YMMV / Strikers 1945

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: The more exotic-looking Cool Planes like the Shinden, Flying Pancake and X-36 Warlord are actual aircraft from World War II and contemporary times respectively.
• Breather Boss: Rommel is surprisingly easy compared to everyone else in II. He Took a Level in Badass in PLUS, though.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: In II, expect most players to gravitate towards the Hayate for being a Game-Breaker whose Attack Drones get the job done reliably, or the Flying Pancake due to its iconic design as well as being a very good ship in its own right.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Hayate in II. Its secondary attack sends out many smaller planes which hunt down any enemies on the screen, filling its charge shot bar much quicker than the other planes. It also has a powerful and easily spammable charge shot, and the most damaging bomb of the game.
  • The Flying Pancake from the same game. It is very quick, has homing shots and its charge shot is very strong and can hit multiple enemies at once. At Level 3, it also cancels bullets. It is even more overpowered in PLUS where the charge shot doesn't slow it down, and its charging speed is the 2nd quickest of the game, only second to the Fiat G.56.
  • The hidden X-36 Warlord in III. It is very fast (especially in comparison to the other planes), has a quick homing shot and the most devastating special attack.
• Porting Disaster:
  • The PSP version of PLUS is not an all-out disaster, but it is incredibly lazy. The screen is too small to comfortably hold the sheer number of bullets present in the original game, the boss music is inexplicably missing and it barely has any content beyond the game itself, to the point that it actually has less options than if you ran the game on an emulator on the same console! Even worse is that a more elaborate port came out... on the iPhone.
  • The games were rereleased on Nintendo Switch under various Psikyo compilations by Zerodiv and City Connection...with a crippling seven frames of input lag for each of them. 7 frames / 60 frames per second = about a tenth of a second of input lag, which can make a huge difference due to the player having to dodge high-speed Bullet Hell.
• Serial Numbers Filed Off: Strikers 1945 can be seen as an almost direct copy of Capcom's 1942 series, with almost all of the elements taken from that series. Not that it is a bad thing.
• Scrappy Mechanic: For whatever reason, PLUS only gives you two starting lives by default instead of three if the region is set to non-Japanese regions. If the game is at your local arcade, hopefully the staff is aware of this and changes the setting to 3 lives, or else the result is a gameplay experience that is over even faster than usual for most players.
• Watch It for the Meme: Play it because you can play as a Flying Pancake.

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