Take heed and prepare yourself:
- Unmarked spoilers
- Subjective opinion
- Pseudo-consensus
- Awesome Music: Plenty of MIDI-charged goodness to go around. Pretty much all of them count,
but a few stand out:- Impossible Orange, a pastiche of "Impossible One" from Cho Ren Sha 68k, a dramatic piece that plays as you take on Big Zan.
- Unstopping (with its intro, named Throatwave), Stage 1-4's second half, and the track featured in Dunkey's Best of 2018 video. Features a Mega Man X-esque electric guitar, perfect for breaching and dismantling GREEN ORANGE's fortress from within.
- The Sea has Returned, Stage 2-3's music, considered by a majority to be the best track in the game. Harkens back to both Touhou Project and Tower of Heaven, with an impressive saxophone sample.
- Crisis, a short but very frantic theme played in Stages 2-1 and 2-4, encapsulating the feeling of shock after the Stage 2-1 boss suddenly takes on an Ax-Crazy One-Winged Angel form or tension and distress as you attempt to flee GREEN ORANGE's planetoid station as it blows up and your weapons break apart as you Outrun the Fireball. As of the White Vanilla update, an extended, more Hot-Blooded version of this track plays during the escape sequence, Now or Never, Get Fired Up!!
- Sky XXXX Days, the real Stage 2-3 boss music, and a fittingly climactic, yet heroic track as Grapefruit finally engages the heroine(s) in a spectacular Mirror Boss battle.
- Despair, the Final Boss' theme, a frantic piece that wouldn't sound out of place from a Touhou game as you fight for your life against the leader of Green Orange.
- Sacred Defender, the theme for the True Final Boss, The Lotus Jewel, after you're sent back in time to creation. It's a hauntingly beautiful theme for the fate of the universe, since dying here means Deletion as Punishment. All the continues you've saved up over all the many deaths playing the game are your lives for this run. Dying here means you have to start from scratch!
- White Vanilla update gives us For Your Security, an incredibly epic theme that's only appropriate when you fight Erasure for real at the end of White Vanilla.
- Impossible Orange
- Best Boss Ever: The Climax Boss fight with Grapefruit at the end of Stage 2-3 is regarded as the high point of the game, where you duke it out with the fighter that was meant to be superior to yours, capable of transforming and using weapons that are very similar to yours, all while "Sky XXXX Days" plays and over an awesome galactic background. In the final phase of the fight, Grapefruit will pull out a new attack dependent on which weapon you chose for your ZeroRanger form: an energy orb for the most hot-blooded round of tennis in a shmup if you chose the sword, or their own drill which creates bullets and electric sparks as it clashes with your drill if you chose the drill.STAGE CLEAR!
So this is the power of... - Breather Boss: Erasure/Regret's four-boss gauntlet that follows the crystal skull in Stage 1-4 is considerably easier than said skull boss, which fires orbs that block the player's shots and tend to abuse Knockback and Collision Damage. These minibosses have easier attacks and each of them drops a 1-Up upon defeat, except for the Monk/Skeleton if you choose to skip them; defeating them the normal way does award the 1-up but given how difficult they are, you're well advised to just skip and not risk the net loss in lives.
- Breather Level: 1-3 and 2-3 are generally easier than the stages that come before due to remaining wide open. Also, the final segment is noticeably easier than the Final Boss and escape sequence that comes before it, though most of the tension comes from losing your save data should you be destroyed.
- Broken Base:
- Do the endless slew of shout-outs serve as a love letter to shmups and anime? Or do they take away from the game's unique identity?
- There's been a fair amount of debate over the True Final Boss of Green Orange — in particular, the consequences of losing to it, which is that the player's saved progress is deleted. You have those who think this is a Scrappy Mechanic and can undo hours of efforts. Others think that it makes narrative sense and that given that this game is a typical-structure shmup, it's not too much of a huge deal to have to try again from stage 1-1.
- Fan Nickname: GREEN ORANGE's Despair form, which takes on the silhouette of a woman whose sprite can easily be misread as having twintails, is sometimes referred to by fans as "Hatsune Miku".
