akiba's strip

Akiba’s Trip: Hellhound & Debriefed is a JRPG beat em up game that focuses on the main character in a Tokyo Ghoul like scenario where vampires and humans are at shadow war over the city of Akihabara. Vampires are attacking and feeding on the young citizens of Akihabara leaving them in a listless state. You have to defeat the vampires by removing their clothes and exposing their Shadow Souls to direct sunlight.

It is not Akihabara without visiting any maid cafes and no, it’s the kind of maid café gang wars like Akiba Maid Wars. It is a fairly accurate recreation of early 2010s Akihabara but it is not Yakuza level of detail that’s for sure as expected from a port of a PSP but even then, Kamurcho on the PSP of the Yakuza games was still pretty accurate. Many of the stores in the game are named after notable gaming and anime stores in Japan.

The graphics were generally fine if maybe lower textures here and there, and the artstyle too is also ok. There is some filler in it with you often going back and forth from place to place. The atmosphere it’s the polar opposite of Tokyo Ghoul. It’s the typical Shonen styled action feel to the story. It is not down to earth and grounded in reality like Genshiken and its as outlandish as the later parts of Otaku No Video that's for certain.

The characters are tropey while the voice acting was serviceable which is just about what the cheesy dialogue deserves. The comedy was made purely for anime fans so if you don’t have that sense of humor, you are really not going to like this game along with the other quirks. The music was generally fine, though I found it to be a wannabe Persona 3 soundtrack with the rap rock stuff.

You can scan and detect which person is a human or a vampire and decide whether or not you want to fight them as each action depends on the kind of ending you get, you can also do side quests. You gain new moves and is also able to purchase books on how to strip characters with more ease as time goes by the more you level up. The combat itself is funny but not really refined as it felt pretty stiff and blocky. You can apologize and get on the good side of either side by doing a pretty humiliating and hilarious mission. There are some weird gameplay designs such as you can access the map only if you are at the edge of the location. You have to equip items when you go outside the map, not during the map but outside it, Every other JRPG I can remember, you can equip items anytime you like but not this game strangely. You can buy a bunch of clothes and even sell off extra duplicates to a thrift store for extra cash too.

The sister mini game section is also a way to pass time by doing all sorts of activities from dress up to giving allowance and masochistically getting beat up by your younger sibling too. There are numerous replay value with different endings and easter eggs to find.

Overall, it was an ok game.

It gets 3 out of 5 stars.