USstreamer: Discover the Naked Truth About Akiba's Trip [Update: Over!]
We hit the virtual streets of Tokyo's Akihabara district this afternoon to learn if Xseed's vampire adventure really is the sauciest game of the month.
This article first appeared on USgamer, a partner publication of VG247. Some content, such as this article, has been migrated to VG247 for posterity after USgamer's closure - but it has not been edited or further vetted by the VG247 team.
You have to admire Xseed's determination to bring over not only niche Japanese import games, but niche games with content seemingly designed to make the more conservative members of the gaming community pop their monocles right into their tea.
Everyone's mileage seems to vary with these releases. Senran Kagura Burst, which launched earlier this year on 3DS, was very much a love-it-or-hate it affair. Some people really enjoyed the gameplay, the character-focused narrative arcs, and/or the emphasis on preposterous breast-jiggling, while others hated it. Next up on the "controversial Xseed games" docket comes Akiba's Trip, a game about nerds saving the world by stripping people down to their underwear. And we — that is, you and I — are going to experience it together, live, on the Internet, this afternoon.
By most accounts, Akiba's Trip isn't just smut, despite the packaging and marketing; it's supposedly more of a satire than anything else, and while you do spend a lot of time ripping the maid costumes right off teenage girls, you spend just as much time rendering male enemies semi-naked, too. The premise of the game revolves around vampires taking over Tokyo's Akihabara district, and the only way to defeat them is to expose their skin to sunlight. Good thing these are the "melt in daylight" variety of vampires and not the "sparkling baseball fanatic" kind, huh?
So maybe it's really clever, and maybe it's just a flimsy excuse for digital lingerie. I don't honestly know what to expect! So please join me this afternoon at 5 p.m. Eastern (2 p.m. Pacific) to explore this game... as well as the white bits of countless Akihabara shoppers, men and women alike. Whether or not the game clears the bar for "minimal good taste," at the very least it's bound to be entertaining either way.