Gradius / YMMV - TV Tropes

You need some practice.

Accidental Innuendo - "POUND through the entrails and SHOOT ABADON!" Something about that sounds unsettling.
Adaptation Displacement - Most American fans believe that the NES version of Gradius is the first in the series due to the fact that the arcade version was renamed Nemesis outside Japan.
Anti-Climax Boss - And how! Almost every Final Boss in the series (with the exception of Doom from Salamander 2, Venom in Nemesis II, Central Server in Gradius NEO, Mother Computer Z in Nemesis for the Game Boy, and Guardian Core and Escape Ship from Gradius: The Interstellar Assault) either uses easily dodgable attacks (Bacterion from III, O.V.U.M. from Gaiden) or straight up doesn't attack at all (Xaerous Brain from the original and ReBirth, Zelos Force from Salamander, Gofer from II and IV, Venom from V). This is justified, as the final stage is usually a Genius Loci controlled by the Bacterions, and so in a sense, the entire final stage (and to an extent the entire game) is the boss fight. By the time you get to the Bacterion leader, you've already practically won.
Awesome Music - Gradius contains a large amount, listing them here would take too much space. Examples can be seen on the trope page.
Best Boss Ever: Unlike most other final bosses, Doom from Salamander 2 averts Zero-Effort Boss hard.
Best Level Ever - Stage 7 of Gaiden, which starts off as a seemingly-innocent volcano stage...and then gets gradually sucked into a black hole. Too bad it slows down to a crawl on certain PS2 models.
Bile Fascination: A lot of fans bought the Arcade Archives rerelease of III AC just to meme on the game's truckload of Fake Difficulty.
Breather Level:
- Stage 8 of Gradius III arcade version is a plant stage that's surprisingly straightforward and easy for being 80% into the game. It's sandwiched between Stage 7 and its fireball shower from hell and Stage 9 which is home to the infamous "Cube Rush".
- The final stage of Gradius V is a slightly harder version of Stage 2 where the player(s) ascend instead of descend, but it is significantly much shorter and easier than the previous stages, such as Stage 6 and Stage 7, both of them regarded as the hardest levels in the game. While it does house a Final Boss that takes barely any effort to dispose of as per series tradition, it's a bit unexpected that the stage right before said final boss isn't too difficult either.
Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
- Across the series, the Force Field is by far the most commonly-used shield whenever it's available, due to the original Shield being very tanky but also only guarding against frontal attacks and the shields being easy to deplete due to their big hitboxes. While Gaiden does have the Guard shield which protects against Deadly Walls and the Limit shield which provides complete invincibility for three seconds, the Force Field is still commonly used even in that game due to its all-around performance. The exception is the SNES port of Gradius III, where the Reduce shield is commonly used instead due to it's extreme reduction of the ship's hitbox (most shields make the hitbox much bigger), and it does allow you to take two hits before you're full-size and vulnerable.
- A number of players will stick to the classic Missile-Double-Laser weapon configuration even in games where other weapon options are available, partly out of tradition and partly due to being a Boring, but Practical setup that can handle almost any situation adequately.
Contested Sequel: ReBirth often gets flak for being only five stages long and failing to live up to the high standards set by Treasure's Gradius V, whereas ReBirth's developer M2 at the time of development and release lacked the reputation to get people particularly hype for their game. but it does have its fans who enjoy it because it's a shorter game (V sometimes gets complaints for being too long, at an hour and a half per loop), it brings back the more vibrant environments of the sprite-based games, its second and third loops actually change up the levels instead of just adding more and faster bullets, and it's a Prequel to the MSX games which are known for having more detailed lore than the rest of the series.
Demonic Spiders - Those bouncy things that shoot omnidirectional bullet spams, the Bubbles in the titular stage, especially in IV (where you have bouncing icebergs to dodge as well), the dreaded Option Thief, the goddamned Zubs (who sometimes materialize on top of you), the inflating mini-Moais that the Moai Boss spawns, the fireballs that generate indestructible shrapnel, and the dreaded Cube Rush at the end of the Ice Stage.
