Akiba’s Trip: Undead & Undressed (PS Vita)
Akiba’s Trip: Undead & Undressed, known as Akiba’s Trip 2 in Japan, is an unusual sequel in that it both heavily borrows from the original game but throws away some of the fundamental worldbuilding. Gone are Shadow Souls in favor of the fairly similar Synthisters, artificially enhanced humans who sap the energy from their targets as if they were vampires. The location for Akiba’s Trip: Undead & Undressed is also still the area of Tokyo known as Akihabara and the player even ends up falling in with a group of community activists known as the Akiba Freedom Fighters, but the cast is entirely brand new and there’s no sign the previous game even happened. Were this a reinvention to try and refine the concepts found in the original it could make sense, but it actually feels like more of a slightly altered retread than some large improvement over the first game.
Akiba’s Trip: Undead & Undressed begins with its male protagonist waking up after he has undergone the procedure necessary to turn a human into a Synthister, but since this hero you name yourself doesn’t want to spend their life leeching off the energy of people in Akihabara, they quickly turn against the people who experimented on him under false pretenses. A girl named Shizuku helps you escape and keep your new abilities and cravings in check, but your friend group, the Akiba Freedom Fighters, are soon pulled into this conflict as Synthisters become more common and more dangerous all around this small section of Tokyo. From there the plot of this action game spends a fair bit of time puttering around, many of the missions you’re sent on being standard patrols where you run into a group of Synthisters, strip off their clothes during battle to exploit their weakness to sunlight, and then maybe get a little closer to some important answers on who’s behind the Synthisters before going on another patrol.
The cast of Akiba’s Trip: Undead & Undressed remains pretty small and not too fleshed out. Most of the Freedom Fighters are one-note like a guy who speaks in gaming terminology or Kati the foreign maid who makes a few silly terminology mix-ups, but the standout in terms of personality and comedy might be your own little sister Nana. Her low key, almost emotionless delivery of some unusual lines and her wide range of nicknames for you that involve portmanteaus with with the word “bro” add an amusing punch to conversations she’s a part of, but the game’s romantic interests are the ones with more developed identities. There are four ladies you can pursue and depending on how you answer questions they ask along the way you will actually experience a somewhat different set of final missions, but you’ll only really get to know one of these girls since scenes focusing in more on them are route exclusives. There’s enough room to actually feel some affection towards your lady of choice before the end, but it can feel like the other characters suffer for being pushed aside in favor of the admittedly still limited work these characters get on their story paths.
An attempt is made to realize Akihabara as an interesting location, but some barriers stand in the face of that. Being on the PlayStation Vita, it’s attempts to realize a stretch of city are hindered by the need for frequent loading interruptions. Walk down a bit of street and to move to the next area you’ll need to look at a loading screen for a bit, the game throwing in advertisements there that are meant to be accurate to Akihabara’s heavy anime and gaming culture but still grow old from how often you’ll see them despite coming in quite a wide range. In a nice touch the game does try to feature a great deal of authentic businesses and architecture from the real world location and you can check a social media app called Pitter where locals banter about recent events, but it doesn’t do enough work to really get you attached to this space so you feel a bit more like a tourist being slightly impressed by what you see rather than a true local vigilante with a connection to this part of town. Spreading out the businesses for the sake of quantity and authenticity also makes shopping a bit of a drag on top of the loading when you enter and leave stores, so it’s likely you’ll want to engage less and less with this well-realized city rather than appreciating the work put into it.
Most of your activities will concern the strip-focused battle system where enemies are defeated when their bare flesh is exposed to sunlight. Some non-Synthister enemies are instead embarrassed to the point they flee when you fight them with this undressing-focused style of combat, but the important thing to remember in every battle is that people have two to three regions of clothing you need to remove before they’re eliminated. Every character wears at least a top and bottom like shirts or pants while some may also have headgear like headphones or hats, but before you rip off somebody’s clothes, you’ll need to wear them down first by striking the three different parts of their body. Only once they’ve been damaged enough will the outfit come off easily, but despite this battle system’s emphasis on targeting different parts of the body, it doesn’t feel like the fight gets any more layered. There are many equippable items that change your fighting style, the player swinging around a laptop different to how they’d wield boxing gloves but more unusual tools like a microphone or large action figure end up wielded like other similarly sized weapons. There are four fighting styles essentially and they all have a pretty simple combo for each region of the body you’ll be attacking, making it feel like you’re hammering the assigned attack button and just waiting for the clothes to flash to show they’re ready for removal. There is an unblockable attack you can execute, but it unfortunately involves pulling the control stick back and since positioning is often important to making your moves land it’s easy to activate this slow attack by mistake. Similar control overlap happens with both your healing and the option to disengage from combat being set to the same shoulder button. Healing will completely repair your clothes and you mostly just need some breathing room for a bit to pull off this powerful reset of your condition, but disengaging from combat by mistake can leave you defenseless as foes still attack you.
