Really incredibly needlessly brutal. R-Type II is born out of that timeframe where arcade operators were getting greedy in regards to the average playtime on shmups, resulting in insane difficulty boosts on Same Same Same and Gradius III and such. I think this game manages to survive in spite of that, though, and while I'd never play it over III or Delta I personally find it a good deal more alluring than its precursor. There's lots of seeds planted here that would blossom beautifully in the next few installments.

I'm not particularly sure if Super R-Type, the kinda-sorta port over to SNES, is an improvement or not. I remember kind of hating it, but I'll have to take another look since I played it a year and a half ago.