The absolute pinnacle of Taito's surreal, operatic audiovisual direction that they increasingly adopted in their shmup design. A somewhat simple but extremely fun and addictive game that is precisely as easy or as hard as you want it to be.

Takes the simple mechanics of Darius Gaiden and adds more complexity to them with the capture ball and alpha beam mechanics. Beam Counter and capture kill multipliers add a desirable amount of depth to the scoring system without going overboard. Extremely kino early 3D graphics. Just barely falling short of Gaiden due to the presence of some annoying stage designs and recycling of content.

A game that is rightfully frequently praised for its lock-on attack scoring system and seamless level transitions. The ZUNTATA soundtrack conveys an oppressive atmosphere but still with a hint of sci-fi optimism. Also an extremely hard game even for shmup standards due to the complete lack of defensive options the player has.

Once super obscure but now has become fairly popular in the shmup community, and with good reason. One of the most balanced classic horizontally-scrolling shooters out there when it comes to difficulty and the acid-trip, dystopian atmosphere is amazing.

I don't like this game quite as much as I used to but it's still a very good game overall. One of the most content-heavy shmups out there with a wide range of difficulties and player ships, several with distinct scoring systems which is pretty cool and unique. Playing this game with two monitors is an absolute spectacle and the semi-dynamic soundtrack is nothing short of incredible at times.

One of the few cases where a Mega Drive/Genesis port is clearly superior to the arcade original. The definitive way to play Darius II even if the difficulty was undertuned a little bit too much here.

Taito's developers must have loved Blade Runner. A fast and frenetic space harrier clone with a catchy soundtrack, but feels a bit short even for shmup standards.

I have a soft spot for the original Darius. The visual art-style feels very unique and almost like a watercolour painting at times, it's pretty cool. Unfortunately the weapon balancing is messed up and recovering on boss fights is pretty much impossible.

An esoteric but charming little top-down run-and-gun that also served as one of the biggest inspirations for the earlier Touhou games. The scarcity of certain essential powerups is annoying but it's still a pretty good time regardless.

Even with the story mode this game honestly feels like a step back from Another Chronicle EX. Also to this day I still cannot fathom why they thought it was a good idea to advertise this game with the awful opening theme "Freedom", when the entire rest of the soundtrack is possibly one of the greatest of all time.

Darius Twin is impressive for being a SNES shmup with little to no slowdown, but there's not much impressive to it besides that. Very easy besides the final stage which is a jarring difficulty spike.

The game that started it all. Obviously very primitive if you go back to play it today and I doubt it could keep your attention for longer than 10 minutes, but I'll still give Space Invaders some respect for its pedigree. Space Invaders showed that videogames can actually be fun and engaging. Also I really need to play the Space Invaders Extreme games at some point.

Definitely my most controversial ranking here to rank Gun Frontier towards the bottom end, since this game is beloved by some people, including Yagawa and Manabu Namiki - the two minds behind Battle Garegga. Gun Frontier crawled so Battle Garegga could fly I guess, because besides the great visuals I don't see much to enjoy about Gun Frontier. The constant waves of random, hyper aggressive popcorn enemies and poor bullet visibility (even worse than vanilla Garegga imo) prevent Gun Frontier from being enjoyable to me.

An awkward and cumbersome sequel to Darius I that was too focused on being harder than the first game instead of being better than the first game. Just play the Mega Drive version (Sagaia) instead.

A very generic vertical shooter that feels a little outdated even for the year in which it was released (1988). Not a bad game as such, just very mediocre.