Ensemble Dark Horse:
- The Moai heads are some of the most well-known elements of the series despite not being protagonists or major antagonists, due to the weirdness factor of "Easter Island heads in space try to kill you with red-and-blue flashing rings."
- One of the most popular Recurring Bosses is Tetran, thanks to its spinning Combat Tentacles, unique attack pattern where it circles around the screen instead of simply moving vertically like its peers, and its appearance always plays Poison Of Snake, a fan-favorite boss theme.
Even Better Sequel: The SNES version of Gradius III was already regarded as a fantastic game. Then Gradius Gaiden one-ups it with simultaneous 2-player play, an equally wide variety of stage environments, the option to rearrange the power meter, four ships that are functionally four different weapon loadouts and all of which are good and four different types of shields including two of which alleviate the problem of running into Deadly Walls.
Fan Nickname: "Gradius syndrome" is used to refer to the series' unforgiving Unstable Equilibrium; more specifically, getting killed in a fully-powered ship and then having to claw one's way out of an extremely difficult section with only their basic blaster, no Options, and a single Speed Up (if they happened to have anything in the power meter highlighted upon death). It can also refer to when other games allow the player to make powerful upgrades to their ships only to take those upgrades away upon losing a life.
Game-Breaker: Some of the custom weapon set-ups can be this if the right weapons and option formations are used.
- Spread Bomb appears in many games as a missile item. It drops to the ground and instead of following the ground, it explodes to deal a lot of damage in a wide area, making it excellent for big groups of turrets and enemy spawners.
- Jade Knight in Gaiden has the aforementioned Spread Bomb and can upgrade it to split into two bombs, has the Round Laser which gives it 360-degree coverage in a game where enemies can come from all sides, and its Pulse Laser is an advanced version of Twin Laser that pierces enemies and can be upgraded to a triple burst.
- The Falchion Beta is this in Gaiden. The Auto-Aiming at full power covers 180 degrees of the top of your ship, the Gravity Bullet speed kills bosses, and the Rolling Missile both goes in both directions and pierces through weak enemies.
- E.Laser, R. Option, Reduce Shield, and Full Barrier in SNES III. E.Laser and R.Option combined give you a powerful rotating charged attack that can erase destructable bullets even while charging and can kill most everything in several hits - you're basically flying a buzzsaw. Reduce shield is the best shield in the series, although it can only negate two hits, it makes your ship, and thus your hit box, smaller, allowing you to slip through most bullets with ease, unlike other shields which tend to have large hitboxes or bloat your ship's existing hitbox. Full Barrier allows you to refill a partial shield instead of deplete it to bring it back to full.
- In Gradius V:
  - Freeze Options (Type 1) in Gradius V, especially when combined with Spread Bombs, can speedkill most bosses with ease by inserting the options into their weak points and exploit safe spots the other types can't, and are overall a versatile option type that allows for many custom formations, including replications of Type 3 (Formation) and Type 4 (Rolling).
  - The Fire Blaster went from a pathetic matchstick to a devastating fire-breathing monster, as its constant fire rate and high damage-per-second makes short work of bosses (especially when combined with the aforementioned Freeze Options and Spread Bombs), and the harder stages (such as Stage 5 and Stage 6) by easily destroying the asteroids and green goo respectively. As a cherry topping on the cake, the sweeping effect can clear out swarms of popcorn enemies and destructible projectiles. Just get used to the short range, because it's utterly devastating when used smartly.
- In ReBirth:
  - Type D, the Metalion from the MSX games, is capped to 2 Options, but it doesn't need the extra two when it has the Up Laser, which fires expanding energy bars upward while retaining the ship's basic gun and without halving its firing rate.
  - Type E has a variant of the 2-Way Missile in which the missiles actually slide along the ground instead of just vanishing when touching it, and also has the Force Field like Type B does. As long as you never use Double or Laser^note, it's easily one of the most powerful ships in the game.
