Akiba's Trip 1 (PC version)
Gameplay:
Writing/World/Atompshere:
It's a janky, low budget PSP game but make by a team that knew how to get basic gameplay right enough. It's a fairly simplistic brawler where you have high, middle, and low attacks, an impenetrable costless guard (which can counter if you follow a successful guard with a matching attack) and a grapple for high/middle/low that bypasses guard, a slow unblockable attack and a few bonus attacks you can unlock during gameplay. The attack<grapple<guard<attack works well enough, though the unblockable is
just slow enough to rarely be useful (really only useful if you have a reach advantage 1v1, and even then not great). The real thing holding it back is the camera. Like a fighting game, inputs are directional towards opponent, but the lock-on and camera aren't "strong" enough to make it always work. Main game is about 10 hours, even if you do a lot of side content, but there's lots of stuff you'll only see on NG+, and 3-6 endings (3 main endings, one alternate version of one of those endings, one smaller fork in another, and one joke ending that's added onto the ending you got if you fulfilled the conditions that has its own rewards/statistics entry)
The game world though, that's amazing. The world is a recreation of 9 major parts of Akihabara. It's a total love letter to Akihabara's culture, by a company based there, with genuinely funny dialog and characters. The main plot is straightforward, but well executed. Plenty of times where dialog options let you be totally irreverent and it actually maters a decent amount of the time. I have a weakness for games that let you pick totally irreverent dialog options and offer unsolicited advances on multiple female characters right after you meet them.
I'd say it's well worth the 12 bucks it goes for on sale, but really, it's a case of a game where the sequel does
everything better and you only touch the original for its unique plot after you've played the sequel. The sequel makes the gameplay actually good (strong 4/5), has greatly improved graphics (important for a game as openly lewd as this), has more of Akihabara and in more detail, and the story is just as good if not better all while actually being cheaper (since its been out on PC for longer and gets a higher discount). I eagerly await the Director's Cut expansion for the 10 year old game and 1: hope they don't ruin anything 2: it works on Proton.
