This mostly concerns Zetsu/Climax mode (and Origin/Arcade mode too i guess, since one is a tweak of the other). Shin maybe someday.
[Mechanics Recap]
There's official tutorials here and here. Idk why City connection doesn't put this in the game itself.
The idea is there's two modes: plane and spirit mode. You also got the usual CAVE shot/laser distinction.
In plane mode, you gather energy by killing enemies. If you hold laser, you can swing the gathered energy near bullets, grazing them and fattening them up, allow for a quicker charge. Energy builds a meter for you to enter spirt mode, the scoring mode.
In spirit mode, if you don't use laser, you are literally invincible, and bullets circle around you like a storm. If enemies are destroyed by shot at close range, they spawn suicide bullets. If you laser an enemy while bullets overlap them, it gets canceled into gold, but you are vulnerable while in laser. Gold when grazed with bullets grow bigger, but if not collected in time they will disappear.
The question then becomes: when to gather bullets? Where to put the bullets? When to graze or cancel? The meter and gold time limit adds constraints to these decisions.
[God of Bullets]
I'd say that AK is one of the few shmups I've played that made me feel like a god of bullets. You might say "so, a cancel-oriented and move-the-bullets type system, don't we already have futari 1.5 maniac and Giga Wing?", but it's good to take a detour and see what they do. In futari maniac, you don't care about what the bullets look like as long as there's a lot of them, and you are in a good spot to escape / micro-dodge when you cancel. In Giga Wing, I consider its scoring to be like a game of hot potato, where you switch between being vulnerable due to reflect cooldown, micrododging for a while until your targets have lined up, then reflect it back like a game of ping pong.
AK invulnerability means you can just throw dodging away for a bit. This evidently seemed like a controversial change because isn't that one of the core of the genre's gameplay? But it compensates by forcing you to manage the entire screen if you want to get good scores, and you need to be invulnerable if you want to aggressively wrangle all of those bullets before they go away.
In fact, I do mean god in a slightly literal sense, because the core of what makes AK's aggression feel unique is the creation aspect, of using the geometry the game provides you. You have to look at the bullet shapes, decide where to harvest, detonate and graze, and you will find yourself physically carrying 200+ blue and pink ammunition around the screen like some STG Atlas. You spend a lot of time not just waiting for opportunity, but actively creating it by zooming around every x and y coordinate while invulnerable to create and collect bullets, and then bunch them together to generate the largest bullet intersection ever. Scoring, ideally, should always be very proactive, but few look as cool as the eye of the storm in this game, and somehow turns that spectacle into a skill. If you can get past the fact that yes, there's a little less traditional dodging than the average shmup, thus leading to ez survival, then you open yourself to a power fantasy that's still rigorous enough for meaningful score play.
It's also a pretty forgiving game for experimentation. Bomb all you want and death doesn't do anything beyond ruining the current scoring section, although if you play high level the drop in rank from a hit means some slight restart syndrome because it thins the later very lucrative patterns.
[Coda]
I'm a little surprised that scoring activity for this game is so quiet. It looks unconventional, but reorient yourself a bit and you'll find AK's core identity is very empowering compared some more dodging heavy scoring systems, or rank management esoterica. Is there anything broken about it that I'm just not aware of? If there is, just treat this review as a giant what if
I dunno all the nuances of this game yet, so to more experienced players feel free chime in, and recommend more games like this if you have any. If you are on the fence, please give it a try! It allows you to fulfil a role more akin to a gardener or a sculptor than the usual gladiator role you get when playing STGs.