The battle system ends up feeling clunky and repetitive because of its shallowness and button overlap, but there are a few more elements added over top it that don’t really increase its depth so much as speed up the affair. Sometimes you can get a stripping chain going where you need to press the right button to flit over to some other enemy whose clothes are ready to be ripped off as well, and when you’re fighting alongside another character you can build up energy for a super move that stuns nearby characters and heavily damages your target. It does feel like it is shortening combat rather than adding new options to it, but this simple system could have worked if it was given more interesting battle scenarios or story framing. Unfortunately the game is lacking in bosses and unique combatants, and while special situations like taking on a huge pop idol group with nearly 100 members definitely feels different from the usual street brawls with three to five Synthisters, things like this are mostly just endurance challenges with only a few members strike at once. The side missions you can accept are unfortunately lacking in character or complexity, many just set-ups for a quick skirmish, and while you can rarely meet a kooky character like a middle-aged cosplayer you need to discourage or a group of art dealers who practically force people to buy their goods, the narrative elements are usually lean and you can mostly expect more monotonous fights.
Your prize for engaging in extra activities is often just more cash despite the store system feeling like its not worth the time investment, but these side missions are also where the harder battles are to be found. Sadly, the hard battles can often just feel more like stat checks, the player leveling up through battle and able to acquire and improve their gear. If you don’t have strong enough clothes and a good weapon you might as well flee from a fight to retry it later, although many side missions are time limited so you’d have to halt story progress to work on improvements. You’re not going to get a substantial reward or something conceptually compelling from many of these tougher extra fights though, so it’s likely wiser to stay focused on the story path, make good use of the clothes and weapons you steal from opponents during it, and push towards the conclusion of the plain plot hoping your lady of choice might buoy some of the finale with her specific spin on it.
THE VERDICT: Akiba’s Trip: Undead & Undressed has a clunky clothes-breaking system that unfortunately gets far more focus than it deserves. A lot of love was put into realizing Akihabara’s urban setting only for loading breaks to fracture the illusion, and with little meat on the story or side quests, you are forced to accept the fact most of the game will be just you executing the same few combos until enemies are ready to be undressed. The building malaise isn’t so overpowering you can’t endure the repetition to complete the story and see its few interesting elements like Nana’s odd speech mannerisms and the one female lead your romance route will trigger some development for, but you’ll still be tolerating the frequent dull cookie-cutter conflicts to find these moments that prevent it from being a total bore.
And so, I give Akiba’s Trip: Undead & Undressed for PlayStation Vita…
A BAD rating. Playing Akiba’s Trip: Hellbound & Debriefed showed me a more polished and expanded version of the first Akiba’s Trip title, and maybe in subsequent ports Akiba’s Trip: Undead & Undressed built up its content and character enough to better match the same level of acceptable quality, but the PlayStation Vita version certainly feels shoddy in some parts and undercooked in others. It is fortunate you can quickly pop open the map to teleport around Akihabara instead of suffering the many loading walls that prevent it from feeling like a cohesive setting, but the game also feels like it is overstuffed with set dressing rather than focusing in on the elements that needed to work. Boasting about having flyers for real world businesses and reproducing recognizable locations doesn’t change the fact you’ll just be tearing off clothes around town over and over with few foes or battles shaking that formula up enough for you to even need to pay much attention. Were it more difficult perhaps Akiba’s Trip: Undead & Undressed would be grating to play and it is always a shame when you get in a fight and find out you’re weaker than the game expected you to be, the strength difference often just meaning the battle is longer rather than deeper. That gap is usually found only if you ignore item improvements or indulge in side content though and it’s not too hard to get good gear or just skip the tough but bland fights. Really, Akiba’s Trip: Undead & Undressed could have used what made Akiba’s Trip: Hellbound & Debriefed feel so special, the narrative weight and fleshed out characters as well as a sense of community making you care a lot more about your adventure than in this swift and lean plot that only focuses in on whichever girl you’ve shown the most interest in.
Akiba’s Trip: Undead & Undressed decided to shake up small elements from the original game rather than trying to address the problems it has only exacerbated by not suitably distracting you from them. Strip combat was perhaps meant to be titillating enough, but even if you are interested in the opportunity to see people’s underwear, it certainly can’t make up for how empty the fights feel and how frequently you’ll need to slog through them with little motivation if you don’t feel such a carnal lust. Akiba’s Trip: Hellbound & Debriefed does feel superior in most every department despite being a remake of the first game sadly, so pretty much any idea that could fascinate you here is better handled in that PS4 remake. Akiba’s Trip: Undead & Undressed was the first game in the series to leave Japan and thankfully it didn’t tank the franchise’s potential too early, this urban adventure lacking a strong selling point now that its ideas have been outclassed by its own predecessor after that game got the polish this game aches for.