Anyone who's played both games extensively knows how easy it is in Gate of Thunder to kill some bosses in less than two seconds, while some take much longer.
You don't have to make Lords easier by buying up everything you can in the shops or milking every exploit. The crystals are part of the scoring system and being as conservative wuth them as you can both increases the challenge and your final hi score. Just like spamming turbo switches and continues while tripping/throwing your way through a fighting game doesn't mean that's all there is to the game or that it's too easy.
Gate and Lords of Thunder have a comparable variety of music. Even if you believe that "guitars with drums" is somehow a genre.
The genre of music in Lords of Thunder is 80s heavy metal/power metal. I can't see how this would be even slightly up for debate. They ape said genre so specifically that you can tell exactly which guitarists/songs their cribbing from sometimes.
BUT DON'T FLY OFF THE HANDLE JUST YET. I'm not slamming the game for this. Remember the thread that shows all the art in games that was shamelessness ripped off from Akira, Gundam, Terminator 2 or Bladerunner? We all love those games and I'm just describing the musical equivalent of that. It's OK. Don't get mad. Some of my favorite anime is only available with its original OST on Laserdisc because it rips off other shit so bad. I don't have any problem with it, honestly. Please don't Google my username for hours trying to shove somthing in my face that in the end doesn't even have anything to do with what I'm saying. Please don't wear out a keyboard on me just because the Professor is in a hybernation period. Please don't attack. Please.
But seriously, LoT is "that metal shooter". It's been that for 25 years. That's what it is and that's totally metal as far as I'm concerned. I love metal and I love Lords of Thunder.
Either way, this is key to why people who were into Iron Maiden, Helloween, etc already when the game came out were not quite as impressed as the non-metal people who are often blown away by the soundtrack of this game because to them rock peaked at Whitesnake. Those people think T's Music is some genius group when it was really just a couple of classically trained session musician who could copy anything. Guys who could easily do anything Metallica did except do it for the first time.
Gate has stuff that is more outside this genre which most definitely is a genre for sure and not something I made up just to shit talk a game I love and get into an argument on the Internet. However, people still talk about the LoT OST a lot more so I wouldn't say it worked for GoT in any way.