I feel like this stage kinda wants to riff on the ol' fly-around-a-battleship-for-a-stage trope (see: R-Type stage 3), but uh, I can't say I ever notice much of what's going on in this stage. Plus, the cat battleship (cattleship?) only makes a few cameos, rather than being an ever-present threat.
The first stage is the hard part--there's bullets everywhere, you gotta watch what the crane's doing, and you need to build up powerups. By stage 2, I was fully stocked on powerups, so I overwhelmed the screen and never had to pay attention to what was going on.
It helped that the final powerup (for Goemon here, it's Reduce) is a health bar. Once you get that, you're set, since getting hit doesn't mean you instantly lose all your powerups.
Gradius games have the same sort of problems, but less exaggerated--Parodius' first stage is much busier than the first stage of any Gradius game I've played, and the second stage is much easier than the second stage of any Gradius game I've played.
What did you think of the battleship stage?
