Akiba’s Trip: Hellbound & Debriefed (PS4)
The Akiba’s Trip series has been on my radar for a while, primarily because when you do a yearly Halloween review series a game with “Undead” in the title sounds like a good candidate for coverage. However, while Akiba’s Trip: Undead and Undressed might be the best known entry in the series, it isn’t the first installment, and I do try to start with the first game in the series when I can. The issue with that idea for quite a while though was that the first game, named simply Akiba’s Trip, was released exclusively in Japan on the PSP, even it’s enhanced version Akiba’s Trip Plus not leaving the country. However, 2021 brought with it the news the game would be coming to the United States for the first time by way of Akiba’s Trip: Hellbound & Debriefed, and while it was released on HD consoles it certainly shows that the game was made for inferior hardware. Very little effort was put into updating the appearance of the game, the simple 3D environments and characters models barely updated, but besides a few blurry textures on backgrounds it does seem to hit the mark where graphics do not impact the gameplay or story negatively. It is a shame such a port didn’t try to touch things up more, but having access to this game this way is better than not having any version available outside of old Japanese PSP games.
Akiba’s Trip: Hellbound & Debriefed takes place in a small district in Tokyo called Akihabara where many with interests in anime, electronics, and geek culture gather to buy merchandise and participate in their hobbies. The game’s protagonist is just another member of this subculture until one day they hear a friend of theirs in trouble, running to his aid only to find a supernaturally strong man who easily knocks them out and nearly kills them. A strange woman steps in to share some of her blood with the dying protagonist though, reviving them and granting them similar powers to the attacker. Through this you have become what the game calls a Shadow Soul, a species similar to a vampire that resembles humans but are stronger and much harder to kill, to the point no conventional weapons can do the job. However, an organization known as NIRO has learned the one way a Shadow Soul can be taken out: they can have their clothes ripped off to be exposed to the sun’s lethal rays.
NIRO recruits the newly made Shadow Soul to be on the side of humans, learning the ways of stripping their targets to try and stop what seems to be a coordinated effort by the Shadow Souls to turns humans not into members of their ranks but into listless shut-ins so humanity’s effectiveness can decline over time as their future generations lack the motivation to innovate. When the story begins you have little reason to turn down NIRO’s offer, partially because as a Shadow Soul you’d meet a swift end for refusing, but as you start fighting against the Shadow Souls you begin to encounter sympathetic members of the race while also seeing NIRO’s methods might not be the best option to resolving this conflict. As you speak with people on both sides of the conflict and learn more about the actual histories behind the people and organizations involved, you will eventually reach branching points in the story where dialogue choices will determine not only the endings but the last sequence of missions needed to complete the game. At many points in the plot you do have more than one dialogue choice and the reactions will change because of it, although one seems to always be a silly answer that isn’t always on topic. There are a few meaningful moments where what you say is incredibly important though and luckily enough the game prompts you to save often enough you can split saves to get multiple narrative routes with ease or potentially load an old save when the sometimes basic dialogue choices don’t make it quite clear where your character is going with a statement.
The game does try to make it clear which route is the best one when it comes to satisfying conclusions and wrapping things up properly so you likely won’t splinter off into one of the more negative outcomes, but the game does try to spin even the less tidy finales with some positivity so you won’t be completely bummed out if you do arrive at them. The main appeal of Akiba’s Trip: Hellbound & Debriefed is its plot, particularly because a lot of work is put into endearing you to central characters and the general human landscape of the Akihibara area itself. For the most part the protagonist you name yourself works closely with a small set of characters, the main group being the Freedom Fighters who are all residents of the area with their own niche interests. Sara is a devoted worker at a maid cafe, Gon is gaga for a pair of twin singers popular in the district, Nobu struggles to separate his interest in adult video games from his real life activities, and the much older Yatabe has many personal connections with business owners in the area. While at first they’re just a quirky group of friends to bounce plot details off of, soon they reveal deeper personal connections to the ongoing story and endearing character traits start to emerge. A good balance of humor in most of their identities means their interactions end up delightful to watch, and they’re hardly the only interesting characters in the cast that hold things together well.
