YMMV / Chaos Field

• Awesome Music: The game's music has been praised for very catchy techno and electronica-styled music that complements the game's dystopian sci-fi setting.
• Cult Classic: While the game hasn't been viewed favorably by critics and some die-hard shoot 'em up players, it managed to gain a small cult following that appreciates the game's interesting take on the genre as a Boss Game.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: A common complaint leveled against the game is the relentless difficulty, which often has players frustrated with onslaughts of bullets thrown against them and the game's lack of a stage select or any way to practice stages to make memorizing their patterns more approachable.
• Nintendo Hard: A handful of lives, a finite number of credits, lots of bullets and lasers, and bosses aplenty. Making it all the way through to see the end credits is easier said than done. Players do gain extra credits per hour between play sessions, eventually leading up to Free Play for unlimited credits.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: Another criticism towards the game is its short length with five short stages that can be beaten in less than an hour and scarce replay value outside of going for high scores. The GameCube version attempts to address this with its Original Mode but for some it wasn't enough to justify its short length.
• Polished Port: The GameCube port of the game is visually on par with the Dreamcast version and includes a new Original Mode that makes the game feel more inline to traditional shoot 'em ups with the addition of smaller enemy waves and new bullet patterns for bosses to mix up the gameplay.
• Porting Disaster: Some of the game's later ports suffer from issues that didn't happen in previous releases.
  • The PlayStation 2 version of the game suffers from frame-rate problems causing the game to run worse than the Dreamcast and arcade releases.
  • The MileStone Shooting Collection 2 re-release of the game has a bizarre problem shared with its re-release of Radirgy Noa where backing out of the game to the game selection menu, playing a different game, and return to either games will wipe that game's settings and save data.
  • The Sakura Flamingo Archives. version of the game, while it runs at higher resolutions than previous versions, it is also prone to bizarre mid-game loading pauses that ruin the flow of gameplay and heavy frame-rate problems during explosions, which sometimes causes the game to outright crash. It is also missing certain textures and effects compared to other versions of the game.
• So Okay, It's Average: The game received mostly average critical reception from critics at the time of release, with many criticizing the game for its lack of incentives to replay the game outside of scoring chasing and bragging rights, bland graphics, brutal difficulty, underwhelming gameplay, and general lack of polish when compared to other shoot 'em ups in the market.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Depending on who you ask, the removal of slowdowns in the GameCube version can be considered a detriment to the game's balance since some of the slowdowns was intentional in the arcade version so players can find where to dodge through dense bullet patterns more easily.

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