Mushihime-sama/YMMV

• All There Is to Know About "The Crying Game": Most people know little about the games other than that they have extremely hard True Final Bosses.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Most players regard God Mode as the only thing worth playing in Futari Black Label.
• Crowning Music of Awesome: Composed by shmup soundtrack legend Manabu Namiki, as well as Masaharu Iwata (composer of soundtracks for Soul Calibur IV, Final Fantasy XII, among others) and Kimihiro Abe for the sequel.
  • To Shinju Forest is an awesome kick-starter.
  • Like A Night of Shooting Stars is one of the most hypnotic and soothing tracks in any game, of any genre, ever.
  • The One Who Is Always In The Forest pumps you full of enough energy to face the final stage.
• Even Better Sequel: Futari.
  • Contested Expansion Pack: Futari Black Label.
• Good Bad Bugs: The "counter banking" technique in the original game, allows you to get much higher scores than intended in Maniac and Ultra modes.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks:
  • Averted with Futari Novice; many players regard it as well-designed and as an opportunity for non-shmup players to get into the genre. nto the genre.
  • On the other hand, played straight with Futari Black Label's Original and Maniac modes.
• Memetic Badass: Queen Larsa, due to her status as Futari's notorious Final Boss, especially on Ultra difficulty where she has a True Final Boss form.
• Moral Event Horizon: In Futari, Queen Larsa goes batshit after her son dies in the previous game. Understandable by villain standards. She also decides to send her remaining child Palm out to die, dismissing him as someone she can replace anyway.
• Most Annoying Sound: Palm players will have "RECO-CHAAAAAAAAAAANNNNN!!" drilled into their heads long after they stop playing.
• Porting Disaster: The PS2 port, handled by Cave itself, doesn't emulate the arcade version's slowdown properly, and the game is downscaled in screen resolution, causing it to look blurry when played with the game window oriented vertically to fill the screen. The Steam port, as of this writing, is also plagued by a number of irritating (but not game-breaking) bugs, which CAVE has assured players that they will soon patch.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: Mushihime-sama was interesting for its different premise and music, but otherwise had rather simple gameplay and visuals, especially compared to other CAVE games. In some ways, it was even simpler than Do Don Pachi. Then Mushihime-sama Futari came along, turned the music Up to Eleven, made big improvements to the gameplay, and is considered to be one of the prettiest CAVE games of all time.
• Tier-Induced Scrappy: Almost no one uses Reco-Abnormal, and for good reason--her shots are difficult to master, and her speed when using her focus shot is faster than her normal speed, in a defiance of usual Bullet Hell conventions.