Goddamned Bats - Lots of examples. One particularly irritating example is the "Strobe Ship" in Salamander's second and fifth stages, which Interface Screws you with seizure-inducing flashes.
- Turrets. Sure, they may only take one hit to die, but they have a good aiming and a fast fire rate compared to most other enemies. And on later loops in V, they fire out a constant stream of bullets.
- The infamous Zub cube enemies. They usually appear prior to a major boss (and almost always before a Boss Rush), and then start appearing as regular enemies in the last stage of the game. What makes these things notorious is they appear out of nowhere (possibly on top of the player) and zoom straight for the Vic Viper. The ones in Solar Assault aren't as bad, but the Zubs in this game do fire bullets.
Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Salamander is quite popular in China, because of many Famiclone consoles including said game, there was a mobile remake of the game being developed by Konami Shanghai, but with the studio's closure, the game was ultimately canceled for unknown reasons
Goddamned Boss: Moai Dimension in Gaiden is not very difficult, relatively speaking, but takes a fair bit of time to defeat since the two heads like to stop in positions that are difficult to hit if your weapons don't have a lot of non-forward coverage. Its loop 2 version is even more problematic, since there are now four Moai heads instead of two. Four-head Moai Dimension ends up being the longest boss fight in the game, not counting Sol, for many players.
Harsher in Hindsight: The title of Gradius ReBirth. The game ended up marking the death of the series instead, being the last original Gradius video game if one doesn't count its spinoff series Otomedius. It didn't help that ReBirth received a lot of criticism simply for failing to meet the lofty standards set by V.
It's Hard, So It Sucks!:
- This series is infamous for being the source of the phrase "Gradius syndrome" and for its biggest criticism: Getting killed and respawning strips you of all of your powerups, which depending on where it happens can create a nigh-unwinnable scenario. As such, some players refer to it as a "one-life game", another shmup slang term for a game where even if you have multiple lives, getting killed and respawning carries so much of a penalty that you might as well just try for a no-deaths run.
- The arcade release of Gradius III was preposterously brutal. This is why the Super Nintendo port toned down the difficulty, in which it was seen as a Polished Port.
- To a lesser extent, V has drawn some complaints for being punishing even on Very Easy, and its exceptionally long loop length of 90 minutes (compared to the more traditional half an hour) only adds to the sentiment.
It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: A common criticism of Gradius IV is that many stages are just rehashes of those in Gradius II. For example, Stage 1 is just the sun stage WITH LIQUID METAL! Granted, most games have a rehashed stage or two (usually the volcano stage and the Moai stage), but IV is seen as especially guilty of it.
It's Short, So It Sucks!:
- Gradius ReBirth is in trouble as far as this trope goes, as it's just five stages, although the player does have to beat the game three times in order to actually beat it completely with an ending.
- Inverted with Gradius V, with some players complaining that the loop length of 90 minutes is far too long for an arcade-style game.
Just Here for Godzilla: Disappointed with most final bosses not fighting back? Play Salamander 2 for Doom, one of five final bosses in the entire series to actually put up a climactic fight.
Memetic Loser: Most Bacterian leaders are this, for they just sit there doing nothing, making the few final bosses to avert Zero-Effort Boss stand out.
Moral Event Horizon: In Nemesis 3, Venom attacked planet Gradius and kidnapped a three-year old James Burton to change history in favor of the Bacterians. His attack has indirectly killed many of Venom's own species due to radiation.
Narm - Several boss taunts, such as:
"You think you can beat me with THAT? Loser!" —Moai Dimension, Gradius Gaiden stage 4 (Also said by O.V.U.M.)
"I'm going to scare you like you've never been scared before!" —Doom, Salamander 2 stage 6
Narm Charm: On the other hand, Doom's "I'm going to scare you" quote may not be so cheesy when he turns out to actually be a difficult Final Boss.
