Akiba's Trip impressions: Pretty damn niche

RENT

Alright, to get my initial impressions out of the way, this is a incredibly damn niche game. It's also an incredibly damn funny game! It's a parody of the traditional "fanservice" games that you typically see released in japan (and on the rare occassion, in the US, but they're always by a publisher like NISA, Atlus, or XSEED. Most likely XSEED.)

 Anyways, onto my impressions:

Right off the bat, the game gets you with it's humor -- the difficult settings are "Easy", "Casual", and "Gamer", (why casual and easy aren't the same thing is beyond me.. or why casual isn't below, easy, even, just mind boggling! (To clarify, that's a joke.)) The main character went to work at some super shady company who promised to pay him in figurines, and it turns out they weren't wholly honest. You get dialogue options, and the game is pretty damn funny, honestly. It goes through the typical tutorial to teach you the basics of combat, and then the story continues on. 

Combat in the game is incredibly simplistic; it's pretty obvious that the combat wasn't their primary concern in the game, and it's more or less "what you see is what you get" when you finally finish the beginning of the game and learn all 3 of the mechanics. That's not to say combat is bad, however! It's good, especially for an incredibly silly fanservice parody game. The main point of the game however, is to strip down your opponents (Females, of course, but MALES, too! Gender equality stripping, huzzah!) and they either leave out of embarassment, or they die, because they're genetically mutated otaku vampires. 

As I said, it's a very, very silly game.

The heavy focus of the game is the dating sim elements, which I didn't delve too far into, because I only played the game briefly -- but I mean.. it's a dating sim. You talk to the girl you like the most, and blow off everyone else, so that you don't lead them on. You can take one partner with you into missions (sometimes you're required to bring a specific character) but you typically get dialogue choices, and answer what you think will make them happy. You're trying to court them. Unfortunately, you can't court the boys (to my knowledge) and you're forced to play as a male character -- even if you unlock a female character model from the free DLC, or if you unlock a female character model in game. Can't have it all!)

The game isn't very punishing, either. If you fail a combat challenge, you simply respawn and you're able to retry it as many times as you like. I'm not sure if that changes later in the game, but from what I played (on gamer, of course!) you're taken to the map, then you can choose where you want to fast travel to and continue. It's like it never happened!

All that being said, this game is definitely a rental. Unless you're hardcore into these kind of games, in which case you would've already bought it, then 100% just rent this game. It's funny, likely very short, and it's worth the $3 you throw at redbox (or, much more likely, gamefly. don't think redbox carries titles THIS niche, yet!)