Japan is famous for many things, crazy fashion, Anime, beautiful exotic women and crazy fetishes. Anime lovers rejoice, Akiba’s Trip has all this and more.
Behind the the beautifully laid out recreation of the Akihabara district in Tokyo, Japan, lies an evil group called Synthesizers. They feed off the energy of the people in Akihabara and work for an organization called the Magaimono. Now in true anime fashion you play a character named Nanashi, who is a jobless loser drifting through life. He decides to answer an add for a job that sounds to good to be true. He wakes up strapped to a table being told he’s been turned into a Synthesizer. Shortly after he’s saved by a beautiful woman who turns him into a vampire like creature.
Now how do you kill vampire like creatures in Japan? Well by tearing their clothes off in broad daylight of course. In order to kill the vampires you target your attack on a specific area, head, chest or torso. Then when the selected area starts to glow purple, you hold down the button and tear off that piece of clothing. After you strip them down to their bra and panties, they disintegrate and die.
For all the women reading this, the game is not sexist… the men get stripped down to their underwear too. The highlight of the game is when you pull off what I like to call the “What The Hell Did I Just Do Special”. After taking off 8 pieces of clothes in succession you get a combo, where you go into a clothes tearing off frenzy. You then cut to a scene where everyone’s underwear tears off and you see anime characters running across the screen with white stars where underwear used to be.
My favorite part of the game is actually the underlining dialogue. There is some serious subtext. Also the dialogue and the choices you make using it decide what ending you will get. Its biggest draw is the ability to get a different secret ending with every female character in the game. You do this by making every female character in the game fall for you, and yes in true Japanese fetish style, even your sister in the game.
The biggest improvement to the PS4 version other then upgrade to 1080p, is the addition of a Toybox mode. In Toybox mode you start with one of everything right from the beginning. This also allows you customize the look of all your playable characters from the kind of shirt they use, to the kind of bras and panties they wear. The only downside is the inability to get trophies… but who needs trophies when you get to start with what would normally take you multiple play through’s to get.
Don’t forget to pay close attention to the story in the intro–one of the rumors that floats around Akihabara is that if a guy keeps his virginity till he’s 30 he turns into a fairy.
Akiba’s Trip is a decent game but not for those with a strict moral compass. It’s also a bit of a letdown that the add-on download doesn’t seem to be available in the Singapore PSN…. but multiple endings are always a good thing (editor’s note: #thatswhatshesaid… I couldn’t help it).