>>725400918
>How is it actually good
Tight controls, varied and complex attack patterns, intricate and heavily layered scoring systems, high replayability. It's no surprise shmups cause the most butthurt, they're pretty much pure undiluted gameplay. Like if you threw a bunch of video games into a blender and distilled off the gameplay chemical the resulting compound would be called shmup. This doesn't make every shmup inherently the best, but it's undoubtedly the rawest form of gameplay in video games which makes it the ultimate litmus test for sorting out normalfags. There's just no escaping the vidya when you fire up a shmup.