In the year 189 of the stellar calendar, humanity happened upon the ruins of an ancient (and, if the st. 7 decor is anything to go by, rather decadent and malicious) civilization, and sent an archaeological crew to explore them. However, the crew managed to activate the ruins' defense system. The system operated by identifying the Sol system as the intruders' origin, then launched the Sun-Fish ("Manbou" being Japanese for "Sunfish"), an ultimate weapon bio-mechanical starship capable of destroying an entire solar system and protected by an impregnable force-field bubble. The surviving members of the crew, however, find a chance to stop the Sun-Fish. By using an unearthed Manbou-J (i.e. Junior Sun-Fish) fighter and activating a teleportation system in the deepest part of the ruins, one pilot, Cleaver Mule, can actually get inside the force bubble and destroy the Sun-Fish from there.
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"What is a Mambo?" I said to myself. Turns out it's another name for a Sunfish (or Mola if you will), which is what the main antagonist/final boss of this game resembles, and can be seen there on the cover artwork and in the background of the Space Mambo card, hence the dumb joke. It's probably my favorite monster in the series, and I know I'm definitely not alone on that, since the twitter account that tweets random cards is using it as their pfp atm.
All that said, yes it was the entire reason I wanted to try out Space Manbow. It's the first MSX game I've tried that was completely unrelated to Metal Gear, it kinda sucks I barely have a frame of reference of other MSX games, but I wanna say this one looks pretty damn nice for a computer game from 1989 despite some of the choppiness which is apparently a common thing for the system. The soundtrack absolutely whips though and is worth checking out by itself.
A damn fine game I wanna say, it's rather difficult as usual for a Konami shmup and it's also hard to get a hold of, so I wouldn't a recommend it for beginners. I had to empty my savings account and sell my kidney to some crazy guy in Tahiti to get a working MSX2 and copy of Space Manbow, definitely don't recommend original hardware for this if you can avoid it. Use modern magic like my real self did.