As you can probably tell, I've been on a huge Gradius kick lately. I've always meant to give this game a shot, but the arcade version of the game turned me away from part 3 in general due to it's unforgiving difficulty and lack of autofire at the arcade I play at (it really needs it).
Fortunately, the console version corrects both of these issues while also improving the soundtrack. Before digging in to playing this game, I would listen to the OST often. I would definitely recommend listening to a separate "music only" video of the console soundtrack, as it might be the best in the whole series...in my opinion. Even with the difficulty set to the hardest level (aka "arcade" difficulty) the game isn't too much harder than the original arcade Gradius to pass 1 loop.
Unfortunately, the SNES version of the game is plagued by some pretty serious slowdown. While this can definitely help in dodging some of the tougher patterns, sometimes the slowdown would end at times when you wouldn't expect and then you're likely to smash into an enemy or background when the speed returns to normal.
A recently released SA-1 patch to correct the slowdown can be applied to the game rom and is definitely on my list to check out soon. I'll probably try to tackle that version of the game without using the bonus stages, just to change up what I did in this run and see all the bosses in their "true" form.
Captured from an RGB-modified SNES Jr. (model 2) via scart, scaled 3X with the OSSC for capture at 1080p/60fps. As with all my runs - no TAS (tool assistance), cheats, hacks, or save states are used.
As always, thank you for watching!