YMMV / Star Gagnant

• Audience-Alienating Premise: Many shmup fans were immediately turned off by the game's central "rapid fire" mechanic, which forces players to continously tap the shot button to fire their special shot and deal anything more than a pittance of damage against non-popcorn enemies. As a result, many players just end up using controllers with external autofire to save their hands, thus defeating the point of the game. Every major reviewer, even shmup-focused reviewers, consider the rapid fire mechanic to be a major negative. Ultimately, it ended up being one of Terarin's worse-selling and regarded as forgettable by most shmup fans.
• Memetic Mutation: Star Pregnant^ExplanationMany English-speaking players get a snark out of how "Gagnant" resembles the word "pregnant". It's actually French for "winner".
• Overshadowed by Controversy: While otherwise a solid Star Soldier-esque shooter with the involvement of Takahashi Meijin, his involvement may have caused more harm than good for this game's reception and sales due to the game being centered around its rapid-fire system, clearly in an attempt to ride on his talent of being able to tap at up to 16 times per second. Many players go as far as to call this game a health hazard due to the injuries that can occur from furiously mashing a button over the course of 30 minutes (in a vein similar to the "rotate the control stick" minigames in the original Mario Party) and the lack of segments where the player can just hold the shot button and reliably deal damage with the regular shot.
• Scrappy Mechanic: While the game is praised for its throwback to late 80s and early 90s shmups, Star Soldier especially, its rapid-fire mechanic, that is, having to mash on the fire button to access a more powerful version of the ship's shot, turned off a lot of shmup players, and was universally criticized by reviewers and content creators, even though that specialize in shmups. While you do have a normal shot that you fire by simply holding down the fire button, it's much weaker and does very little damage to anything that's not already a One-Hit-Point Wonder. Continuously mashing the fire button over the course of an entire run might've been acceptable in The '80s and The '90s, but with more awareness of injuries caused by poor gaming ergonomics such as carpal tunnel syndrome and repetitive stress injury, you'll find very few people defending this mechanic, and a lot of "superplay" videos of this game will straight up use controllers with autofire.
• That One Level: Stage 4, the Ice Planet, can be problematic for first-time players of this game and less-skilled shmup players, as it features walls that heavily limit your space, and touching the walls will remove your shield, or kill you if you don't have a shield. There are stalacites that try to close the passageway and have to be pushed back with your special shot. All while you're being harassed by the usual waves of enemies.

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