The music all comes from an FM synthesizer. There’s a synthesized voice that announces the names of the weapons that are picked up, as well as the bosses’ weak points. One of the most memorable is the first, Golem, which is a huge floating brain with an eye in the center, and tentacles that wave around in the direction of your ship. The backgrounds are a lot more detailed, and there’s actually more than one boss this time around.
The graphics are fantastic, especially for 1986, and it’s amazing to see the artistic advances within the single year between Gradius and Salamander. After killing it, the scrolling speeds up, and you need to maneuver through a set of tight corridors before you can escape. If you don’t kill it before it scrolls off the screen, you need to replay the whole stage.
Like in all of the main Gradius games, the final boss – a big, red orb called the Zelos Force – is defenseless, but the screen continues to scroll forward when you reach it. The sixth zone is an enemy base, where you have to fight a whole wave of Gradius ship bosses, before facing off against some leaping Moai heads. The fourth stage heavily resembles the first area of Gradius, complete with the same graphical style and enemies, while the fifth stage is another boring asteroids field. The third level is a flaming tunnel, complete with huge flares that blast out at an arc. The second stage is an asteroid field, and introduces a famed recurring enemy, the Tetran, which is similar to the Big Core boss from Gradius, but has four multi-segmented arms that spin around. The first stage takes place in a huge biological monster, where you fly past a set of chomping teeth and into its body. There are six stages in total, which alternate behind horizontal and vertical viewpoints.