Older Than They Think: The arcade version of Gradius III is infamous for not only its cruel and unusual difficulty, but also for not allowing the player to use continues. Many fans mention this as if it's the first or only Gradius game to disallow continues, but the Japanese versions of the first two arcade Gradius games, as well as the Japanese Life Force arcade revision of Salamander, also do not allow continues or buying in extra lives.^note
Pacifist Run: Every boss can be beaten just by letting the timer run out so that the boss self-destructs, but special mention goes to Vaif, the Stage 5 boss in Gradius III. Vaif is a sextet of Moai heads that shoot out smaller drones that inflate as they take damage, causing them to limit your movement room. Because of this, it's actually easier to just fly in circles and lead the drones on a chase until the boss timer expires.
Polished Port:
- Gradius II on PC Engine is a very faithful recreation of the arcade version, AND adds a new stage.
- Gradius III:
  - The SNES adaptation is widely regarded as a much better product due to a lot of stage redesigns in the player's favor (including removing two heavily-disliked stages: the 3D tunnel stage that is incongruous with the rest of the game, and the sadistically hard and virtually RNG-based crystal stage), resulting in a much more fair game. Its arrangement of the soundtrack is stereo-mixed, whereas the arcade version's is monoaural.
  - The PS2 version, although it is a port of the arcade version, does manage to add a stage select that lets you start from any segment you've reached, effectively giving the game a continue feature.
  - Hamster's Arcade Archives version, another port of the arcade game, expands stage select to have all stages unlocked from the get-go and introduces save states.
- Gradius Collection, despite being released on a system with controls that don't lend well to shmups^note, does manage to recreate the five games on the collection very accurately, as well as introducing useful tweaks like adjusting hitbox sizes, widening the playfield for Gradius I and II, and introducing checkpoint saves. All of this years before M2 started producing ports with the same degree of accuracy and similar collections of features.
Remade and Improved:
- The Famicom version of Gradius II is the only Gradius game on the Famicom/NES to allow four options on the screen at once^note thanks to the cartridge's special chip, and features reimagined editions of the arcade stages that play just as well on the weaker hardware. Even better, you can destroy Shadow Dancers and their variants, which are usually indestructible in the arcade version. This tradition continued on many home console sequels.
- The SNES version of Gradius III isn't a port of the game so much as a remade version, featuring somewhat different stage layouts, as well as adding bosses and stages while removing others, and is regarded as better than the arcade version, which gets complaints for being sadistically unfair and difficult. The stages and bosses are redesigned in favor of fairness, like the rocks in the lava stage now being completely destructible and Big Core mk-III no longer has its Beam Spam final phase move; furthermore, some of the even more hated stage elements are removed entirely, like the infamous "Cube Rush" (and the entire cube stage for that matter) and the post-Final Boss escape sequence. It also adds three continues, whereas the arcade version has none, and some of the powerups available are considerably more powerful (Twin Laser now pierces enemies, Reduce now actually grants the player protection against hits), with some handy new additions as well (such as Formation Option, which keeps your Options in a "wingman" formation, making it easier to manage their placements, and Full Barrier, which restores a partially-consumed shield instead of forcing the player to deplete it first to be able to recharge it).
Scrappy Mechanic:
- Once you activate a Double or Laser, you cannot revert back to the standard shot without dying. Several ship loadouts throughout the series work better with the basic shot instead of its specialized weapons, meaning that you can be stuck in a difficult or outright Unintentionally Unwinnable scenario if you take either "upgrade". The only recourse available that doesn't involve dying is in the arcade version of III, which allows you to use the "Normal" "powerup" in the "!" slot to take back your upgrades one at a time.
- In most games, Speed Up upgrades last until your ship is destroyed and cannot be undone, potentially leaving you with a ship that's Too Fast to Stop and will smash into walls or enemies way too easily. Only a few games allow you to reduce your speed or reset it back to initial.
- Gradius V's cutscenes cannot be skipped, despite the fact that both are at least 30 seconds long.
