1943 Kai

The game is set in the Pacific theater of World War II, off the coast of the Midway Atoll with the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces as the main group of antagonists. The player takes the role of an unnamed U.S. Navy ace pilot seeking revenge to defeat the Japanese naval aerial forces that attacked the American aircraft carrier, destroy all Japanese air and sea forces, fly through the 16 stages of play, and ultimately destroy the battleship Yamato, the game's final boss. 11 of these stages consist of an air-to-sea battle with a battleship or an aircraft carrier as the stage boss, while 5 stages consist of an all-aerial battle, either against a squadron of multiple strategic bombers or a single heavy bomber, the latter requires the player to shoot its engines to destroy it.

As in 1942, players pilot a P-38 Lightning. Controls are also similar: button 1 fires main weapons, and button 2 performs two special actions: one of three special lightning attacks in exchange for some of the player's fuel, or a loop maneuver like in 1942 if buttons 1 and 2 are pressed simultaneously. Players now have only one life, in the form of a large "fuel" meter, constantly depleting, but refillable by collecting various powerups. In 2-player mode, when both players overlap their planes on screen, the energy bar can be transferred from the player with more fuel to the player with less. Destroying a complete formation of red enemy planes will result in a power-up, such as a health boost or a new main weapon.

In Japan, Game Machine listed 1943: Midway Kaisen as the most popular arcade game of July 1987. It went on to become Japan's second highest-grossing table arcade game of 1987, and tenth highest-grossing arcade conversion kit of 1988. Game Machine also listed 1943 Kai: Midway Kaisen as the sixteenth most popular arcade game of July 1988.

Yoshiki Okamoto, the producer of the game, stated on his YouTube channel that the game faced protests from the Japanese right wing. According to him, protesters criticized the game's content – where players control American aircraft to attack and destroy Imperial Japanese Navy warships – as an insult to the souls of fallen soldiers enshrined at Yasukuni Shrine. Okamoto acknowledged the criticism resonated deeply, that one could question why Japanese developers would deliberately make a game about defeating the Japanese military, and that he had been too young to consider that perspective at the time. He explained the setting was chosen to make the game more appealing by putting the player on the side of the war's winners, and that the content was fantastical – diverging from historical accuracy with elements like mixed Army/Navy aircraft and the battleship Yamato appearing at the Battle of Midway, where it was not actually present. In the NES version, the names of the warships and battlefields were replaced with fictional ones.