No idea about the game, but this thread reminded me of playing some MS-DOS top-down "Japanese-like" shooter a long time ago, unable to find it later. It was not Raiden or Tyrian or Raptor or even Overkill that people always mention first...

Well, finally I found it, even in my long-time "abandonware" archives: Mirage Thunder

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9r7UCM2G2c

https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/mirage-thunder

It was not Japanese after all, but by a Taiwanese company apparently.

Now that I got to play it though... it felt kinda meh. Even the object movement is quite jerky, much more so than in the aforementioned vertical scrolling shooters that come to people's mind first. Still, I recall enjoying it a long time ago...

Mystery solved.

And now this discussion reminded me that for some reason I liked Overkill a lot... I don't recall why, maybe it had some kickass music? I have to dig it from my archives and try it too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzx59Km9ywo

I recall Overkill having even better music than that... It might be it supported also Roland MT-32 or SCC-1, I need to check it...

EDIT: Yep, it supports Roland MT-32 which sounds better than the Soundblaster music in those Youtube videos. :)
It can be enabled by running the game with "overkill.exe /r" but I think it is enabled by default if the game detects the presence of a MPU-401 MIDI interface in the system (it makes the assumption the MPU-401 belongs or is connected to a Roland MT-32 compatible MIDI device...).