I bounced off Akatori twice before it clicked.
Not because it’s unfair. Because I was playing it wrong and the game never bothered to correct me.
Here’s the short version of the problem. Akatori looks like an automatic transmission and plays like a manual.
You can hold one gear and mash the attack button. The game will let you.
Then you hit a boss, stall out on a hill, and wonder why the thing that worked for two hours suddenly does nothing.
So these are the tips I’d hand a friend who just booted it up.
Contrast Games put this out on August 5, 2026, you play a teenage battle monk named Mako, and your staff is also a god.
Your staff is not just a weapon
Akatori, the staff, transforms. That’s the whole design of the game in one sentence.
It becomes a throwable spear. It lets you cling to walls.
It glides, it lets you slide, and later it punches through portals.
Every traversal ability you unlock is the same staff wearing a different hat.
Which means when you’re stuck, you’re usually not missing an upgrade. You’re forgetting you already have one.
If a room looks impassable, the answer is almost always a staff form you’re not thinking about.
Learn to shift between staff and fists early
This is the manual transmission thing, and it’s the tip that fixed the game for me.
Staff attacks hit harder and reach farther, but they burn energy. Fists are faster and lighter, and they build that energy back.
Most beginners pick one and ride it the entire game.
Don’t. You want to be switching constantly, dumping staff energy into the big hits and then going back to fists to recharge while the enemy is recovering.
Idle staff energy is wasted damage. Same as sitting in third gear on a highway.
Attack in mid-air to jump farther
This one is criminally underexplained.
Swinging while airborne extends your jump distance. It’s a platforming tool, not a combat tool, and it turns a bunch of “that gap is too wide” moments into easy hops.
Your aerial three-hit combo also magnetizes toward enemies, so you’ll drift to them slightly in the air.
Useful in a fight. Occasionally annoying over a pit.
Jump is your dodge, not roll
I spent way too long rolling into damage.
In Akatori, jumping clears most enemy attacks, including a lot of the boss stuff that looks like it should be rolled through.
Roll is for environmental hazards. Moving electric platforms, that sort of stuff.
Retrain your hands on this early and the difficulty curve flattens out noticeably.
Get close and stay close
Feels wrong for a game where your weapon has six feet of reach. Do it anyway.
Backing off after a combo resets your damage window and gives the enemy free time to reposition.
The good players in this game are the ones parked in the enemy’s face, punishing recovery frames.
Dodge toward the opening, not away from the danger.
Your combo has a cooldown, so plan the gap
Basic attacks in Akatori don’t chain forever. After a combo there’s a beat where you’re doing nothing.
New players fill that beat by mashing harder, which does not work.
Fill it with movement instead. Reposition, hop over the enemy, swap to fists, then come back in.
Treat the cooldown as part of the combo, not an interruption to it.
Once you’re planning around that gap instead of fighting it, the whole combat system stops feeling stiff.
Break every yellow crystal you see
Amber is the universal currency, and those giant yellow crystals scattered around the levels are free money.
They take one hit. There’s no reason to walk past them.
You’ll spend the Amber at merchants like Yoshiro, mostly on healing items, and you will absolutely want a full pouch before a boss door.
Hoarding Amber does nothing for you. It’s not a score.
Chaos Bells are where the good moves come from
This is the mechanic I completely ignored on my first run, and it’s the reason my first run went badly.
Chaos Bells need a full purple Chaos meter to activate. That meter fills by fighting enemies.
Ring one and you get a real ability out of it.
Dodge and Counterattack comes from a Bell. So do charged attacks.
Read that again if you’re the type who sneaks past enemies to save time.
In Akatori, skipping fights makes you permanently weaker.
Exploration doesn’t feed the Chaos meter. Combat does.
Touch every Guide Stone
Guide Stones are your checkpoints. They save your progress and they refill your health, and they cost you nothing.
Walk to them even when you’re at full health and feeling good.
Because the moment a stretch goes badly, the difference between “I lost two minutes” and “I lost twenty” is whether you tagged the last one.
Press M more than you think you need to
The map marks your objectives, which is a genuinely nice thing for a game in this genre to do.
Akatori is also more linear than most metroidvanias. Backtracking is light and the critical path is usually pretty clear.
So if you feel lost, you’re probably not lost. You’re one missed ledge away from the route.
Check the map before you spend ten minutes re-running a corridor you already cleared.
Practice on the dummy before you need to
There’s a training dummy early on. Use it for more than three seconds.
Charged attacks in particular need you to build the meter and then hold the attack button, and figuring that timing out mid-boss is a bad plan.
Same goes for talking to NPCs. It’s an indie game with a small cast, and the merchants and side characters are worth the thirty seconds.
Read the early bosses instead of racing them
The first few bosses are pattern tests, and each one hands you a movement ability when it dies.
The Turtle gives you wall climbing. The Wasp gives you the air dash.
That’s the real reward, not the health bump.
Takatsugi is the wall most people hit first. He has four patterns and he starts by dashing away and lobbing explosives at you, so watch the impact zones and don’t stand in them.
When he drops his head with the sword drawn, that’s the rush-slash. Jump over him and keep hitting.
Low on health, he chains three rush-slashes and finishes with a shockwave. Both are jumpable, which is that “jump is your dodge” rule paying off exactly when it matters.
Stay glued to him the whole fight. Distance is his advantage, not yours.
The Sea Serpent has an actual weak point
Later on you’ll fight a Sea Serpent that feels like a damage sponge until you realize you’re hitting the wrong thing.
When it slams its mouth into the floor and stops moving, go for the eyes. That’s your window.
Past half health one eye stops taking damage. Eventually both eyes go red and it swaps to tongue attacks instead of head slams.
Dodge four tongue strikes and the tongue itself becomes hittable. Boulders and triple tail swipes are the filler in between, and the venom it spits sticks around on platforms for about ten seconds.
Dash through the electric vines, don’t climb around them
Once you’re in the Amber Mines and you’ve got the underwater dash, the glowing vines stop being a hazard.
Dashing through them negates the damage entirely.
I wasted a lot of time trying to platform around those things before I figured that out.
It’s a good example of how this game hands you a solution and then never mentions it again, so when a new obstacle shows up, try your newest ability on it first.
Give it two hours before you decide
Akatori’s opening is the weakest part of it, and I say that as someone who ended up liking the game a lot.
The staff forms stack up, the Chaos Bell abilities land, and the movement gets genuinely fun once you have double jump, air dash, and wall cling all at once.
The version of this game you’re playing in minute fifteen is not the version you’re playing in hour three.
Shift gears, ring the bells, and stop rolling.
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Images are from the Akatori page on Steam and used under Fair Use.