YMMV / Metal Black

• Awesome Music: It has a great soundtrack, courtesy of Yasuhisa Watanabe. The Stage 1 theme, "Born To Be Free", appropriately sets the tone for your journey up ahead, and it's often regarded as one of the Zuntata's best.
• Heartwarming Moments: The bad ending, overlapping with Tear Jerker. You fall in battle against the Final Boss, but your sacrifice inspires humanity to mobilize all of their 20,000 Black Fly units and strike back.
• I Am Not Shazam: "Metal Black" is not the name of the player's spacecraft, but a military project that developed the weapon. The spacecraft ifself is called the Black Fly.
• Nightmare Fuel: Where to start? There's a bleak and hopeless atmosphere that resonates throughout the game, especially as you begin the journey on a war-torn earth. The game's graphical effects add to the already surreal and psychadelic experience, and the Eldritch Abomination Final Boss will do its best to assault you with a sensory overload... Its dying screech bestows you with with a view of Earth being cut in half, though the ending implies that the whole thing was All Just a Dream.
• Quirky Work: Metal Black is a trippy shoot-em-up with psychedelic themes, enemies consisting of Flying Seafood Special, and entertaining Translation Train Wreck. It's infamous for its odd final boss, which, even with all the crazy things you've seen before reaching that point, still can't compare. The entire fight takes place before creepy and symbolic imagery, presumably visualized into the battlefield by the boss. This slideshow includes fossils, a prehistoric human, a factory, and soldiers and combat aircraft. It then shifts to two final, surreal images, depicting what seems to be a junkyard and finally, a twisted cityscape with an eyeless cat in the foreground. This is immediately followed up by the earth getting destroyed and a question, asked in broken English, of whether what happens is a dream or not.
• Porting Disaster: The Taito Legends 2 version has a bug that prevents you from firing a focused laser at max power instead of the lightning attack. This effectively ruins the most spectacular mechanic of the game, as using a beam lacking full charge against enemy beams won't generate the energy spheres that obliterate bosses.
• Tear Jerker: If you lose all your lives against the Final Boss, a sequence plays out where your Heroic Sacrifice inspires humanity to scramble the other 20,000 Black Fly units and fight back in your honor. To compare, if you do defeat the Final Boss, a trippy and barely-decipherable sequence plays out that doesn't really resolve any of the plot's loose ends.