If you're looking for a solid, retro, mechanically simple arcade experience, look anywhere but at Akashicverse, which seems to delight in making the player feel borderline-psychotic with its futuristic bevy of special moves, absolutely ferocious bullet patterns, and blazing-fast pace.

Luckily, the devs do an admirable job of making the chaos parsable on the screen (though, there's so much going on that a beginning player will still likely have plenty of visibility issues), and the various control schemes generously incentivize your abuse of the game's myriad "methods" (special moves). Each one can be activated with a different, not-too-complicated fighting-game-style input, and they do some crazy shit: send bullets slowly back the other direction, turn you into a giant mech, spew layers upon layers of homing missles, or even create a force field where bullets are slowed and lasers are outright cancelled. Learning the moves takes a couple solid hours of practice, but once you get it they feel pretty fantastic, and--if using the ADAM1 control scheme--your ship emits a shield to protect you when entering inputs, so there's ample time to nail them.

I did get tired of the gimmick after a while, as even in spite of the game seeming to overpower you to an insane degree, it will still beat your ass absolutely senseless.

As much as I admire the unique feast of mechanics Akashicverse lays on the table, its particular brand of density and difficulty is just not quite for me. It is absolutely worth checking out, though, if you're curious about one of the more bold mutations of the traditional shoot-em-up.