Super R-Type

According to Famitsu, Super R-Type sold 109,120 copies in its first week on the market and 190,374 copies during its lifetime in Japan. The Japanese publication Micom BASIC Magazine ranked the game eighth in popularity in its October 1991 issue, and it received a 22.1/30 score in a readers' poll conducted by Super Famicom Magazine. It also garnered generally favorable reception from critics. Entertainment Weekly's Bob Strauss picked the game as the second greatest game available in 1991, saying: "The space-shooting R-Type game has been evolving over the last several years; this latest incarnation is the most graphically overpowering yet. Players pilot a ship through the deep cosmos, picking up various supercharged weapons along the way and squaring off against some extraordinarily detailed aliens, which look like illustrations from classic pulp sci-fi magazines of the 1930s". Super Gamer stated that "It looks brilliant and plays well, but while graphical slowdown isn't that bad, going back to the start of the level whenever you die soon becomes tedious".

On March 14, 2008, the game was released on the Wii Virtual Console service in Europe and Australia. The game was made available on the Virtual Console in North America on March 17, 2008. However, it was removed from the Virtual Console on March 30, 2012, in North America and on March 31, 2012, in Europe. The game was re-released on the Nintendo Classics service on April 12, 2024. Legacy games company Retro-Bit released a SNES-compatible cartridge including the game alongside R-Type III: The Third Lightning in July 2018.