Being the sequel to the excellent Raiden IV, I had expected it to be more of the same. Great levels, weapons and music. While Raiden V is a great game in its own right, it does fail in some areas that make it pail in comparison to its predecessor. To get the positives out of the way, the levels are all great, they have great set pieces and enemies are also toned down while also still feeling like they put up a challenge. The weapon selection this time around is actually amazing. Tripling the amount of weapons that the player has access at the start of the game, is great. I had tried at least 5 of 9 different weapons across my two playthroughs of the game. There is also health for the ships shields in this game, as oppose to being one-hit in the previous games. Along with the bombs, to help do major damage and destroy bullets, there is also the cheer system (which is a meter that fills up over time, and allows the player to call in a partner ship for a limited time to boost fire power). As for the two major flaws that this game suffers, one is the way to progress through the stages and the second is the dialogue. To progress through the stages, the player has to have to have a high enough accuracy to get high enough ranks to progress to the right stages. While that doesn't really seem all that bad, it really forces the use of the lock-on laser so the accuracy doesn't go down all that much during stages (unless players get good with another weapon). Now for the bigger problem, the dialogue that happens in between each stage. As I mentioned at the beginning, music is usually a big plus for the games in the series, and I am fairly certain that of the small bits that I had heard from the breaks between dialogue that the praise for its would have been carried over from the other games as well. Unfortunately, due to the constant talking between characters they completely talk over the music and make it hard to hear it. On top of that the dialogue itself is extremely hard to hear due to how it is mixed with the rest of the audio. The obvious solution would be to go into the audio options and turn down the voices either really low or just turn them off but there is no option to do that, so players are just meant to play with the dialogue on. Having an option to have minimal dialogue option or just have the ability to turn them off, would go a long way, as it is really hindering of the experience. Overall though, the game is more Raiden action, and has the best gameplay of the series. If only there was an easier or more understandable way to know how to progress to specific stages and have the ability to shorten or be rid of the dialogue.