This is a pretty neat little game on the early Gameboy and it's actually fun! It's probably the most accessible game in the series I've played since you can determine the difficulty from the options menu through lives and a difficulty level. You can adapt it to be extremely forgiving or brutally challenging, which is how I've always enjoyed shmups (i.e. Ikaruga, my favorite shmup ever). They also somehow managed to have this run with limited slowdown, even when the screen is full. I had a pretty good time with this even though it does maintain the same frustrations of becoming significantly more difficult when you lose a life since your upgrades go with your ship, but it's still a neat little romp and one of the more enjoyable Gradius games I've played thus far. 3/6