YMMV / Akai Katana

• Awesome Art: The console ports' menus look absolutely gorgeous, going above and beyond the menus used in prior CAVE home ports, featuring a katana that changes position in accordance with what menu you're on, and a UI that uses decorative pages of paper as its primary motif.
• Broken Base: The City Connection edition of the game for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Microsoft Windows via Steam has been met with ambivalent reception. On one hand, there are those who enjoy the game being brought to modern platforms and a wider audience, and find it a sufficiently well-done port, with the Switch and Steam version via Steam Deck being great ways to enjoy the game on the go, but others are turned off by the 5-6 frames of input lag (especially the Switch version) and think it doesn't do a whole lot to save City Connection's reputation for high input lag.
• Nightmare Fuel: Shion and Suzuran's story is pretty horrific. First, in their backstory, when Shion gains the Blood Katana, she undergoes Rapid Aging, and the effect can be seen in the eyecatch at the end of Stage 3. Then in the ending, with Emperor Basho dead, Shion looks up at Suzuran (who is still shown in her giant Guardian size, unlike the other endings where the Guardians have reverted back to standard humanoid sizes)...and Suzuran suddenly takes Shion into her hand and crushes her to take the power of the Blood Katana for herself. Then Suzuran herself rapidly ages, much to her own horror.
  Shion: Suzu! We did it! The war is over!
  Suzuran: Yes...Shion...A peaceful life lies ahead...For me!
  Shion: !!
  Suzuran: Hehe...you foolish woman...It's time to die, bitch!!
  (Suzuran reaches her hand out over Shion, crushing her.)
  Shion: Wh-, Su-zu...aGghHHh!
• Polished Port:
  • The Xbox 360 version is widely regarded as an improvement over the original PCB version, addressing the performance problems of that version and adding two new modes that expand the play area to 16:9, with Climax being a remastered version of the game and Slash featuring a Difficult, but Awesome mechanic involving using katanas to cut up enemies and bullets for massive score. This port would serve as the basis for all subsequent Updated Re-releases of the game.
  • The exA-Arcadia version has all of the modes of the 360 version, the Exa Label Arrange Mode, a new "Ultimate" difficulty, and subtitles for the character dialogue. Additionally, it's the best-performing version of the game with smoother sprite movements (moving 1 pixel at a time instead of 2) and only one frame of input lag!
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • In the console ports' Training mode, even though you pick your fighter before starting a run through the training settings page, the game still goes through the motions of taking you to the fighter select screen where your fighter is automatically selected, making you wait an extra 5 seconds to start your run.
  • Like other in-house CAVE ports and ports thereof, using the Restart command to quick-restart prevents your score from being saved to local high score leaderboards or replays from being saved. And furthermore, restarting is disabled in Score Attack. This is because the restart command takes you back to the start of the current stage, so it makes sense that restarting in a later stage disables those two mechanics...but it doesn't excuse voiding scores and leaderboards if you do a restart in Stage 1. In fact, the inability to quick-restart from the beginning of the game (that is, without having to go back to the main menu then through the character sleect screen again) while in a later stage (e.g. you flubbed your run and you just want to try again) is a Scrappy Mechanic in and of itself.
• Underused Game Mechanic: If you fly up to the top of the screen, the HUD will shift to the bottom of the screen so as to continue to display but in a way that doesn't obscure your vision. However the threshold to trigger this is very high and thus isn't all that useful.