[2][3] The North American release differed from the Japanese original, as it contained songs from their then upcoming album Made in Japan and the bonus track "Lullaby".

[5] A re-release in 1991 contained the bonus track "Map", which was written by Kuni Kawachi and originally on his album Kirikyogen, which featured Joe Yamanaka and Hideki Ishima, under the name "Works Composed Mainly By Humans".

Cope described the record as a festival of guitar worship, where each "Satanic riff" is interlaced with "a more dazzling stellar lick", and so "regally exultant and wantonly barbaric simultaneously, yet so musically complete" that it renders vocalist Yamanaka all but obsolete.

[13] David Fricke of Rolling Stone declared Satori his favorite Japanese rock album of all time and described Ishima's lead lines on it as having a "curdled-distortion quality, like mad-cat wails, that contrast dramatically with his Tony Iommi Jr. block-fuzz chords.

"[11] AllMusic's Thom Jurek gave the album 4½ stars out of 5 and made it their pick as the band's top album calling it "a real classic"; "From power chords to Eastern-tinged, North African, six-string freakouts, to crashing tom toms, to basses blasting into the red zone, Satori is a journey to the center of someplace that seems familiar but has never before been visited.

[16] The entirety of Satori was used as the music score for Takashi Miike's 2002 film Deadly Outlaw: Rekka, which features Yuya Uchida and Joe Yamanaka as actors.