Raiden/YMMV

• Crowning Music of Awesome: Starting with "Gallantry", the music of the first game's Stage 1.
  • Most of the music in Raiden IV are remixes from the first two games. They are awesome.
  • On the large scale, all of the series' music is awesome no matter what game you play, including the spinoffs.
• Demonic Spiders: Tanks, but only when the Dynamic Difficulty gets pumped up. They will shoot a fast and accurate shot as soon as they enter the screen, and is probably one of the main causes of Yet Another Stupid Death.
• Porting Disaster: The SNES version of Raiden Trad has terrible graphics, ton of slowdowns and arbitrary changes to the gameplay.
• Replacement Scrappy: The Photon Laser in Raiden III, which serves as a replacement for the Bend Plasma and was panned as a result. If you ask anyone who doesn't like Raiden III why they don't like it, the answer will be "it doesn't have the Toothpaste Laser" more often than not.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: The Spread Shot default weapon is heavily disliked in the sprite-based games due to requiring rapid tapping to get its damage-per-second output to a respectable level and plenty of powerups to give it a good spread. From Raiden III onwards, it starts off as a three-way spread and can be rapid-fired simply by holding the fire button down (while the other two weapons have this behavior, the spread gets the highest quality-of-life improvement out of it).
• Scrappy Mechanic: In Viper Phase 1, you get a multiplier applied to your end-of-stage bonuses dependent on what percentage of enemies you killed. If you destroy every single enemy, the muliplier is x100. But if you so much as miss a single enemy, that multiplier drops to a x50. It won't matter much in a survival-oriented run, but in a score-based run, missing one enemy can make a massive difference.
• "Seinfeld" Is Unfunny: Throughout the 90's, Raiden, Raiden II and Raiden DX were seen as the face of the Shoot 'em Up genre, and was well-known for its purple "toothpaste laser". The proliferation of Bullet Hell games in the 2000's and 2010's have not done wonders for the series' popularity; nowadays, it's seen as having lifeless, generic visuals and lacking pretty bullet patterns, not helped by the additional difficulty that stems from the huge hitbox and loss of most powerups upon death. Although new games in the series continue to be released today, Raiden IV and Raiden V in particular ended up going under the radar.
• Serial Numbers Filed Off: The first game is in many ways a retread of the earlier Toaplan shmup Twin Cobra. The homing missiles also seem to have taken their trajectory routines from Toaplan's Slap Fight/ALCON. On top of that, "Gallantry", the song for Stages 1 and 4, shares a phrase with "Mystic Green" from Toaplan's Hellfire, and "Lightning War" (2 and 7) sounds like an extended version of the second half of "Against the Attack", the Stage 2 song of Flying/Sky Shark by... Toaplan, again. The first Raiden was, basically, a doujin of Toaplan precepts.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • In Raiden, the main riff of "Rough and Tumble" resembles "Skull Castle Part 1" from Mega Man 2.
    • The refrain of "Flap Toward the Hope" from Raiden II sounds similar to Remlia Castle from Astyanax.
    • Can't Retrace from Raiden IV sounds like Act 1 Boss from Sonic & Knuckles.
    • "Lightning War" from Raiden I takes riffs from two Toaplan shmup game songs: "Against the Attack", the Level 2 music from Flying Shark/Sky Shark and "Far Away", the Level 1 music from Truxton/Tatsujin.
    • "Gallantry", the Stages 1 and 4 music in the first game, has a phrase that sounds a lot like a phrase in "Mystic Green", the Stage 4 music from Hellfire (0:25-0:39 in "Gallantry", 0:23-0:37 in "Mystic Green").
      • Considering the first Raiden game was basically a big Toaplan homage, this makes sense.
    • The main theme of "Electric Resistance" is very similar to "Vampire Killer" from Castlevania.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks: The Proton Laser in Raiden III. Instead of being purple and twirling all over the damn place, it's green and only swings from left to right depending on the player's movement (at least it dependably got foes behind that big vessel...). The outcry was such that in Raiden IV, you get to choose between the Plasma Laser and a triple-beam (and purple) version of the Proton Laser.
  • On the other hand, the way the Plasma Laser coils in Raiden IV is dissimilar to previous editions. The suspicion among some fans is that Seibu had simply lost the original algorithms, and only created the Proton Laser the way they did because of that.