thoughts:
+ great visuals and music
+ bosses attack patterns are mostly well designed
+ lots of visual and audio cues, nothing really feels like it comes out of nowhere
+ doesn't suffer from gradius syndrome (no heavy emphasis on not losing powerups, in fact there's none at all in this game)

. not sightread friendly. ur gonna get ur ass beat first run because there's a lot of things you need to just learn (which weapons to use, how to handle certain gimmicks and patterns). but thats kind of standard for this genre
. pretty easy for a shmup once you've figured it out, i 1cc'd my second run of the game because you get fucktons of extra lives for speedkilling bosses which is really easy with snake
. the game has an option to play music from a CD instead of using the game's OST. sounds cool but i didn't bother figuring out how to do that on an emulator

- stage 6-D is a huge difficulty spike, nothing else in the game comes as close to being hard
- theres 12 weapons but realistically you will only ever use like half of them, and 90% of the time it's either monkey or snake
- speaking of which navigating the weapons menu is a nightmare
- why does snake kill bosses 10x faster than any other weapon