Your liaison with NIRO is a professional woman named Mido who struggles to fit in with the casual behavior of the people of Akihabara despite having a soft spot for such hobbies herself, and seeing her get flustered adds a more personable side to her that makes it harder to accept NIRO and the Shadow Souls both have good people on their side. The Shadow Souls start to show more of their humanity through characters like Rui who desires to live a normal life where no one gets hurt and her close friend Suzu whose vulnerable and sweet demeanor makes it hard to believe your opposition is only made up of monsters. There are outright bad people you need to face, but the story of figuring out how to find a good ending between all these conflicting interests is made stronger because the game spends time letting characters explain their thoughts while also shining lights on their simpler moments so it’s not just proselytizing in the protagonist’s direction the whole game.
Akihabara is certainly an interesting host to the action not so much for its actual layout, the majority of the game’s locations city streets that you select from a map screen despite their small size, but because of the personality of its people and the strangeness that comes with it. At various points in the game a Twitter analogue is updated where a group of slowly recognizable side characters discuss goings-on in the area, be they the works of a villain you’ll later face, the activities of people you know including yourself, or just fleshing out the universe such as discussing a popular anime and manga franchise that ends up weaving through the story’s events a surprising amount of times. The town is full of strange people to meet both as part of the narrative and for optional side missions, characters like the Master of the clothes-stripping fighting style who speaks in sultry innuendos and is only ever seen dancing behind a lacy curtain, a man who dresses as a giant soccer ball, and a group of 30 people who all dress like frogs definitely giving the game an unusual and absurd appeal. This is further helped by the fact that, if you buy the right items or earn mastery of stripping techniques in other ways, you can steal unusual costumes and use them as armor for yourself, the game not only giving you the silly joy of seeing your character in a serious cutscene in an astronaut suit but still having the good character writing and voice work to maintain its drama despite it.
A lot of the game needs to rest on the interesting characters, emotional narrative beats, and absurd side mission concepts unfortunately as the actual gameplay substance is quite lacking. The stripping fighting system in Akiba’s Trip: Hellbound & Debriefed isn’t particularly deep or interesting. When you suspect someone is a Shadow Soul or you’re fighting a less scrupulous human the goal of a battle is to strip off their outer layer of clothes, this lethal to the vampire-like beings and usually shaming deserving humans as justice for their wrongdoings. While characters are stripped down to their underwear, the simple character models probably rob it of some of its intended eroticism, although the fact Shadow Souls all have their skin turn blue when exposed to sunlight also makes this odd battle system a tiny bit weirder. The concept of yanking off the clothes isn’t the major issue though, as fights are mostly about attacking body regions to weaken the clothes before you can rip them off. You do eventually get some combos and special moves, but most fights are going to boil down to smacking someone’s chest, head, and legs and then ripping off the clothing when it’s possible, sometimes pulling off a chain if enough clothes is damaged at the moment. You need to avoid being undressed yourself since you’re a Shadow Soul, but these fights tend towards repeating the same strikes over and over no matter the situation.
Some strategy can emerge in group fights, primarily because if you’re surrounded there can be very little to do if they all start attacking at once. Trying to wear through a group can ask you to vary up your targets more and go for actual stripping chains to clear their ranks faster, but some moves meant to help for such situations like twirling around to hit everyone can leave you open for so long after that enemies can retaliate easily. Rather than fight difficulty emerging from the techniques enemies use, it tends to derive just from their overall strength or numbers since getting cornered can be hard to recover from, but overall if you get a good weapon and some decent clothing the majority of battles will be a lot of low pressure conflicts where you don’t need to put much thought into it besides which body part you’re attacking to remove the next piece of clothing.
