Adaptation Displacement: Both Contra and Super C were originally released in the arcades, but the NES ports of these games are more popular than the arcade version.
Seasoned players believe Shadow Beast Kimkoh, the Final Boss of Super C, is relatively easy. It comes after a brutal final stage, but it's a stationary boss, its attacks cannot directly harm the player under its legs, and the player can waste it in seconds assuming they have the appropriate weapons.
The final boss of the first Game Boy installment, Operation C, is just an alien lifeform in a tube that you shoot at from distance, with no other enemies or dangers in the room.
Breather Boss: The Stage 7 boss in Contra 4. Even in Hard Mode, it's basically just a gigantic bug monster you have to gradually destroy bit by bit, with it having little to nothing in terms of offense to throw back at you except for soldiers in hover bikes underneath it.
Whether the Contra or Probotector versions are better. While many prefer the Contra versions because they're the uncensored originals and run at a superior 60Hz refresh rate rather than 50Hz, Probotector is preferred by another crowd because the robots are perceived as cooler and less generic. Interestingly, the Contra Collection includes a "Turbo Mode" option with the Probotector versions of the games included allowing them to be played at 60Hz.
Fans of Contra III: The Alien Wars and Contra: Hard Corps argue about which game is the best in the series — especially considering that both games split the franchise in two entirely different directions (with Contra III being a basis for ReBirth and Contra 4, while Hard Corps style of gameplay was revisited in Shattered Soldier, Hard Corps: Uprising, and to some extent Neo Contra).
Shattered Soldier: Earth's ruling Triumvirate is indirectly responsible for the alien invasions of the first games in the series. They sent an army to recover the Relic of Moirai from Jupiter; the invading aliens were actually a defensive army. The Triumvirate, uncaring, claims the aliens are invaders, thus prolonging the war and resulting in countless deaths. When Lance Bean found out the truth, they supposedly killed him, and also used a satellite to wipe out 80% of Earth's population, blaming all this on Bill Rizer, who is later released to take on a terrorist group. The Triumvirate ultimately plans to examine the Relic and become like gods.
Neo Contra: Master Contra is the leader of the terrorist group Neo Contra, which poses such a threat to the now-prison planet Earth in 4444 that Bill Rizer is revived from cryogenic storage. Master Contra—as well as the Player Character himself—are both clones of the original Bill Rizer, seen in the game as "Mystery G", and later killed by Master Contra. Master Contra plans to end all wars—by blowing up Earth, which he succeeds in doing in a Bad Ending. Despite all his talk and claims how he is "the ultimate form of Bill Rizer", in the end, he is, as the player character says, "just a heap of metal with an inflated ego".
Contra 4. While many hail its return to the series' roots, some feel that the combination of the DS's two screens makes for an awkwardly-tall screen with a gap between the screens, especially when stages emphasizing horizontal movement are involved. The lack of a stage select or stage practice — despite being released in 2007, when stage select and practice had long since become staples of arcade ports and arcade-style consumer games — hardly helps much for those trying to practice later stages and don't want to have to go through previous stages every time. While the overwhelming consensus is that it's far better than the PS1Contra games that really hurt the series' image, some feel that it's still an inferior product to other games such as The Alien Wars and Hard Corps.
Contra Returns. A fitting tribute to the series seemingly developed and made by Tencent/TiMi who managed to make use of Konami's old lore with their permission (some design changes aside) with Action RPG gameplay that is designed to attract new generations of gamers along with casuals as well (and somehow managed to be slightly more 'Contra-ish' than Rogue Corps despite all those changes), or a dumbed-down experience (due to it playing like a Looter Shooter than a proper Contra game) with Contra's skin is insulting for longtime players? And that would still depend on how you look at Konami at the moment: Either it's an okay attempt to make a mobile game or just yet another entry of the 'Konami is insulting gamers since the 2015/2016 controversy' long list.
Disc-One Nuke: For Contra Returns, if you are lucky enough to get Lucia Zero thru some event or if you lack patience, buy enough to reach VIP 5 which has her as one of the rewards, she'll really shine even into late game. As an "A" rated hero, Lucia should be pretty good and her stats reflect that. But what makes her often as useful as a "S" or even "SS" hero is her skills which revolve around summoning automated turrets and drones. These independently firing automatons can almost triple her firepower and they're superior to a human in detecting incoming threats. This let's her sail through missions requiring defenders, or quickly and safely dealing with bosses.
If you happen luck out with a special holiday event such as Xue and the Lunar New Year celebration, you can not only get yourself an S or SS hero - you may even get their skins and accessories plus associated weapons too.
One of the earliest boosts is if you buy the Golden M4 assault rifle. It's not only an S ranked gun but it's also a gold colour weapon too - marking the gun as especially powerful and it makes the shooter borderline invincible in early and even late stages of the game.
Event-Obscuring Camera: There is an invisible area "between" the DS's screens in Contra 4. Bullets can pass through it, which will result in numerous, and cheap, deaths from a bullet you couldn't even see a moment before.
