Akiba's Trip: Undead and Undressed review: clothing optional

Japanese developer Acquire provides an intimate look at otaku culture, the fandom and fervor surrounding Japanese anime, manga, video games and fashion in Akiba's Trip. The graphics may not be the prettiest, but the semi-accurate scenery of real-world landmarks was a powerful nostalgia trigger for my memories of living in Japan.

This wrapper is conceptually cool. Akiba's Trip is unapologetic of its weirdness, but the detail put into the game's aesthetic doesn't extend to its tedious combat and mission structure, detracting from some entertaining dialogue and stories about the characters' relationships.

But the quest to discover the cause of and defeat the Synthisters is less intriguing than the relationship-driven subplots. One of these subplots involves the protagonist taking one of his lady friends as a love interest. Players can choose one of these four girls to take on missions. The more face time between you and any one of the leading ladies, the greater the romance, which rewards players with some pretty hilarious and awkward scenes of teenagers trying to flirt.

There are dozens of optional side missions that involve running errands or helping other characters, but everything ends in a fight against groups of Synthisters. I stopped completing side quests because I couldn't stomach the combat anymore. Running around between loading screens and getting into lengthy fights for a paltry bit of in-game currency wasn't worth it.

There are a few fun moments that play into the game's otaku aesthetic. In one mission, my friends entered a cosplay contest as a group of popular anime characters. During the contest, a group of Synthisters attacked them, and my friends kept in character with the cosplays they wore while they fought. This piece of the main storyline is just one small instance of the game taking mandatory time out from its "serious business" vampire storyline to tell a silly story around otaku culture — and the game's lack of self-awareness makes this lampooning enjoyable to watch. Building more severe situations like boss fights within funny fluff moments such as the cosplay contest made me want to stick around through the otherwise uninspiring combat and storyline sequences.

The time spent not trying to strengthen your romance (or bromance) in Akiba's Trip is taken up fighting Synthisters in hand-to-hand combat. Controls are streamlined, with only three attack button options available. These allow you to target the head, torso and legs of an opponent. Repeatedly attacking one area will weaken the clothing your opponent is wearing, eventually allowing you to rip it off. Once all head pieces, shirts and pants or dresses are ripped off, your enemy dies. If your own clothes are all ripped off, you die.

In this way, clothing is utilized like armor, with each piece adding boosts to different stats. Clothing pieces can be upgraded for even greater boosts, and while sometimes you can buy the items at stores within Akiba, you have a better chance of scoring more high-quality pieces in post-combat loot drops. The idea of using clothes as magic armor is a neat idea, but the system lacks any real depth or draw. The satisfaction of visually customizing characters to my liking just wasn't there because my lack of interest in combat made it hard for me to care about the clothes.

I struggled to find a rhythm in combat between the occasionally buggy AI and the difficulty of successfully landing attacks. No matter how much I leveled up, it never got easier. I weathered boss fights that dragged on for nearly half an hour because I couldn't get someone's hat off. And thanks to the lack of visible health bars, I couldn't track whether I was making any meaningful progress. Most combat scenarios ended in me wanting to scream. It felt like my skill level had nothing to do with how well I did.