Well, this is the definitive edition of Raiden IV, I guess. Even that might be overselling it - all this is amounts to a straight port of Raiden IV OVERKILL, a game you can commonly get on PC for $3-5, with a new arranged soundtrack.

Ok, that's not telling the whole truth. It's actually a desperate ploy from Tokyo Arcade Mikado (a place notable in FGC and STG scenes) to try and recover some of their lost revenue from this goddamnned pandemic.

And Raiden IV remains decent. Ugly and bland, with some notably insane difficulty spikes, but a fine enough STG of the classic, super-fast bullet style rarely seen these days - though granted, this game is already 14 years old by now. Its still way better than Raiden 3 and 5, and has some great bosses and decent enough levels. As ever, Overkill mode remains dogshit though.

But hey, how about that new soundtrack? It's... ok. Frankly, it's mostly fine, but definetly has that feeling of an arrange soundtrack that's better listened to outside the confines of the game than in it, and sadly has a few shit songs - Most notably Stage 1's "A Stormy Front", which previously was the best track in the game and was incredibly good at hyping the player up. The new version is an overproduced mess of guitars and percussion that sounds awful. The rest is ok, with stage 2 and 3's arrangement being particularly strong, but the soundtrack on the whole works way worse than the original - and the Stage 1 track sucking is a huge issue for a shmup and means im bound to just use the original soundtrack... In which case I might as well just be playing the PC version...

Yeah don't bother. Raiden IV is decent and this is the best version of it, but also, just get the PC version.