The Spread Gun in the NES games, especially if combined with the Rapid Bullets power-up, is far and away the best weapon in the game, since its bullets cover a wide area and can obliterate bosses provided the player button mashes.
The upgraded version of the machine gun in the arcade game Super Contra has a ridiculously fast firing rate that allows you to wipe out bosses in a matter of seconds.
The Homing Gun in Operation C works like a three-way Spread Gun and shoots just as fast... except all of its bullets home in the enemy, making it tremendously effective in all situations.
Neo Contra has Weapon Sets D and F as well as Jaguar's katana. Set D has a Lightning Gun that can One-Hit Kill many enemies, the secondary is a hard hitting bazooka that does massive damage against bosses and stationary objects, and the lock-on weapon is the Heaven's Laser, which is absurdly strong, never misses, and reloads stupidly fast, making things that need a lock-on utter push-overs. Set F has the GV Laser (named after Gradius V) which fires a constant laser beam with a ridiculously long range. Jaguar's katana is another powerful weapon, because it can take out bosses in a few swings if you get up close to them.
Contra 4 has the upgraded Laser and upgraded Machine Gun. The former is a great boss/mini boss killer on those with large hitboxes. While the the upgraded Machine Gun deals huge blunt damage that works best on those with smaller or medium size hitboxes. There have been many a player who get these two weapons early, and stick with them for the rest of the game.
The series, specifically the NES version of the first 2 games are very popular in China, due to the fact that many Famiclone consoles included the game as part of the lineup. Several bootleg versions, such as Super Contra 7 and Super Contra X were also made to cash in on its popularity. It eventually led to Tencent making Contra Returns, a tribute to the series that features almost all of the canon characters and enemies. And they also feature Jackal, a fellow Konami game, in a crossover event.
The game is very fondly recalled by retro gamers in Poland. Any time Pegasus ("Polish NES") is mentioned, Contra is brought up and people usually speak about it along the lines of: "Those were the times..."
Contra Force is beloved in Russia, mainly because of the fact, that in the 90's this game was widely distributed on bootleg carts in both original and hacked forms (hacked versions of the game featured mostly fixed slowdowns) and also because the setting of the game resonated with the situation in the country at that time.
20 years after the release of Neo Contra, Steve Blum, who voiced Master Contra, would later voice Bill Rizer in Contra: Operation Galuga. Guess he really is the "real and original Bill Rizer" after all, is he?
Bill and Lance, especially how their broken bond practically moves the story in Shattered Soldier. Also, in the European Gryzor continuity, the title is from their shared surname, as if they were a married couple (well, they could be also brothers, but that wasn't ever clarified, and the subtext remains).
Genbei "Jaguar" Yagyu and Bill Rizer in Neo Contra especially in Joke Ending. To clarify, they swim in space, only in loincloths, while Bill holds that of Genbei, and to add a cherry on top of this all there are sounds of gay sex in the background.
The Triumvirate probably crossed it way before the first game when they stole the Relic of Moirai to become gods, triggered the Aliens into attacking earth to retrieve the relic and covered up the entire thing as an alien invasion where the aliens are "trying to conquer mankind".
Nausea Fuel: The final level on Contra 4. After you defeat Black Viper's first form, she absorbs the corpses of the humans into her biomass, growing to monstrous size in the process. You must then blast a hole in her rear end and go inside her body, making your way from her intestines up to her brain. Expect to destroy a lot of organs, climb ruptured tendons and deal with a bunch of parasites on the road to the final battle.
The NES games are notoriously difficult and were responsible for introducing American players to the Konami cheat codenote Inputting a sequence of buttons at the title screen awarded the player with 30 lives, which were seen as a necessity to enjoy the games back when save states weren't available.
The arcade versions of Contra and Super Contra are notoriously even harder than the NES versions. This is because there are only limited continues (similar to another Konami arcade game), and there is no Konami Code to save you.
Contra: Hard Corps, and Contra 4 are considered to be even harder than the NES games, with the fourth game's manual even treating its harsh learning curve as a point of pride. When Hard Corps was released in Japan, they added a health bar and gave players unlimited continues.
The original Contra is mistakenly considered to be inspired by Predator thanks in part to Bob Wakelin's now iconic cover art for the home versions (which was traced over from publicity stills of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Dutch Schaefer). In reality the arcade version began worldwide distribution on February 1987, predating the June 12 theatrical premiere of Predator by roughly four months.
While the original Contra popularized the Konami Code with its 30 lives and people now associate the Konami Code with Contra, the code actually originated from Gradius, where using the code will power up your ship, the Vic Viper.
Polished Port: The original arcade game had a lot of flaws. The NES version fixed most of them, plus expanded the levels. It did take a graphical downgrade to get it onto NES hardware, but since it displaced the original, not many people realize that. The Japanese version even uses a special chip to add extra graphical effects and brief cutscenes.
The complete lack of a stage select, something that probably would've been excused in the 80's, not so much in 2007 when individually-selectable stages had since become the standard.
The Hit-Rate system in PlayStation 2 games. While it's pretty useful for reminding you not to make mistakes again, it does frustrate most gamers that it could prevent them from completing the game without any mistakes. Even worse is, you could get a Downer Ending if you do a slight mistake.
