YMMV / Strider (Arcade)

• Arcade-Perfect Port: the Sharp X68000 port, developed internally by Capcom, is almost identical to the arcade. The Mega Drive port by Sega, not so much, but it was considered a stellar port for a home console at the time.
• Even Better Sequel: Strider 2 is this to the original game, polishing the original concepts and eliminating the flaws present in it. It also has something for multiple challenge levels; score running for advanced players and infinite continues, respawning on the spot, and the option for infinite time for beginning players.
• I Am Not Shazam: The main character's name is not "Strider", that's just the name of the organization he belongs to.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • One of the bosses in Strider 2 is a young woman trapped in an energy core, which Hiryu destroys with her inside. In-game no context is given as to the how or why, outside the woman's pre-battle line in which she asks to be killed^note Watashi o koroshite or "Kill Me". According to official material, she's a Merrow◊, a mysterious aquatic creature with psychic powers which is forcefully used to power the Balrog, and the process is so painful and exhausting she's practically begging to die already. Quite a disconcerting situation.
  • Hiryu is almost like a cocky Shōnen hero in the first game, and has been depicted as The Stoic with the occasional Tranquil Fury in other material. In the second game? The artwork goes out of its way to give him something of a crazed stare on the cover and title screen, the villains legitimately are terrified of him the further in the story you get, and his theme combined with the credits art almost plays him up as a sort of karmic Grim Reaper rather than a heroic ninja. If the Gainax Ending of Meio implying him to be a reincarnation of the original Hiryu is anything to go by, he may be.
• Porting Disaster: All the ports by Tiertex were greatly pared down, with crude graphics and choppy scrolling. Somewhat understandable for the 8-bit ports, but even the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST ports were well below those systems' usual standards.
• That One Attack: The Shadow Tag Bullets Soldier only appears twice in the whole game, and dies with one hit. But if you don't know his position in advance to start slashing before you even see him, you will take a hit.
• That One Boss:
  • The Gravitron Core. The first half of the battle generally consists of waiting until it moves close enough for you to slash and hopefully destroy the atom-like satellites that are circling it. Once that's done, the Gravitron itself must be damaged, forcing Hiryu to jump and be trapped on its orbit. However, no matter how much you mash the attack button, chances are you won't be able to destroy it before it repels the Strider, costing one unit of health. Had a droid tied to that health unit? Too bad, it's going to be lost. Were you one health unit away from death? Tough luck, you are in an unwinnable situation.
  • Grandmaster Meio. There is not much strategy to this fight other than hope he floats in your general direction, slash him like a mad man and hope you can deplete his health before his unavoidable attacks do you in. In a game where you can't control the path of your jumps, his arena is littered with pits to accidentally dive or be knocked into, and he's a "Get Back Here!" Boss that is perfectly fine with shooting at you from off-screen. Hiryu just isn't mobile enough to easily bring the fight to him. And every single time you die, you have to hear that goddamn laugh of his (and again if you game over) and start the whole fight over with no power ups to make it easier and no chance to get any.
  • If you're playing for fun, 2 gives you infinite continues that drop you right where you died at the cost of crippling your score. If you're playing for score, however, Caduceus is the final obstacle of a rather relentless game. You have to hit its head to hurt it, which requires climbing up its arms - arms that spam projectiles every couple of seconds at you. While you can disable the arms, it's very temporary at best. And at complete random it can just spam projectiles down its arms to force you off, move its arms around to screw up the climb and/or make it hard to avoid more attacks, or just outright fly off-screen to drop Beam Spam from above as you're forced to drop to the ground. A No-Damage Run is nigh on impossible for all but the most skilled of players, and a single death means that entire stage's score gets dropped, ruining the run at the very end.
• That One Level: The Third Moon is a massive difficulty spike from the Amazon. It brings back the aforementioned Russian Gunner, though thankfully there is only one of him in this level. This is followed by a rematch against That One Boss Gravitron Core, the first one in the Boss Rush. Shortly after, you acquire the extended cypher power-up and engage Solo. Failed to defeat him before the power-up runs out? Too bad, the following platform section requires you to have it in order to destroy a robot that is blocking your path. After that, there is a Dual Boss fight against the mechanical gorilla and a T. rex, which can end in failure if you don't realize the latter respawns endlessly unless the former is destroyed. The level culminates in a sequence where Hiryu must ride Uroboros to the Grandmaster's lair, with the game doing its best to distract the player from Uroboros' flight pattern, before finally introducing the Big Bad himself in a chaotic battle that must be won to finish the game.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Back when Strider 2 was just announced, plenty of fans mistook Hien for a brand-new female Strider.
• The Woobie: The Merrow, from Strider 2, is a mermaid-like creature with mysterious psychic powers. She was captured to become the power core of the Battleship Balrog, which uses her powers in order to fly. Encased inside the ship's reactor core against her will, she's siphoned of her energy constantly in a painful process which leaves her exhausted, as the energy obtained from her is so powerful she can't control it by herself and needs assistance from nearby Control Brains to keep it stable. Her species was hunted down specifically to power battleships of the Balrog's class. When Hiryu arrives, the Merrow, unable to endure the pain anymore, begs him to kill her. Hiryu destroys the machine, putting an end to the Merrow's suffering.