- The Gradius Gaiden port on the PSP via Gradius Collection got the short end of the stick when it comes to screen options. All of the other games allow scaling the screen up to the PSP's screen height with and without stretching the picture, but Gaiden unfortunately has to make do with only the small dot-by-dot mode and stretch-screen mode. This could be due to some sort of hardware limitation, and it's not an outright Porting Disaster, but it makes for an eye-straining experience compared to the other four games in the collection.
- For arcade operators and collectors, the original Gradius runs on unique "Bubble System" hardware that uses what is known as bubble memory, an early effort at solid-state memory (as opposed to mechanical disks). Unfortunately, the hardware needs a fair bit of time to warm up (hence the 99-second timers on this game and also TwinBee), and can be easily damaged by electromagnetic fields, making the hardware too fragile for an arcade environment where there are many other arcade cabinets present. This is why Gradius boards that work are quite rare and it's easier to get its overseas counterpart Nemesis instead, which uses more traditional ROM chips instead; this in itself is a Scrappy Mechanic too due to the diferences between both versions.
Scrappy Weapon: The series has a lot of weapons and as such is bound to have this trope for many players:
- The Spread Double in III Arcade and V are looked down on for having angled shots where enemies are mostly in the Vic Viper's direct vertical position, making the Double's aiming unreliable to use.
- Falchion β in Gaiden has the Rolling Missile, which in practice ends up barely hitting enemies due to their short travel distance.
- In IV, those who use Type 4 will simply not touch the Armor Piercing shot, because of its slow rate of fire and average-at-best damage output offsetting its penetration properties.
- Fire Blaster in both MSX games (Nemesis 2 and 3) is dismissed because as cool as it looks, the short range puts it at a severe disadvantage compared to lasers, which are just as powerful but don't have range limits. Speaking of damage, the Fire Blaster has pathetic damage, thanks to a Game-Breaking Bug. Thankfully in Gradius V, the Fire Blaster now has the second best, if not, the best damage-per-second out of the other lasers, its sweeping effect can clear large clusters of enemies, and it has a constant rate of fire without the need for Type 2 or Type 4 Options.
- Those who use Type E in Rebirth stick to normal shots, because the alternatives to it are both terrible: V. Shot fires up and down in a game where most enemies come from the front, and while Vector laser pierces through enemies it's weaker than the normal shot and cannot cut through the destructible walls in Stage 2 and the bonus stages. Since you can't revert back to the normal shot in this game once you accept either shot "upgrade", you can end up in an Unintentionally Unwinnable situation.
Self-Imposed Challenge:
- There are "Boss Recovery" runs, where you get to a boss, die intentionally, and then get to and beat the boss with the few power-ups you get on the way from the pre-boss checkpoint.
- A simple challenge is to simply refrain from activating certain power-ups. Theoretically, every game can be beaten with just enough Speed Ups to get through any speed sections that exist, and not activate anything else.
Sequel Difficulty Drop: Gradius Gaiden, whether you consider it a follow-up to the arcade or SNES version of Gradius III, is regarded as one of the easiest games in the series, thanks to the Gauge Edit feature that lets you put more essential powerups at the front of the gauge, allowing one to, say, get a full set of Options with just four capsules, or a shield in one. It also has shield types that can nullify some series-common hazards: Guard protects the player from environmental collisions (although you will still get destroyed if you pinch yourself in a tight crevice or get crushed between two closing walls), and Limit which grants complete invincibility and even lets you pass through walls for three seconds; Limit in slot one in particular means you can be invincible for pretty much the entire stage, at least until you encounter a boss. As such, some players will intentionally ignore Gauge Edit and/or use more conventional shield types if they want a stronger challenge, or consider the "real game" to begin on the second loop.