The overheat mechanic of Contra: Rogue Corps is widely loathed by anyone who played this game. It prevents players from keep shooting their guns, and it's annoying as it sounds.
Sequel Difficulty Drop: Neo Contra is significantly easier than Shattered Soldier, which is one of the hardest games in the series, especially once the GV Laser and Weapon Type D is unlocked.
Sequel Difficulty Spike: Super Contra, particularly the NES version (retitled Super C), has much more brutal game design than its predecessor. The first game, while still very hard, can be mastered through rote memorization thanks to enemies and hazards mainly sticking to patterns, whereas the sequel throws in tons of sudden, randomized and fast-moving dangers that test your reflexes much more stringently than they do your memory. Also, the famous 30-life code from the first game has been replaced by a measly 10-life code (Japanese versions kept 30-life codes), meaning even if you're cheating it's still harder.
Sequelitis: Rogue Corps has been near-universally regarded as the worst game in the series, given its significant change in style, addition of mechanics that gel poorly with Contra's gameplay, and heavy focus on grind over fast-paced action.
That One Attack: Lance Bean's pinball-like attack from Shattered Soldier. It's really fast, unpredictable, and very hard to dodge. It's also pretty much one of the reasons why it's hard to get an S-rank for many.
The Energy Zone in the original Contra gives many people fits simply because of the shooting energy traps over Bottomless Pits and a whole series of them on platforms, making a highly difficult game even harder if you didn't use the 30 lives cheat.
Stage 4 of Neo Contra. Despite being easier than its predecessorShattered Soldier, it's probably the hardest stage of the game due to the mini-boss being very annoying with its hard to dodge and shoot mines, the turrets being hard to lock onto, and the obstacles being very difficult to shoot through. If you're trying to 100% this stage with a weapon set that isn't Weapon Set D, good luck.
They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Effectively the crux of critic's problems with Rogue Corps. By itself, it's hardly a bad game if you can get used to it, but as the long-awaited continuation of the mainline series when the last game was ten years prior (twelve if you overlook Rebirth in favor of 4), suddenly changing the entire game to a Neo Contra-like design with loot drops, weapon overheating and loadouts completely compromised the principles of the series for most fans. Compare to the aforementioned Neo Contra, which has its detractors for the gameplay shift and permanent weapons, but still has plenty of fans by getting the core design down (Rogue Corps does have its own fans who enjoyed it for what it is, but considering the situation Konami is at, they're more silent than ever and most likely has less numbers than even Neo Contra).
Unintentional Period Piece: Being named after the Iran-Contra Affair is the most obvious indicator of the series originating in the 80's, but the emphasis on muscular military men, said men being visible pastiches of action icons Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, and especially the first game's use of jungle settings visibly inspired by The Vietnam War (which was still fresh in public memory in part due to the struggles faced by its veterans, and had already been sanitized into a stock action setting by the likes of Stallone's Rambo: First Blood Part II) further hammer it in that this is a series that could've only gotten its start in the waning days of the Ronald Reagan era.
A lot of recurring bosses suffer from this in the US due to various now-obsolete Dub Name Changes and errors All There in the Manual. Later installments usually corrected the boss names.
Canonically, there is no boss named "Red Falcon"; the term only correctly refers to the alien-supported organization. However, manuals for the western releases of early games also call various enemies "Red Falcon", namely Java (giant worm alien attacking from the top of the screen) and the Orian (a regular enemy). Gava, the first phase of the final boss in III is also mistakenly believed to be called "Red Falcon".
Waggle: Contra 4 attempts to capitalize on the Nintendo DS's dual-screen by having the gameplay take place across both screens at once. Now, portrait-ratio Contra is not too bad of an idea, given that the very first game and the original arcade version of Super Contra are also portrait-orientation games. The problem is that the gap between the screens, which counts as playable area, can cause the player to get abruptly killed by attacks they didn't notice coming from the other screen, or worse, attacks that originate from inside the gap.
At the time the earliest games were released, there was controversy over the US, under Ronald Reagan, supporting rebel groups in Nicaragua called the Contras, short for Contrarevolucionarios, or "Counter-Revolutionaries." This caused some minor controversy and may have contributed to European release of the arcade game being titled Gryzor (since support for the Contra(s) was considered right-wing and heavily opposed in Europe) and why the NES version of Super Contra and the Game Boy Contra game were retitled Super C and Operation C respectively.
The localizations of the first two NES games and Operation C changed the setting from the 27th century to the then-present (as well as the names of many of the characters). This became problematic when Contra III featured an obviously futuristic setting, so they had to change the main characters' name and claim that they were the descendants of the previous heroes. Contra 4 would actually make attempts to reconcile these differences in canon.
The European Gryzor and Probotector continuity changed most of the heroes into robots to tone done the human-related violence. As seen on the Broken Base entry above, this is sometimes thought to be for the better.
, it's basically just a gigantic bug monster you have to gradually destroy bit by bit, with it having little to nothing in terms of offense to throw back at you except for soldiers in hover bikes underneath it.