Nightmare Fuel / R-Type

"The Bydo are a man made nightmare. And I cannot wake up. None of us can. The Bydo..."

— From Recovered Voice Recorder

The R-Type series is perhaps one of the darkest, creepiest Shoot 'Em Up series around, featuring evil time-traveling aliens, weapons made from said evil aliens, and disgusting Womb Levels.

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• The rumored use of Wetware CPU behind several R-Series spacecrafts falls into a downright horrifying Body Horror territory. The R-9C War-Head is piloted by a biological computer made of amputated pilots linked onto the spacecrafts, the pilots are contained within a capsule known as Angel Pac. The R-9/0 Ragnarok is also speculated to have used a 23 year old girl stuck in a biologically 14 year old body as its biological computer, in which the military denied the speculation. Thankfully for the former, as shown in Super R-Type, it's not true, as you can see a normal looking pilot boarding the War-Head at the beginning.
• The Sweet Memories in Final, meanwhile, is Nightmare Fuel on account of literal Nightmare Fuel. That vessel's Dread Wave Cannon is actually loaded with the pilot's own nightmares.
  • "Dread Wave Cannon" is just a nickname, however. Its real name is "Illusion Wave Cannon", and the images you see when it fires are not indescribable horrors straight from the darkest parts of the pilot's mind, but... images of the planets Saturn and Venus, and the Greek Parthenon.
• R-Type III has the second stage (Acid Creatures) which appears to be set in a gigantic alien's stomach, with a fittingly eerie theme, until you reach the end of the level and the boss, Necrosaur, is a series of orifices that deploy giant sperm at you.
  • In versions of R-Type III outside of Japan, it uses giant eyeballs instead.
• Gomander / Cyst is a contender for one of the most disgusting vagina monsters ever created. Watching the Outslay symbiotes going in and out of its... orifice things, is an unnerving sight, to say the least.
  • A huge Gomander appears in Final as the boss of stage 6.0, where you have to blow the thing from the inside. It's as disgusting as it sounds.
  • And after being left out of the main game mode in Final 2, it makes a comeback in a recreated second stage of the first game as the last stage of the second DLC set of homage stages, with even more of these orifice things than its previous incarnations.
• Delta. When that game is considered the point the series entered a Darker and Edgier AND more Nightmare Fueled direction, we are not joking:
  • The final stage in particular: It's the only game so far that delve into Surreal Horror, where the background is a constantly shifting mirage of void, post-apocalyptic backdrop of a city, real-life photographs, and mathematical formulas. The enemies include giant sperm, blue-skinned, red-eyed babies encased in crystals (complete with a baby-like cry when they appear on screen), and giant regenerating strands of DNA. All with a very creepy vocal track. It ends in a Womb Level that spews blood-red sperm-like creature with a confrontation against a large Bydo being made of light that, after absorbing your Force, start growing fleshy tentacles as you charge your Delta Dose as a final strike against that being.
    • Part of that stage is copied from the final scenes of AKIRA. This is not a good sign.
    • And if you're playing as the R-13A Cerberus? You get stuck in this nightmarish dimension after failing to break out of it with your Lightning Wave Cannon and forcibly transformed into a Bydo. Only to be killed later in Stage 3.5 of Final, though one may consider it a Mercy Kill given what the pilot went through after being transformed into a Bydo.
    Epitaph in the R Museum: Once he was a fearless hero, now a forest watchdog. What evil keeps him leashed here?
  • Granted, Stage 5 is not exactly cheery, either, with rusted, broken, and/or skeletal versions of enemies and stage elements from the very first R-Type game, all drifting and spinning freely around the field, and it ends with a boss rush of equally ruined and free-floating bosses from the first game: the Turret Ring (stage 1 miniboss, corroded and spinning in and out of the background), Gomander (the stage 2 boss, its eye shattered and its body decomposing), and the Warship (the stage 3 boss, split in half and heavily damaged). The background music, "Wickedness", containing ambient noise, heartbeat-like drums, and moaning under a discordant melody doesn't make it any better (though the uptempo mechanical boss theme kicks in when the Turret Ring appears, which helps change the tone of the stage somewhat).
  • Stage 6 of has a space station... infested with flesh and blood and gore. As for the enemies- Body Horror dog-things, bouncing brains, some Bydo-infested R-craft (which would then be explored in Final and Tactics), etc. The topper would be the boss, a variant of Dobkeratops known as Subkeratom, basically infesting a launch tower very much like the one your ship took off from. Either you found another unfortunate R-type base or yours was taken over while you were in stage 5.
    • Of all the Delta stages Final 2 has brought back for its homage stages, THAT one made it into the third set. Even though the lack of blood-curling screams from said enemies when killed and Subkeratom being more mechanized compared to its original appearance kind of dampens the nightmare factor a bit, it's still an unnerving sight to see that stage being recreated in modern-day graphics. And this time, it's possible for YOUR own ship to be transformed into said Bydo-infested R-craft after killing Subkeratom...
• For that matter, the origin of the Bydo: the games' story makes it clear that future humanity made them, which is bad enough, but if you examine the supplementary material, it reveals that the Bydo are human! More specifically, they are what humanity would become if reduced to its most base and evil instincts and left alone to fester and evolve for millenia. They are actually physically incapable of feeling any kind of positive emotion. Future humanity engineered them that way deliberately. Of course... The best weapon is one that can't feel regret.
  • In fact, the Bydo enjoy using this as a part of their total warfare against humanity on all fronts. They want humanity to feel fear and confusion as to what they are.
