Akiba’s Trip: The Animation is a 13 episode anime that’s based upon the game. As you can tell from the title, it’s based in the Japanese suburb of Akihabara, famous for its stores that focuses on anime, gaming and other pop culture products. It initially follows the siblings Tamotsu and Niwaka, both otaku’s, as they are shopping around in Akiba. They then witness an absurd fight between a girl who fell from the sky and a group of people, whereby the girl then proceeds to strip her opponents.
The girl later ends up befriending the siblings. She’s Mayo, a “Bugged One”. Basically she has awesome physical abilities but with a fatal flaw. If she has too much of her skin exposed, she’ll die and her body will turn into gas. This was the reason why she was stripping her opponents as that’s the only way to defeat them. Through several coincidences, the pair ends up helping her fight these enemies who are monsters with the ability to take control of people.
The trio is also joined by the obviously foreign Arisa. As you can probably guess, the anime has a heavy focus on fan service, and while most of the female characters serves as fodder for this, Arisa is probably the main fan service girl. However, the fan service never gets too outlandish or daring, and it’s quite expected at this point. The animation quality isn’t stellar. At the best of times, it looks clean and sharp, while at its worst, it feels lazy with a lack of detail and characters being oddly out of proportion.
Unfortunately the anime’s unique and daring premise is never utilized to any sort of good effect. In fact, in most episodes, it only shows up right at the end for a quick way to defeat the opponents. The rest of the time is filled with Tamotsu spending time in Akiba and getting into all sorts of weird situations. It’s filler material that’s close to being bottom of the barrel stuff. As a result, the pacing slows to a crawl and it becomes bland and boring quickly.
The anime has an episodic nature with Tamotsu, Mayo and Arisa fighting against a different enemy each episode. Usually, they’ll be put into some random situation that makes no sense. This isn’t inherently bad but it’s so unimaginative here that yup, it’s bad. It tries to play this off as parodies of pop culture like an episode dedicated to Street Fighter V or another to a card battle very similar to Yu-Gi-Oh, but it crosses the line to become cheesy and painful to watch instead.
There are some good parts where the humor punches through but the other 95% of the time, it falls flat. The writing is so generic and it never reaches the fun ridiculous of the games. Admittedly, it would be hard to fill twelve episodes with a plot like Akiba’s Beat that centres around a gameplay gimmick of stripping others of their clothing, but to not even attempt a decent plot is another thing entirely. It tries to go for the angle of being over-the-top but fun, while parodying the extremes of otaku culture… and yet it manages to screw that up becoming the very thing it is trying to make fun of.
The final two episodes is where the bulk of the plot happens. Just like the rest of the anime, it’s nothing special and it is very generic in its execution. The villain responsible for all these monsters that the protagonists were encountering and having to strip had a basic “must destroy everything” type of motivation. There are no twists, no turns, and falls flat in its execution. It has a resolution that is typically used in those cheap low-budget anime and has a terrible ending to boot.
Overall, Akiba’s Trip: The Animation is a bad anime. It squanders every potential it had, from the unique premise of stripping clothes off enemies to defeat them, to the fan service that this could have provided. What we got instead is a generic plot that regulates that unique premise into an afterthought, bland characters and truckloads of filler material.
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