>>11988294
Shmups are fundamentally very different from most other genres. Gaining skill at Street Fighter or Ridge Racer or Tetris is about learning the mechanics of the game and then using mastery of those mechanics to succeed. The basics are the same but each game is different and it's a test of your skills vs what comes up in the game.

Getting good at a shmup is a lot more like learning to play a piece of misic. The game starts and you're on a steady path, enemies come in waves in specific patterns that are always the same. So the "game" as such it is, is memorizing where to go in respose to each enemy and wave to maximize your score.

And so, because the genre is mostly an exercise in memorization and repetition the challenge has to come in making it so that the games seem very difficult until you have memorized the patterns. That gives the genre an air of seeming very hardcore and difficult to outsiders and shmup fans try to play that up as it validates their dedication to a genre that's more akin to playing a piano than playing a game.