  • Not to mention the entire concept of the Bydo's "wave" form. Imagine that for a second. A wave, as quick and unobtrusive as a sound. And all you need is to get close for it to begin taking over.
• The Bydo pilot names in Tactics, when put together, translates to this:
  Fell asleep and when you next woke up you were a Bydo all you want is now to go back home to your beloved planet Earth you can think of nothing else.
• Final does not mess around when it comes to Nightmare Fuel as well:
  • Stage 4 has you take on a number of rogue Bydo enemies that have clearly been tested on or modified with human technology to a rather uncomfortable degree, culminating in a fight against a captured (and artificially enhanced) Dobkeratops. This reinforces how mankind has reached the point wherein reverse-engineering the Bydo and using their own weapons against them are considered acceptable, even if it means risking their eventual creation down the line.
    • Said Dobkeratops' head has a phallic tongue that appears to deploy sperm. Not the case in its Final 2 recreation, where it is a fusion with II's Subatomic incarnation known as Subatom Nonosis.
  • The Stage 6.1 route features the player's ship being possessed and turned into a hideous organic blob by the Nomemayer after killing the stage's boss. You proceed to fight your former comrades in Stage F-B, with a R9-A Arrowhead as a Role-Reversal Boss to boot. Even worse, the final words after completing the game on this final stage imply your pilot never even realized what had happened.
  Recovered Voice Recorder: Are the seabirds the only ones happy to see me on this beautiful summer night?
  • When you start the first stage, that weird thing that goes zooming past you? That's your future self mentioned above.
    • Said stage is recreated as part of the third DLC set of Final 2's homage stages, where it's possible to destroy said infested ship halfway throughout the stage. And remember stage 6 from Delta being included in the same homage stage set, where it's possible for your ship to end up being transformed into a Bydo? Stage F-B is where you get sent to, with a R-99 Last Dancer that throws everything but the kitchen sink (including unleashing the Giga Wave Cannon at low health or the longer the fight progresses) taking up the Arrowhead's spot.
  • Stage F-C has you going forward through time to stop the Bydo Empire before they even get started by future humanity's recklessness. Your reward for saving your species from extinction by its own hubris? Humanity deciding to go back to war among themselves now that their central enemy is gone, meaning no matter what you do, in the end everything is for nothing - and now humanity has the R-Type fighters outfitted with Bydo technology for the cycle to repeat all over again.
• The Bydo are one of the most dangerous, if not, the most threatening organisms man has ever faced. They are unstoppable, wanting nothing more than to consume and absorb humanity into themselves, a single goal to return to Earth, becoming one with their creators, a mission they pursue fervently. The disturbing fact that an entire universe is out there to conquer, yet they focus all their efforts entirely on us. We destroyed their biomechanical forms, they simply regenerated, growing more powerful forms. We banished them to another dimension, they simply mastered time and space just to come back here again.
• Tactics 2 hints at something worse than the Bydo, something that scares them. The Bydo path of action in the game heads towards their home planet before they sudden turn tail and leave. They're not shown but the fact they can get the Bydo, known for their single minded persistence, to flee implies much about them.
• Whichever stages mentioned above that are brought back as homage stages in Final 2 retain their nightmarish elements for the most part, but the main course stages don't shy away from Nightmare Fuel as well:
  • Right off the first stage, you enter an abandoned space station filled with frozen interiors the further you traverse it, leading to a frozen Dobkeratops (which becomes active on R-Typer difficulties). The eerie theme on entering the frozen interior furthers the mysterious atmosphere (though that was interrupted by a high tempo theme on taking on a Gains mecha), and the same Bydo-infested ship from Final's first stage can be seen in the background.
  • The first half of Stage 4.0 involves traversing through a Bydo-infested space station, with all of the R-craft inside mutated into Bydo-infested ships similar to the one back in Stage 1.0. Calling the stage a "cleanup" would be an understatement.
  • Stage 7.0 is a Bydo dimension filled with nothing but wreckages of fallen R-craft, featuring floating clumps of debris and Bydo-possessed R-craft dangling from some sort of gelatinous substance. Even though it lacks the usual nightmarish elements found in the Bydo, one has to wonder why such a place exists, and how do destroyed R-craft end up there in the first place.
    • The R-9WB Happy Days in this R-craft graveyard fared much worse than the Cerberus in Delta, being a slave to a parasitic slug-like Fenrir that feeds on debris to grow while the ship is forced to drag the pile of Bydo matter and debris throughout the stage. That thing then morphs into the cocoon-like Ahms Vault, with its Final Force core inside having completely taken over the poor Happy Days.
  • Stage 6.1 involves descending throughout a mysterious ruins. Nothing is known about that place, especially when the enemies there don't resemble anything like the Bydo. Reaching the boss, Principle Wall, reveals wreckages of R-craft scattered throughout the ground, which means there were other pilots that met a grisly fate while exploring the ruins.
    • After destroying Principle Wall, just like Final's Stage 6.1, your ship suddenly gets transformed into a Bydo and sent back to the same space station before it was frozen, only to be greeted with a Space Corps fleet that's out to destroy you.
• As a fitting end for the first set of the homage stages, Stage X7.0 in R-Type Final 2 is a recreation of the very first stage in the series, except now it's been overrun with disgusting-looking fungi that grow rapidly and are lethal on contact (almost as if they're as harmful to the ships themselves as they are to humans), topping off with a decaying Dobkeratops covered in said fungi.

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