blowing something away like dust.
    • Mini Missiles give you what you pay for at $1000: a swarm of missiles that do very little damage.
    • The single-barrel Pulse Cannons are very underwhelming too, while the double-barrel ones aren't much better.
    • The Zica Supercharger is letdown for $50,000 apiece. The cannons fire low-level Zica Lasers and automatically charge when you're not firing, but these are far less powerful than the inexpensive Atom Bombs.
• Seasonal Rot: Episode 5, included in Tyrian 2000. A good number of players consider it to be this as it is very short, contains no new music, the new weapons and ships are no match for the stuff that the first four episodes have to offer, and much of the artwork was not done by Daniel Cook, the original sprite artist for Tyrian.
  • Debatable, but many blame this rot because of the Rule of Funny overtaking the serious bits of the plot as well, come Chapter 5. The plot was nicely wrapped by the previous episode and though a bit byronic, it was a satisfactory ending. And then comes the next chapter and you find out that the real Big Bad is not the greedy, genocidal MegaCorp you've been fighting so far, but a magical god assisted by his cult of fruit and ale who were shadow-stringing said corporation. You can't make that shit up.
  • Due to differences in the data file structure, the OpenTyrian source port ends at episode four. Development of a version that works with the fifth episode from Tyrian 2000 (called, naturally, OpenTyrian2000) hadn't been completed until 2020.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Perhaps not technically a sequel, but the first few levels of Episode 2 (the first commercial episode) are much much harder than the end of Episode 1 (the shareware episode).
• Suspiciously Similar Song: "Gyges, Will You Please Help Me?" is closely based on "Truth" (Haides theme) from Thunder Force III. The game's composer Alexander Brandon himself stated that it was heavily influenced by Thunder Force III.
• That One Level:
  • Deliani in the first episode could be one of these if you were not equipped with enough firepower and shielding, as it was filled with Demonic Spiders (those green ships!), and ended with a large brown boss that fired damaging blasts of plasma (even more when he was near death). In Episode 4, however, you are required to dodge a whole load of these bosses flying down from the top of the screen!
    • This is even worse in the arcade modes. In story mode if you die in a bonus level you just move on to the next level with no penalty. In arcade mode you lose a life - and a level of weapon power - until you run out of lives, then you go to the next level ... with a low-power weapon and no backup lives.
• That One Boss: In Episode 4, you descend into the core of a planet to fight a gigantic magma fireball in a bid to save the planet from a fiery extinction. You have 30 seconds to destroy said fireball while dodging a whole slew of heavily damaging fireballs that it fires out. This boss is immune to certain weapons, and it can regenerate its health to full in an instant! And if you don't defeat it, lots of people will die. And you'll know, because they've been sending you messages before.
  "Whoever you are... um... Thanks anyway. AAAAUUUGGGHHH! THE CONTROL PANEL'S ON FIRE!"
• The Woobie: Poor Trent Hawkins. After his friends and family are killed by Microsol and his feats of revenge gain the attention of the anti-Microsol resistance, he ends up being exploited for his heroism and forced to solve crisis after crisis without any chance to take care of himself. He even overhears a transmission in which Transon Lohk, head of Gencore, outright brags about how he's going to keep using Trent for the latest crisis of the week, knowing that as a hero he will be obligated to accept. It's no wonder by the end of Chapter 4, he decides to just flee the galaxy, hoping he can finally enjoy a life of peace and solitude...but Chapter 5 seems him getting roped back to home to solve one last conflict.