Common Knowledge: The "YOU FAIL IT!" screen is widely believed to be part of a Non-Standard Game Over, not helped by the most common screenshot of the line being from the Stage 3 boss, which is set during atmospheric re-entry. What really happens when that line appears is that you let the boss timer run out, and you'll still go to the next stage while forfeiting end-of-stage bonuses.
Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Expect all high-score runs to be set with the Windina, thanks to its powerful Area of Effect-based Charged Attack that can be used to easily destroy most enemies on the screen with high multipliers.
Difficulty Spike: The first five levels shouldn't be too hard if you can kill the enemies before they attack (and even then, they don't shoot too much). The 6th stage however, introduces enemies that fill the screen with loads of shots, a the boss has helpers that spam bullets.
Game-Breaker: Despite being classified as a "Difficult" ship with seemingly weak firepower due to its narrow coverage and small bullets, the Peplos ship actually has the highest damage-per-second of any ship in the game, if one is not averse to Button Mashing to get the super-rapid-fire effect or using an autofire controller, and can shred bosses before their attack phases become a threat. Furthermore, because it's always at full power, you don't have to collect any power-up items at the start of the game or after dying and respawning.
Hilarious in Hindsight: The pilot of the Windia ship is named Leefa (though this Leafa has a slightly different kind of name spelling).
Nightmare Fuel: The Final Boss and the Big Bad of the game, Brawshella (or as the Stage 7 subtitle aptly calls it: The Crooked Embryo), is a giant Fetus Terrible that makes some creepy moaning noises as it takes damage. When you defeat its first phase, it comes out of its enclosure to fight you in a new arena with a pulsating organic background, giving the impression that you're inside a womb.
Sequel Difficulty Drop: Considerably easier than its predecessor Pulstar. It ditches the checkpoint system in favor of simply respawning the player in place so that they can keep going and finish the game, instead of wasting continue after continue on the same section. Furthermore, no longer completely depowers you, only reducing your shot level by one out of four (except for the Peplos, which is always fixed at level 4 in exchange for being weaker than the rest of the ships). Finally, while the first game suffers from foreground objects obstructing the player's view, no such hazard exists in this game. Of course, a player looking to 1CC the game is still going to have their work cut out for them, and those that don't care for a 1CC can still expect to feed the game a full-course meal of credits; arcade games are designed to be Nintendo Hard, after all.
Special Effects Failure: While the parallax scrolling effect in stages 2 and the towards-the-foreground scrolling in stage 6 look absolutely cool, the fact that they are actually pre-rendered videos is exposed should a player be sent to the continue screen on those sections; all of the sprite layers freeze in place while the continue and fighter select prompts are present but the video continues its looped playback.
Underused Game Mechanic: At the end of each run (whether you clear the game or not), you're given a few pages of advanced details such as per-stage time and score and the game rank. However, these stats don't work correctly: They only record stats of your first credit, meaning that the "times each ship is used" and "times you continued" parameters are useless.
Visual Effects of Awesome: Stage 2 has an absolutely breathtaking 3D parallax effect of the corridor in the first half of the stage running at 60 FPS. Likewise Stage 6 has a similar effect set in a tunnel that scrolls towards the player.
