Starting with "Gallantry", the music of the first game's Stage 1.
Most of the music in IV are modernized rearrangements from the first two games.
On the large scale, all of the series' music is awesome no matter what game you play, including the spinoffs.
Broken Base: Fans of the series can't quite agree on whether the purple Bend Plasma weapon introduced in Raiden II is an overpowered and excellent weapon due to its ability to easily twist and hit off-angle enemies even at low power or an overrated Awesome, but Impractical weapon that isn't worth picking up due to having lower damage-per-second than the Lightning Laser or a point-blank Spread Vulcan and being a visually distracting weapon that can endanger the player. Generally speaking, casual players seem to gravitate towards the Bend Plasma, while 1CC- and score-focused players tend to avoid it.j
Common Knowledge: The enemies are often referred to as the "Cranassians" as if it's canon, but this name is actually a misspelling of "Carnassials" from the localized manual for the SNES Raiden Trad, the only game where that name is used. This confusion stems from the fact that the other games don't explain the plot in-game to begin with, so people just took the localized Trad manual and assumed that to be canon to the rest of the series. This was largely put to rest with the release of Raiden V, which refer to them simply as the Crystals.
Zigzagged. Many players (if not all) will only use the purple "Bend Plasma" laser, to the point where Raiden III is criticized for not having it. Some other players only opt for the standard Spread Gun for the entire gameplay instead.
In terms of subweapons, players tend to go for the homing "H" missile rather than the dumb-fire "M" or semi-homing "R" missiles due to its useful property of chasing after any enemies the player's shots may have missed, especially when using the laser main weapon.
Demonic Spiders: Tanks, but only when the Dynamic Difficulty gets pumped up. They will shoot a fast and accurate shot as soon as they enter the screen, and is probably one of the main causes of Yet Another Stupid Death. And if you think you're safe over the ocean with fewer "Sniper Tanks", there's "Sniper Gunboats" that perform the same role.
Difficulty Spike: An increase in difficulty usually occurs around the second or third stage.
Even Better Sequel: The original game was already a smash hit in arcades, and Raiden II managed to top that and become one of the most iconic shmups of the 1990s, with many people who grew up during that period speaking fondly of the game's "Toothpaste Laser".
The most enduring is "The Cranassians" for the series Big Bad (officially named "the Crystals" in Raiden V). The name "Cranassians" is a misspelling of the name "Carnassials", given by the Super NES Raiden Trad US-localized manual. This is the only Western localization of the Raiden game to name the antagonists. The much-cited North American manual of The Raiden Project for the "Cranassians" name calls them "technologically advanced, alien 'exological' beings.
"Toothpaste Laser" for the Bend Plasma laser.
Ion Laser for the straight blue laser.
Fandom Rivalry: There's some one-sided friction with fans of Metal Gear, Mortal Kombat and Genshin Impact, due to all of those games having a character also named Raiden who is better-known in video game pop culture (though in the case of Genshin's namesake, her full name is Raiden Shogun), with those characters' fans often having no clue what this game series is (i.e. "Oh, Raiden? As in the MGS / Mortal Kombat / Genshin character?"). This bleeds over into a generational rivalry in the case of Genshin Impact as well, due to Genshin fans generally being relatively young (teens or early 20s) and Raiden fans generally being millennials or older.
Good Bad Bugs: In the arcade version of the original game and The Raiden Project, switching main gun right before or during a boss battle will cause the game to ignore the current settings of the Dynamic Difficulty and revert bosses to their lowest health value. It is particularly easy to cheese the 3rd boss this way as destroying its front section always spawn a weapon power up.
It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Raiden IV's soundtrack gets criticism for its reliance on arranges of tracks from Raiden I through DX, with only 3 out of the 5 stages' themes (stages 1, 2, and 5) being original compositions and both boss themes being lifted from the first two games. The console modes rely even more on arranges, with the new stage 5 (arcade stage 5 now being stage 7), stage 6, and the EX stage also having arranges rather than originals. Even the True Final Boss doesn't have its own theme, instead using the Raiden I boss theme which several other bosses in IV already use.
Nintendo Hard: Bullets move very fast, it takes many stages' worth of powerups to get your ship into a reasonably powerful state, losing a life knocks all of those powerups out of your ship making recovery nightmarishly difficult, and there's a sheer drought of extra lives; these games often only give one extra life in the entire game. The Seibu-produced games also don't give invincibility when firing a bomb and bombs take about a second to detonate, so it's quite difficult to whisk yourself of imminent death.
Not-So-Cheap Imitation: Not only did the first few Raiden games, which were basically ribbing Toaplan, end up being successful, to the point where many people who grew up with early 90s arcade games speak fondly of Raiden II's signature "purple toothpaste laser", but while Toaplan went bankrupt in 1994, the series continues to receive new installments, with three new mainline games since (with the latest being Raiden V in 2016) as well as the three Raiden Fighters spinoffs.
Only the Creator Does It Right: The MOSS-developed games (Raiden III onwards) are generally regarded as adequate but not as good to the Seibu-developed ones (Raiden I, II, and DX), due to changes in level design and the loss of the Bend Plasma laser (and while it does return in Raiden IV, many players note that it feels different from its sprite-based incarnations).
