Review: Akiba’s Trip

Hurrah I’ve just discovered a game called Akiba’s Trip or possibly Akiba Strip that is all about pulling off the clothes of teenage vampires to unveil their pants and make them explode in the sunlight. It always amazes me how easy it is for something ‘from Japan’ to just leave me confused and flabbergasted at its existence so instantly. It’s out now on PS4 and is also a sequel to a PSP game.

The game starts off in a beautiful cell shaded anime fashion with your main character lying on a table slightly confused. Relatively unanimated images of the characters appear on the screen to ask you questions and you are given the opportunity to choose your responses from a dialogue tree. It’s also possible at this point to say the wrong thing and be killed at this moment. Suddenly a beautiful anime girl comes in and teaches you how to kick peoples asses by dodging and punching and the like. The controls are a wee bit sloppy in my opinion, a more DMC or God of war battle style would’ve been preferred but it reminded me more of Vice City’s dated sluggish punches.

At this point it becomes very odd and a mixture between a dating game and the kind of game that would normally be designed by a young teenage boy. Fan service all over, but not an entirely bad game either. As I said the control system is a bit sticky, like if you were to try dancing in a room full of jam, but you can tear through the game in no time if that’s what you want or you can upgrade and become awesome. There are multiple endings, you can unlock other fan service stuff like being able to change the female characters underwear and having see through clothes, you can also fall in love with most of the female characters in the game. It’s so offensive and ridiculous that I’m surprised it got released in the west.

It didn’t take long to discard it’s own mythology though, as the story evolves you learn that you are a campsite of sorts that feeds on the energy and motivation of others but you are a good one like Blade, and everyone else is a bad one. The only way to defeat them is to have their skin be in direct sunlight, the only way to do this is to tear off the clothes of the people you are fighting and watch them explode. The reason I say their mythology dissolves though is because there are many girls walking around with very complicated lingerie on that when you reveal them to the sunlight lingerie intact they explode whereas you’re-not-going-out-dressed-like-that girls who are showing a lot of skin already seem to be immune until you get them down to their little underthings. Also the characters get oddly addicted to this fighting style and when in battle with human beings will also tear off they clothes causing them to run off in embarrassment but having absolutely no reason to justifiably do so.

I took a while playing this one, as the story line was functional at best though quite fun and interesting if you understand all the obscure japanime references and the like, there’s a lot of excel saga and punk poem style satire constantly on the go. When I play grand theft auto for too long I forget just for a second that it isn’t ok to break into cars, so I was concerned that if I played this too much and I got into a bar fight with my friends I might pull off everyone’s clothes.

I would buy this game if you enjoy anime or manga satire, you are likely to go to Akiba in real life and can therefore make use of the discounts from the real actual shops fliers that you get in the game. It’s actually fun, but I can’t tell if I’m being tricked into thinking its fun by evolutionary urges getting excited by pants.

3/5 for Akibas Trip. It’s a bit pants.