Sequel Difficulty Spike: Gradius II is already difficult enough, but Gradius III got hit with this hard. Bosses have more well-guarded weak points, enemies are more likely to corner you, a lot of the weapons (especially the Edit weapons) suck, and continues are not allowed. It took until the PS2 version (as part of a Compilation Re-release with Gradius IV) to have something amounting to a continue feature, the stage select.
Sequelitis:
- Gradius III (Arcade) is not only atrociously difficult, but it's also full of extremely cheap moments that just makes the game very unforgiving. Many players regard it as the worst game in the mainline Gradius series. The SNES port on the other hand is more favorable because the difficulty was toned down drastically.
- Gradius IV is victim to this, due to not adding anything new to the series (the first stage is even a re-hash of the first stage from Gradius II) and for the 3D effects looking rather cheap, even for Playstation standards. It's also a contender with Gradius III for "hardest game in the entire series".
Shocking Moments: Players who have started to get used to series traditions may take on Doom in Salamander 2 or Venom in Nemesis 2 expecting a series-traditional Zero-Effort Boss...only to eat bullet or lightning, respectively, realizing that for once these bosses actually fight.
Signature Scene:
- From the arcade version of Gradius III, Stage 9's Cube Rush, held as the pinnacle of the game's Fake Difficulty.
- The Final Boss fight with Doom in Salamander 2, on account of being one of five final bosses in all of Gradius to actually fight back.
Spiritual Successor: Depending on who you ask, some fans consider Gradius V this to both the Salamander games when a few other fans consider it this to the MSX games.
Surprisingly Improved Sequel: If counting only mainline games, Gradius V is widely regarded as a serious improvement over Gradius IV, thanks to various improvements in the gameplay mechanics like giving the player more default firepower, variants of the iconic Options to keep things fresh, a 2-player simultaneous mode, and allowing the player to recover their options when dying (like in the Salamander games). While still very much a difficult game, the improved mechanics and better difficulty balancing put it in the realm of "harsh, but fair" rather than just "harsh".
Suspiciously Similar Song: "Fire Scramble" from Gradius III sounds just like Renaissance's "Song of Scheherazade".
Tear Jerker:
- The Game Over theme from Gaiden. A Dark Reprise of "Sky 2", and easily one of the most heart-wrenching themes in the entire series.
- The ending of Neo Imperial is heartbreaking; because Big Core MK-1 Custom (the escapee core warship) didn't survive the encounter with the Force Viper, and afterward its wreckage flies aimlessly in the empty void beyond. The BGM playing there is not helping at all.
That One Boss: Has enough examples to warrant its own page.
That One Level:
- The arcade version of Salamander / Life Force has a couple:
  - Stage 3 is the first brick wall for many players, taking you through a solar / stomach acid zone where the flames/acid suddenly erupt into arcs that can catch you off-guard, mandating Trial-and-Error Gameplay.
  - Stage 5 was blatantly designed to take players' money^note, featuring enemy formations that form in a circle around you and abruptly close in on you, more of the seizure lights enemies from Stage 2, and a section near the end where fast-moving lines of enemies race across the screen and vomit bullets all over the screen no matter how quickly you destroy them.
- Stage 8 of III AC, the fire stage. The Fire zone invented Bullet Hell even before it became a genre itself, thanks to the small meteors that come in massive numbers, essentially covering 90% of the screen while you desperately try to dodge each one of them.
- Stage 9 of III AC, the Crystal stage, is infamous for the cube-rush segment, where huge numbers of crystal cubes will home onto the Vic-Viper and trap it while the cubes keep spawning. Oh yeah, and there is NO CHECKPOINT in this stage! Did you die to the boss? Time to do the cube rush all over again!
- Last but not least, Stage 10 of III AC, the fortress stage, is utterly unforgiving, thanks to its massive amounts of Demonic Spider enemies, laser traps, and shifting floors.
- Speaking of Crystal zones, Stage 3 (Stage 4 for NES) in II has tons of floating crystals that explode into more crystals whenever you damage them. Add that with turrets all over the place and you got yourself a hairy stage. In fact, that stage is the current image for this Trope's Shoot 'em Ups page.
