Akiba’s Trip: Hellbound and Debriefed is very much a new style of experience for me, and is the first ‘anime tiddy’ game I’ve ever played. To those unfamiliar with that highly professional and technical term, it essentially means it is an anime game where every female character (and some of the guys) have a grip on their own clothing as loose as trying to grip wet soap while your own digits are thickly coated in butter. I’m afraid this review can only get hornier from here.
The premise is simple. You play an un-named protagonist, who I named LukestOnePiece because I thought it was funny, that must fight vampires (referred to as Shadow Souls in game) on the streets of Akihabara. The Shadow Souls, like yourself as you are also one, are extremely susceptible to sunlight and so the most sure-fire way to kill them is to find them outside during the day and, you guessed it, strip them.
The game made me laugh a lot more than I thought it would, including bizarrely on the title screen when selecting my choice of difficulty. Instead of the conventional options of easy / medium / hard, Akiba’s Trip instead opts for easy / casual / gamer, which despite rigidly sticking to easy mode in most games I appreciated for its humour. I also appreciated the comedy in a very early conversation tree where I was given the option to change topic with the lady interviewing LukestOnePiece by asking for ‘her measurements’. After responding in the affirmative that I was serious a couple of times I was immediately killed in the cut-scene and booted back to the start menu. If Respawning’s Luke wasn’t married I’d make a quip about how that’s so like him but as he is I’ll deflect it onto Will instead because I can (even though he’ll be editing this review).
My favourite moment came around an hour in where I was having what the game thinks is a combat tutorial, despite never telling you much and expecting you to figure bits out yourself, where I was offered the opportunity to bare knuckle fight either a teenage boy, a teenage girl or a bear dressed as a chef. Naturally, as any sane and self-respecting horny demon would I accepted the fight with the latter option, but upon stripping the bear chef (which to my shame unlocked a trophy so now my PSN account is forever tainted) it transpired it was also a teenage girl but dressed as a bear, dressed as a chef.
The art style is as anime as you can imagine so that’s half the mission statement fulfilled immediately, and the charitably labelled gameplay is profoundly tedious and dated. That isn’t entirely the criticism it sounds like as the game is a remaster originally released on the PSP in 2011, though I do wonder why they have bothered to remaster it at all?
Upon returning to play the game for another session having spent well over an hour skipping the incessant dialogue and button mashing through combat earlier, I was reminded that as this is a 2011 game there is no auto-save function, and so absolutely none of my progress had been saved. The save option is only accessible from the map screen, which I didn’t know, and so I was confronted with the reality of having to redo everything. To put it in a response as polite and horny-free as I can: Fuck that.
When the game inevitably drops to below £1 and you want a couple of laughs and to kill an hour then I can recommend Akiba’s Trip: Debriefed and Hellbound, but without that criteria there are dozens of other games you can get horny over instead which will be more fun. It’s not totally offensive (don’t forget it was made over a decade ago) and it did make me laugh but the loss of progress and unending dialogue wore me down to the point I can’t go on. As a result, I score it
3 / 10
