Stripped-down combat at its finest.
Akiba's Trip is a series of Beat 'em Up Action RPGs developed by Acquire Corp, known for its three-way combination between geek culture, Urban Fantasy, and brawlers. Set in the tech and hobby capital Akihabara, the basic plot follows humans as they fight off dangers to the town, including store riots, ornery thugs, energy consuming vampires, the city's dark unconsious...
Your player character, a run-of-the-mill otaku caught in the middle of supernatural happenings, is imbued with power and must fight off the enemies of the game before they wreak havoc on the entire town. And you typically do this by stripping them of the will to fight. Literally. Without the clothes on their backs, they're exposed to enough energy to turn them into dust, but since you've got the same powers as them, you're just as toast as they are if you show enough skin.
Titles in the series include:
- Akiba’s Trip: Hellbound & Debriefed (2011, PlayStation Portable)
- Akiba's Trip Plus (2012, PlayStation Portable; remake of Hellbound & Debriefed)
- Akiba's Trip for Gree (2012, Android/iOS; port of Hellbound & Debriefed)
- Akiba's Trip: Undead and Undressed (2013, PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, PC, and PlayStation 4)
- Akiba's Beat (2016, PlayStation Vita and PlayStation 4)
- Akiba's Trip 2+A (2017, PlayStation 4; a rerelease of Undead & Undressed with content from The Animation)
Manga adaptations in the series include:
- Akiba's Trip (2012, written by Kenji Mizuta)
- Akiba's Trip 2 (2014, written by Rei Kusakabe)
- Akiba's Beat! (2016, written by Choboraunyopomi; yonkoma spinoff)
Anime in the series include:
- Akiba's Trip the Animation (2017, GONZO)
Tropes present throughout the series:
- Bland-Name Product: Twitter appears in Strip as "Pitter" and Beat as "Quipper", though the latter seems to also have some resemblances to Instagram or TikTok.
- Combat Pragmatist: Sure, stripping their clothes off is useful when fighting vampires, but the player character also does it to normal humans in order to humiliate them enough into running away. Just don't attempt this on non vampire females... Just. Don't.
- Double-Meaning Title: Obviously; a trip through Akiba + stripping down enemies to defeat them. Beat is a little harder to figure out without knowing the mechanics: "walking a beat" as you're investigating delusions + a rhythmic beat as your primary weapons are basically music players and you get in-universe Theme Song Power Up music for fights.
- Emotion Eater: Vampires are able to suck out the energy in humans, leaving them lethargic husks that never want to leave their room. They tend to pick otaku as easy targets since the public expects them to wind up Hikikomori.
- Delusions in Beat only exist as long as the deluser still believes in them. Only once a deluser is about to experience anxiety or a mental break does a way to dispel the delusion become apparent.
- Fanservice: What did you expect from a game about stripping? Most of it comes from the Male Gaze when girls get stripped to their underwear, but there are a few bones thrown for the ladies in Undead & Undressed.
- Intentionally Awkward Title: An invocation of The Problem with Pen Island in the logo and the series' spelling in Katakana (アキバズトリップ) is pretty much guaranteed to make you say "Akiba Strip" .
- Otaku: All kinds of otaku are represented in the series, befitting a franchise taking place in Tokyo's geek culture mecca.
- Our Vampires Are Different: Sensitive to light they may be, but the vampires of Akiba's Trip need most of their body exposed to the sun before they can turn to ash.
- Later-Installment Weirdness: Unlike the other entries, Beat involves taking down demon-like entities with no strip combat present at all.
- Lighter and Softer: Played with. Beat has an underlying plot that's as dark as the rest of the series, but doesn't have any of the strip mechanics and tends to poke a little more fun at itself and its primary protagonists.
- Product Placement: The games and brands represented in the game are all real, often including ads for franchises that really were advertised in Akihabara at the time. The game also has legit flyers from that time for business in Akihabara
- Satire: When it all comes down to it, the franchise is about stopping forces from corrupting the youth into shut-ins and blaming their transformation on geeky hobbies.
- Beat is about fighting literal manifestations of the dark side of otakudom.
- Takes One to Kill One: The only way the protagonists stand a chance against the vampires is by getting turned into one, since normal humans can't fight on equal footing.
- Thematic Series: While the games are disconnected from each other, they all follow the basic premise of Akihabara culture clashing with paranormal trouble.
- Urban Fantasy: Classic demon slaying and vampire hunting action meshes with contemporary pop culture and the youth that consumes it.