Your reward for side missions is usually money and the game has many shops to buy new equipment, stripping masteries, abilities, and usable items like armor upgrades, healing items, and stat boosts. Things can be priced pretty highly if you don’t partake in the side missions, and while many do have fun little sidestories like the game programmer running away from his job multiple times or finding Nobu’s biggest fan, they do usually boil down to more fights in places that you’ve already fought similar foes in before. While your foes may be dressed in absurd ways there isn’t much variance in how the battles are set up leading to the kind of drain on interest that is usually best rectified by returning to the main plot. Side missions can expire though and usually will after two main story missions, but story missions can also get in combat ruts in periods where a spotlight isn’t on any particular character or the main story isn’t really moving forward. Seeing some of the sillier side missions is worth it and a few even flesh out people you know, but they do add some unfortunate repetition to a game that already has incredibly generic and samey fights. When even the major bosses feel pretty similar to the battles on the street, it becomes clear Akiba’s Trip: Hellbound & Debriefed really doesn’t have much of an idea on how to evolve its combat system beyond its basics.
THE VERDICT: If you strip Akiba’s Trip: Hellbound & Debriefed down to its gameplay basics you find yourself with similar bland battles throughout, but besides some issues with being surrounded and the lack of innovation within the fight format, its problem is repetitiveness rather than awfulness. However, there is an extra layer to this experience, the plight of the Shadow Souls and the many compelling characters caught up in the conflict helping this rise above the simplicity of its action. Managing a mix of absurdity, humor, and emotional resonance, main players and the extended cast do work together to make an appealing plot, just not one that can quite shake off the impact of its weak battle system.
And so, I give Akiba’s Trip: Hellbound & Debriefed for PlayStation 4…
An OKAY rating. Disregarding the dated graphics and even putting aside the stripping concept for the combat since it actually has a decent rooting in the plot while those same graphics keep it from threatening to be titillating, Akiba’s Trip: Hellbound & Debriefed feels like a good plot held back by the failings of its gameplay. In some ways the game seems designed to be mindlessly played, there being plenty of ways the game accommodates multiple playthroughs and its cataloguing of most everything you can acquire laying out a set of daunting completionist tasks, but just because you can push through and smack clothes off people to complete a checklist doesn’t make the task particularly interesting. Those more tedious tasks aren’t required thankfully, but the tedium comes through even in the main story progression and it holds back some of the side missions that have fun and amusing concepts until you actually have to fight someone to wrap things up. The Freedom Fighters, sympathetic Shadow Souls, Mido, and even the users of the knockoff Twitter service build things up well, establishing a sense of grander community in Akihabara while more personal connections invest you in the plot that threatens the safety of those in this subsection of Tokyo, and when I did go through to see the less positive endings I did feel bad knowing some of the endearing and well realized characters I had met in the main story were going to harmed by the choices made. It is because you are given time to really get to know the cast that Akiba’s Trip: Hellbound & Debriefed can almost overcome the drawbacks of a battle system that wears thin early on and never really changes from that opening design, but luckily the clothes-ripping combat also isn’t really poorly designed so much as rather rudimentary beyond deciding which body part to smack at the moment.
Akiba’s Trip: Hellbound & Debriefed may seem a little odd, a port without much improvements of a game that has some clearly basic gameplay that would do little to invest players on its own merits, but it also shows one major advantage to releasing such a game in this manner. Akiba’s Trip: Hellbound & Debriefed has a nice story to tell with a group of distinct characters you enjoy interacting with, and while you could have played a Japanese PSP and the original 2011 game to experience it, if you didn’t understand the language then you’d be getting all of the worst parts with none of the things that make the repetitive action tolerable. Perhaps if the plot wasn’t interrupted by the bland fights so often or the sub missions could focus more on out of the box missions like the ones where you help Rui cook an egg instead of stripping more people in the same way you’ve done many times before then the game could be recommended on the story alone, but it can still be worth a look if you think you can forgive the simplistic clothes-tearing action.