Kokuga

Kokuga is a shoot ’em up game released by G.rev in 2012 for the Nintendo 3DS. It was directed by Hiroshi Iuchi, famous for his seminal shmups Radiant Silvergun and Ikaruga. Unlike many worldwide releases, the game wasn’t released in Canada and the developer was only notified that they would not be able to, late in the preparation process. Kokuga is a slow-moving, free-scrolling top-down shooter where players are placed in control of a futuristic “compact mobile tank” known as Kokuga.

The Kokuga is suspended on four “legs” and features a single turret capable of rotating 360 degrees using the shoulder buttons. Each stage has the player move through destroying other mechanical, tank-like, turret-like, and robotic enemies. Most stages end with massive and varied boss battles. Stages are separated into segments with large gates at the dividers–destroying all enemies before destroying the divider resorts in bonus shield repairs.

Destroying the gate without defeating all the enemies in that section merely results in all enemies therein being annihilated. Kokuga differentiates itself from most other shooters in a variety of ways. Rather than collecting power-ups, players already have 20 “cards” to utilize. Of these 20 attack and support cards, four are randomly displayed on the touch-screen at a time and offer a variety of abilities, from an offensive laser ring around the player, to homing shots, to shield restoration and damage repairs. Players cannot cycle through the cards, and in order to get new ones, at least one current card must be used.

In this way, the game offers an unusual strategy element to the shooter gameplay–careful and planned use of power-up cards over simply powering up as much as possible as soon as possible. Also different is the level set-up. There are three “final” stages at the corners of a triangular grid which make up the final stages. The stages themselves are laid out somewhat like a keyboard labeled with letters A~L, and a player may start at any stage. However, continuing through the game requires a player to select an adjacent stage from the completed first.