Gradius 1 was a good game but it was nothing that wowed me personally. Maybe I'm just hard to please but I was looking forward to the sequels. This one was on the CD instead and it's pretty good and an improvement from last time. I really like some of the stages here but by the end it does go down a bit in quality. I really don't like the stage that goes super fast, it feels like a very cheap thing to do to the player. The final boss is also lame like really really lame. But if you can look past some of that stuff, this is still a really fun shmup for the console. Wish there wasn't a lot of slowdown at times though.