Periphery Demographic: The series has earned quite a reputation among mobile games due to its precise touchscreen controls for the Raiden Legacy port.
Polished Port: Raiden IV Overkill, essentially a PS3 Updated Re-release of Raiden IV, includes the two DLC fighters Fairy and Fighting Thunder Mk-II available from the start, exclusive levels, and has a special Overkill mode reminiscent of Ether Vapor's Surplus Damage Bonus.
Porting Disaster: The SNES version of Raiden Trad has terrible graphics, ton of slowdowns and arbitrary changes to the gameplay.
Replacement Scrappy: The Proton Laser in Raiden III, which serves as a replacement for the Bend Plasma and was panned as a result. If you ask anyone who doesn't like III why they don't like it, the answer will be "it doesn't have the Toothpaste Laser" more often than not.
Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: The Spread Shot default weapon is heavily disliked in the sprite-based games due to requiring rapid tapping to get its damage-per-second output to a respectable level and plenty of powerups to give it a good spread. From Raiden III onwards, it starts off as a three-way spread and can be rapid-fired simply by holding the fire button down (while the other two weapons have this behavior, the spread gets the highest quality-of-life improvement out of it).
Throughout the series, the weapon items upgrade your weapon by one level if you collect an item for your current weapon, and change your weapon without any upgrades if you pick up an item that's different from your current weapon. This doesn't seem so bad at first, until you realize that under this system, it is possible to leave yourself quite underpowered for a difficult situation ahead if you carelessly and frequently change weapons; conversely, the best way to power up is to keep picking up more of the same weapon item, regardless of what weapon is best-suited for what's going on right now.note To compare, contemporary Toaplan shmups (which the original Raiden was basically copying) have separate items for powering up your main weapon and changing it. This means a player can frequently change their main weapon without putting themselves at risk of being underpowered for later levels.
In Viper Phase 1, you get a multiplier applied to your end-o f-stage bonuses dependent on what percentage of enemies you killed. If you destroy every single enemy, the muliplier is x100. But if you so much as miss a single enemy, that multiplier drops to a x50. It won't matter much in a survival-oriented run, but in a score-based run, missing one enemy can make a massive difference.
Raiden IV's Light Mode is a Scrappy Mode at its best, for those who are lazy or don't bother to go on game settings. Some knowledged players would rather play Original Mode (or in home ports, Additional Mode or Overkill mode) in Practicedifficulty over this. The inclusion of Overkill mode in Overkill ports render Light Mode obsolete.
Serial Numbers Filed Off: One can consider Raiden to be a Toaplan-styled shmup. It is in many ways a retread the Toaplan shmup Twin Cobra. The homing missiles also seem to have taken their trajectory routines from Toaplan's Slap Fight/ALCON. On top of that, most of the music homages music from other Toaplan shmups (see Suspiciously Similar Song for specific examples).
Suspiciously Similar Song: Raiden has songs similar to those in Toaplan's shmup games. Considering the first Raiden game was basically a big Toaplan homage, this makes sense. See Serial Numbers Filed Off for more information.
"Gallantry", the stages 1 and 4 music in the first game, draws its main chorus from the latter part of the Space Harriermain theme about 2 minutes in. It also has a part that sounds similar to "Mystic Green", the st. 4 music from Hellfire (0:25-0:39 in "Gallantry", 0:23-0:37 in "Mystic Green").
They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The Proton Laser in III. Instead of being purple and twirling all over the damn place, it's green and only swings from left to right depending on the player's movement, its only real advantage is that it pierces through enemies while damaging them. The outcry was such that in Raiden IV, you get to choose between the Bend Plasma and a triple-beam (and purple) version of the Proton Laser. The way the Bend Plasma behaves in IV and V is different to II, DX, and Raiden Fighters. The suspicion among some fans is that Seibu had simply lost the original algorithms, and only created the Proton Laser the way they did because of that.
Tough Act to Follow: Raiden II and DX are held up as the gold standard for the series, with II being an Even Better Sequel to the first and DX adding its own refinements. The 3D-visuals/MOSS era has had a tough time measuring up to these two games due to what is widely regarded as inferior level design, the loss of the Bend Plasma in III and its dissimilar form in IV and V, and the replacement of Go Sato and Akira Sato for a different composer in V. While III through V are still great games, all things considered, they'll always be seen as a shadow of the 2D/Seibu-developed games.
Vindicated by History: Upon its release, Raiden III didn't get quite a lot of positive reception due to shmups and other 2D action game genres going out of style at the time in favor of games with more cinematic narrative-driven experiences, plus amongst those who did continue to enjoy shmups, it got criticized for its dull-looking 3D graphics, replacing the iconic Bend Plasma weapon with a more generic Photon Laser, and the change of developer from Seibu Kaihatsu to MOSS resulting in a much different-feeling game from the earlier entries, which many argued was for the worse. However, over time the shmup community has been willing to give the game another chance thanks to rereleases across multiple platforms and being able to judge it relative to later games in the series. The reduced difficulty and making the default spread shot much more usable at the lowest levels helps to further ease players into the game, as the Seibu-developed games are known for being relentless from start to end.
, the music of the first game's Stage 1.