- The Cell stage in IV is practically one of the most unforgiving stages of its kind, thanks to the amount of regenerating cell walls and Demonic Spider Mooks with unpredictable fast tentacles.
- The Famicom version of II has the first stage as perhaps the most difficult one alongside the expectedly-difficult final stage. Said first stage does a reprise of the solar prominence stage from Stage 3 of Life Force, necessitating Trial-and-Error Gameplay to find a safe route. Unlike Life Force, this game uses the Checkpoint system, so if a prominence turns your ship into vapor, you'll have to start the entire section over!
- The first stage of III Arcade is pretty fun, and provided you played perfectly (you have four options, your laser, and missiles) and keep up a steady stream of fire, the second stage is tense, but enjoyable. It's the third stage where it all goes downhill (ironically, the third stage is virtually a rehash of the first stage of I only a hell of a lot harder, and appears again in Gradius Rebirth, where it is nowhere near as hard).
- These get toned down in the SNES port of III, only to give up the sudden crash into the brick that is the High Speed Zone due to sudden change in auto-scroll speed. If you don't have at least two speed ups, you will smash into the wall the moment the intro of the music finishes.
- The third stage in IV, the bubble stage. It's similar to the one in III, only now with stationary obstacles and, much more importantly, the smaller bubbles that are produced when you destroy a larger bubble are briefly indestructible shortly after splitting up. You can come into this stage with full weaponry and the bubbles may still overwhelm you.
- Stage 6, the "green slime factory" level in V is nasty in both difficulty and design, thanks to the infinite amount of green goo that fills up the tiny cramped up stage. To make things even worse, the level tilts, making the goo spill all over the stage. The backwards section preceding the second Boss Rush may be shorter, but it's still not pretty. If you have correct weapon setups however (IE: Fire Blaster with Spread Bombs and Freeze Options), cleaning the green goo can be somewhat easier.
- Also in V is the clusterfuck that is Stage 7. It starts off with swarms of teleporting enemies, followed by a fleet of Big Core MK 1 units, which ends with multiple constant streams of enemies. After the enemy swarm, the speed section will make you suffer, as it has sharp vertical turns, gates that open and close at the worse times, and a section of fast-moving elevators filled with turrets, while Beacon awaits you at the end. After the anxiety-inducing battle against Beacon, you have to go through a series of moving walls, including a gate that will permanently close if you're not fast enough, followed by a large cavity with tight spaces, and a gimmicky puzzle where you have to move four spheres by shooting them and use them to block the laser pods. A plethora of power-up enemies show up in a fast-moving maze that precedes a massive field of homing mines while Duckers snipe you from above and below. This is where Keeper's Core, considered by many to be the hardest boss in this game, and possibly the entire series, fights you. Immediately after the battle with Keeper's Core, you also have to take down another Spider Tank boss, Elephant Gear, by destroying the cores on its knees while weaving through its legs and blasting up popcorn enemies. At the end of the stage is a closing gate with four enemy generators outside of the base. It's worth mentioning that this stage is right after the already nasty Stage 6.
- In ReBirth, Stage 4 is a sore thumb in the game's difficulty curve. There are alien skeletons on the floor and ceiling that, if shot at, release bones that cannot be destroyed. If you don't have a button that fires your shot only and another one that fires missiles only, expect to eat bone a lot due to accidentally shooting the skeletons. Also, picking up a blue enemy-clear item will cause all on-screen skeletons to release bones.
They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: One criticism of V is that not only it lacks the series-traditional volcano and Moai stages, something that even non-mainline games such as ReBirth and Gaiden have^note, V also lacks the highly-diverse stages and bosses that the previous games have, like the fire stages with fire dragon bosses, desert stages, or the plant stages with giant plant bosses. The only unique stage that doesn't have a mechanical boss is the 4th stage, which has a massive heart as the boss while the worm boss from Gaiden (or at least a subspecies of said worm) shows up as an Elite Mook. That said, it doesn't stop fans from hailing it as one of the best games in the series.
