Akiba’s Trip: Undead and Undressed by Xseed wasn’t exactly what I was expecting when I installed it on my Vita. I’m not sure where those expectations originally laid, probably in the fact that Japan likes producing a certain kind of hack and slash game with over the top humor, a simple story and an overarching sense of titillation. While Akiba’s Trip does provide all of the above I suppose the title caught me by surprise because it was a lot more “involved” than I would have thought.
The game drops you into the role of a nameless protagonist, defaulted to “Nanashi”, as he’s experimented on by a dapper gentleman named Zenya who when he’s not shopping out of the J Crew catalog spends his days transforming young men and women with heavy materialistic desires into energy sucking vampire like entities called Synthisters. Zenya found Nanashi by drawing him in with the promise of payment in the form of figurines, and Nanashi’s greed proved stronger than most turning him into a powerful Synthister. Soon after Nanashi is rescued by the purple haired Shizuku and she shares a nice, bloody kiss with him in order to free him from Zenya’s control.
Joined by Nanashi’s childhood friends the “Akiba Freedom Fighters”, a pharmaceutical’s CEO and a pop idol, Nanashi and Shizuku set out to free Japan’s Akihabara district from Synthister control. How does one defeat a materialistic vampire you may ask? Obviously you strip off their clothes. While vampires usually die with exposure to any sunlight, proper vampires, not the ones that sparkle in the sun, Synthisters are allowed to at least enjoy a little solar radiation in their day to day. Remove their clothing however and the sun will turn them into a pile of ash.
Akiba’s Trip has a unique, and perhaps awkward combat system. When you meet up with a group of Synthisters in Akiba the game will not automatically enter battle regardless of if they attack you or not, instead you have to hit the left trigger to enter and exit combat, while the right trigger serves as your block. You then have to target different portions of clothing on the rival Synthister, head, body and legs. You have to wail away at your enemy by hitting the appropriate button for the part of the body you want to attack. The controls are defaulted to triangle for head, circle of upper body and x for legs. Once the clothes are whittled down enough you’re allowed to rip them off the Synthister, and in some cases keep the sweet threads they were rocking.
While I understand what they were going for the default controller scheme felt a little awkward to me, and while you’re able to switch to a few different predetermined button layouts you’re never allowed a fully customized controller option. Paired with the fact it requires a surprising amount of damage to wilt the health off a Hawaiian shirt the controls got in my way a little of really enjoying this combat heavy title. There were some neat aspects of the combat however where you could enter a kind of hyper strip mode, jumping between guys and gals at light speed, rudely exposing them and racking up those combat points. If you do a really great job you could sometimes pull off their dainties, placing them in full buff for the world to see… Until the sun obliterates them from existence anyway. Now unfortunately that’s about where the depth of the game ends, and there’s going to be a lot of battles awaiting you as the story goes on.
There’s a ton of benefit to ripping off clothing, or engaging in materialism and buying gear on your own. New gear means better stats, and you can dress yourself ina fashionable pinstripe suit or go for a more ironic hipster route in a polka dot shirt and shorts while carrying around a giant leek as a weapon. There’s also a bit of a synthesizing system, where you can combine clothes or weapons into each other for stronger benefits. Once you’re done dressing for fashion week, you can then test at your new stats and skills at an arena located on the far end of Akihabara.
If you couldn’t tell the story is pretty comedy heavy. I mean, it’s a game where greed gives you super powers and you have to run around stripping folks naked. There’s also a couple of in-game “online” functions to explore, such as a site named Pitter which is far more reddit than twitter, where people share rumors about Akihabara’s urban legends and generally troll each other. The protagonist will also get patronizing emails from his friends to keep him knocked down a couple of pegs. Several times throughout the game you’ll also get to make dialogue choices, some quite hilarious and some that make Nanashi the biggest jerk to ever jerk, naturally you’ll want to choose these for maximum comedic appeal right?
Wrong. Turns out despite the highly comedic edge you can hurt your friend’s feelings, make them hate you, and even change the outcome of the game’s ending. This is something I discovered a tad too late after trucking through my game as a shallow a-hole. There’s a bit of a Star Ocean/Fire Emblem vibe as far as endings go, whoever you have the highest relationship affinity with is also the person you walk off into the sunset with. Though there’s no chance for bromances in this game, you’ll only be walking off with a lady. Though the mechanic is hidden in the choices you make throughout the course of the story, you can at least check how much someone may like or dislike you with a story NPC.
Endorsements anyone? Why sure I’ll take it. I mean in a game about materialism it’s only proper we get a few company brands and businesses in there. While this may have partly been done to “authentically” recreate Akihabara because you know, no one’s ever figured out how to work around brand logos before, it’s a bit jarring when running around in the game’s world. Some landmarks are even recognizable if you’ve never been to Japan, the Go! Go! Curry fast food joint comes to mind if you’re a New Yorker. Still at least some credit should be given for their faithful recreation of Akihabara, and most folks likely won’t have a problem with the branding in game.
The title is available on both the PS3 and PS Vita, and as you’d expect the graphics, character models especially are “stripped down” (hur hur) to function on both hardwares. I’d call the graphics satisfying, but far from cutting edge. The soundtrack also isn’t very memorable. However the cast of characters in the game is at least colorful, and both personalities and acting jobs did the trick for me.
Akiba’s Trip is far from the most cutting edge title, and it’s far more involved than your average hack and slash that typically seem to run between 2 and 5 hours. At a whopping 30 hours of playtime, it’s certainly a title that will last awhile in your vita, the question is if you’ll have the patience for it. The biggest draw seems to be collecting clothing items and the lass you’ll be walking off into the sunset with. They do try and offer some replayability in a New Game+ that allows you more customization options and to pursue a different story path with one of the casts’ females, but this wasn’t nearly enough to keep me personally interested. I don’t know if Akiba’s Trip has as long of a shelf life as it’s going for, and that’s unfortunate as being a shorter title may have served it better.
