Y'all ready for this?

[A Black Falcon]

It's a shmup, and you're expecting a plot? 3rd to 5th gen shmups mostly have the same plot, which involves you, the lone pilot of an experimental spacecraft, who have to save your world from the invading whoevers, as the last hope for your people. Once in a while you get something else, but not usually. I don't mind, that's all the plot you need for a shmup. :)

Length... while some early 3rd gen (NES era) shmups were quite long, like 1942 and such, within a few years developers realized that the games are much better short, and short shmups have remained ever since. Most shmups are short games which try to make up for the short length with great replay value (particularly for score) and high challenge. It often works. BioMetal's not that short for shmup standards. Also, yes, that guy's really good. Notice how he manages to not die pretty much ever, dodging through lots of bullets without getting hit? Yeah, most people wouldn't be nearly that good, and it'd take them a lot longer, if you finished it at all.

I wasn't at all ready for this!

Really though, that's crazy localization there, and pretty insulting. That really does give a weird flavor to that game, which I gotta give credit to, uses enemy attacks OTHER than the standard "bullets everywhere" every now and then.

Insulting? How so? To the original composer perhaps, but other than that, how so?

I agree that it makes the game very odd, though. It's so strange playing a shmup to that music. It does make it unique, however. :)

I always found it funny that those types of games always cram in a glass canon. It is odd how you've got this state of the art super-ship, except in reality it's just a fly that can be swatted out of the air in one hit that has to collect other weapons just to get powerful enough to kill things decently.

Well they're usually prototype ships, perhaps they haven't perfected the armor yet?

Also, by the late '90s, the bullet-hell shmup became the most popular kind, and those often have a very small hitbox, sometimes as small as one pixel (the hitbox is where you have to get hit to die). The one dot in your cockpit (or your character's eye or heart or something, for flying-people shmups, which have become increasingly common over the past decade) is the only vulnerable spot in those games, but they're incredibly hard anyway because of the insane number of bullets coming at you.

And a few shmups, including many (though not all for sure) of the Western ones, have health bars...

Still though you're right, like in Gradius, how come if they can make those invincible option helper ships, why can't they just make your ship out of that stuff too? Just game logic, it'd be no fun if you couldn't die. :)

It's kinda like how the manuals and story of Starcraft go into detail on how amazingly advanced your marines are, except they are really just pathetic cannon fodder you'll never really care about.

That's true, yeah. At least there was that thing about how the presence of medics increases average battle survival time by some small number of seconds or something...