Tough Act to Follow:
- Gradius Gaiden is regarded by many fans as the best game in the series, due to having a diverse-yet-balanced ship roster, a wide variety of stage environments, Co-Op Multiplayer (while the Salamander games have it too, this is the first game explicitly titled Gradius to have it), the ability to rearrange the power meter, and new shield types that many find to be actually useful unlike every other shield type that isn't Force Field. But as a result of this, Gradius IV, released about a year later, ended up being viewed in a negative light due to lacking a lot of what Gaiden has, although even comparisons aside, it's still seen as one of the worse games in the series anyway due to its utterly frustrating difficulty. Gradius Galaxies would later be released and, while regarded as a pretty good game by many, is seen as lacking some of the shine that Gaiden has. Even Gradius V (see below) gets measured against Gaiden unfavorably due to its less varied environments and weapon types.
- The other contender for "best game in the series" is Gradius V. Among the many innovations it has are an absolutely beautiful leap to fully three-dimensional graphics, an Option Control mechanic that improves the player's offensive options, up to four shots on the screen as opposed to the traditional two, a grandiose Hitoshi Sakimoto soundtrack, and a relatively high degree of content for the price with loops taking an hour and a half each. Unfortunately, this ended up establishing a very tough standard for subsequent Gradius games to follow. Gradius ReBirth was released four years later and got snubbed by many for being too short, not having cutting-edge 3D visuals, and not having the movie-like soundtrack despite being arranged by renowned shoot-em-up musician Manabu Namiki. Gradius Collection on PSP also got criticism for not including Gradius V, despite the fact that the porting team would've had to make some serious sacrifices to make it work on the PSP's weaker hardware (which sits somewhere between the PS1 and PS2 in terms of overall power).
Underused Game Mechanic:
- Very few games allow the player to take back Speed Ups: III allows the player to use Speed Down but it's in the "!" slot or keep setting off Speed Ups until the game finally resets the player's speed back to normal. V also has the same "Speed Ups reset back to zero once you activate enough" of them gimmick, though at least maximum ship speed is still controllable enough in that game.
- Gradius Gaiden:
  - The game allows the player to rearrange their power meter, allowing for more practical setups like Option in the first or second slot. No other game has allowed the player to do this, not even later ones; the closest the series has gotten to a gauge edit in any other game is the Japanese arcade version of Life Force, in which player 2 a differently-arranged but still preset power meter.
  - The version on Gradius Collection does not have 2-player simultaneous mode, most likely because of how unintuitive it would be to have 2 players on a single PSP and how difficult it would be to implement ad-hoc multiplayer for a game that was not programmed for it.
- In Gradius V, the game seems to be setting up loop 2 to have differences besides "enemies fire more bullets" by having the stage 1 boss have not one but two cores, one on each side. Unfortunately, after this twist, the rest of the game decides to just go back to the "more bullets" method of increasing difficulty, with virtually no other differences.
Unexpected Character: Few fans expected Nemesis 2 characters, of all characters (more specifically, protagonist James Burton and antagonist Venom before he became a massive brain in V), to appear in Gradius ReBirth, as Nemesis 2 is simply a side entry for the MSX rather than a comparatively big-name console or arcade game. This is more pronounced in North America, where the MSX failed to find anything more than a niche following.
Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Dr. Venom, very much so. After the Northern Cross war, he and nearly all of the few other Wreeks who survived were mutated into a green-skinned appearance due to nuclear fallout (at a time when Gradius was actively exploiting them for their ESP abilities.) According to the Gradius II Bible, he sought protections, as they were now an endangered species, but the Gradian empire refused to listen, and his coup against the throne was originally an act of desperation. When he partnered with Bacterion, however, it is implied he grew solely obsessed with revenge, to the point he ended up causing the Northern Cross War to begin with.

YMMV / Gradius

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