Before playing this game, all I knew about Space Channel 5 was that it was a sort of Simon Says style rythm game with some serious retro-futuristic vibes, similar to the Jetsons, and that Michael Jackson was in it. And now, after playing it for a bit (But not beating it, I think I may never be able to), I have a number of thoughts.
Michael Jackson, in Space Channel 5
The first of which is DAMN THIS GAME IS HARD! I consider myself decently okay at rythm games. I've cleared some hard songs in Project DIVA, and FC'd a couple songs in a couple games, but I cannot clear the first stage of this game for the life of me, and I've tried about 5 times now. I think it's due to a killer combo of not having any visual indication of when to press buttons, incredibly strict timing for button presses, and the fact that I don't have a CRT.
To start explaining, I'll talk about that last point. There is a reasonably well-known issue amongst retro game enthusiasts (AKA Masochists) that digital, "pixel perfect" TVs cause a few frames of delay due to some series of factors that I don't understand. The result is usually around 3-4 frames of delay at 60fps. Under most circumstances, this is negligible and the sort of justification used by people who are bad at fighting games, but it really seems like the delay is just enough to make the difference between an accepted press and a miss. I also have reason to believe that an extra frame or two of delay may have been introduced because I had to buy replacement cables for my system, and believe it or not, the market for replacement parts for a 20+ year old console is not that great.
Then we come up on the button issues. In most rythm games, there is a graphical representation of when to press buttons, almost like reading sheet music to understand what you're playing. Space Channel 5 does not have this. Also in most rythm games is something of a sliding scale from "perfect" to "barely" to "miss". Space Channel 5 has a simple pass or fail system. That is especially damning when you can only mess up 5 different parts of the hostage sections before they just end and you fail. And that miss will happen if you fail so much as one "note" in that section.
This last part is just speculation, but... it really seems like ratings go down a LOT easier than they go up. I had an attempt with a rough start, bringing my ratings down to 7%. I proceeded to do really well in the middle section of the stage, which brought the ratings up to... 8%. Then I had a reasonably okay attempt at the final, "boss" section of the first stage, where my ratings stayed the exact same. Result? I lost the stage, entirely unable to get anywhere neat the 15% requirement to pass the stage.