- Funny Moments: If you actually get a Z-rank in White Vanilla / Light Mode (which is no easy feat, to put it lightly, as it entails maintaining a 99-100% destruction rate, speeding through the game, and not getting hit for the entire game) in the Great Oppressor timeline, G.O. congratulates you, awards you her "eternal gratitude" in multi-colored letters, and after several lines of silence as if you were expecting a better reward, she just cheerfully tells you to Get Out! and closes the shutters.
- Goddamned Boss: The orb squad in 2-4. Individually, their attacks are fairly weak and singular for a penultimate (antepenultimate, counting the True Final Boss) boss, but they come in four waves: one, then two, then three, and finally six at once. Worse yet, if the player fails to destroy all of them in one go, Despair will create more orbs, up to three at a time. This can make for a tedious, frustrating fight if the player fails to properly pace their attacks. In fact, most high-level players opt to absorb the final wave of orbs and intentionally suicide to destroy all of the orbs at once.. Worst of all, you have to do this fight all over again every time you start from 2-4, which can eat away at your continues and leave you with too few lives for the True Final Boss.
- It Was His Sled: The game is well-known for its infamous endgame where losing to the True Final Boss will erase your progress and force you to restart from stage 1-1. Some players will even warn those interested in this game about this twist to save them any surprise frustration, while some interested prospective players who are aware of the twist will ask for completed savefiles from others just so they don't have to engage in a battle where their save file is at stake.
- Scrappy Mechanic:
- The save file getting erased after losing to the final boss has become one of the game's most reviled mechanics for a lot of players, as not only hours of progress are lost, but your continues are lost as well. Mercifully, once you beat it, you never have to deal with this again unless you decide to hard-reset Erasure, as this sequence is not part of the Great Oppressor timeline. However, if you know where your saved game is, you can back it up and restore it if you fall to the Lotus Jewel.
- The "Lightning Battle" achievement requires you to beat White Vanilla / Light Mode in 15 minutes or less. However, if you unlock the True Final Boss of this mode, the time spent fighting it counts towards your play time, meaning you can fail the achievement by making an effort to actually fight the boss. This is an additonal problem if you also want a high score, since the TFB is worth a ton of points (reaching a x12.8 Boss Break multiplier in particular allows you to farm points off the boss's flunkies) so now you have to choose between the achievement or your score. You can avoid this problem by getting to the TFB in under 13 minutes (the fight has a 2-minute time limit), but that's far easier said than done.
- Tear Jerker: Clear the story mode by defeating the True Final Boss. Erasure...
- That One Achievement: Both modes have the "Enlightningment" achievement, which requires you to get every single achievement specific to the mode you're in within the same playthrough.
- That One Boss:
- Stage 1-2 and 2-2 has Artypo, who not only fires lightning-fast bullets but also blocks your shots with its Force Device. Fire at the Force too much and it unleashes a special spread attack, which can be fatal if you fire at the Force while it's at the bottom half of the screen. Its tendency to shield itself also makes a bane amongst speedrunners and those otherwise trying to get the Z-rank time bonus in White Vanilla / Light mode. It is possible to near-instantly kill this boss with the back shot, but getting into position to do it is a near-suicidal effort. In comparison, the boss following it, 2nd Apocalypse, is a more straightforward fight.
- Stage 1-4 has the unnamed crystal skull boss, which fires orbs that block your shots and take many hits each to defeat. While they aren't instant-damage like most other projectiles, instead inflicting Knockback, they might bully you around enough times to damage you anyway. As such, this boss is easily a barrier to those trying to complete the first loop. It's also the Final Boss of White Vanilla / Light Mode, not only potentially snuffing out a 1CC attempt but also being difficult to get good grades on (especially a time grade).
- That One Level: The second stage on both loops. The narrow passageways crammed with enemies and bullets makes for a nasty spike in difficulty compared to both the stage before and after.
- Underused Game Mechanic: During the Lotus-Eater Machine sequence in Stage 2-4, there's a neat Arrange Mode you can play that uses controls and scoring akin to DoDonPachi, including Smart Bombs which the main game does not have. It even has a unique boss not found in the regular game. Sadly, this mode only lasts one stage. You lose access to this minigame if you defeat the True Final Boss, and have to re-unlock it by resetting back into the GREEN ORANGE timeline.
- The Woobie: Poor, poor Despair. She was created from the Lotus Jewel and tasked to destroy all lifeforms aside from humanity. Because of this, she goes insane from the despair and loneliness from being separated from her sister and turns against humanity.
