English Dub Review: Akiba’s Trip “Akiba’s Last Trip” (Season Finale)

This is a semi-long one so lets do this!

Spoilers Below

With everyone reassembled, it’s time to restore Akihabara to its former glory. As the rest of the team go on a rescue mission for the Akiba vigilante’s, Tamotsu & Mayonaka set out to deal with their true foe, Mayonaka’s Grandmother Fukame. When the two infiltrate the building they encounter a series of bizarre obstacles such as Famicom controllers that act as a security system for a hidden passage followed by an elaborate series of Indiana-jones-style traps and kicking the asses of resurrected villains from previous episodes before.

When they confront Fukame there’s all sorts of secrets revealed about Mayonaka’s past such as her age being 74, and her exposure to modern Akiba’s otaku culture along with it’s lively positive energy being the reason she loves the land while Fukame’s bitter & biased view stems from how everything changed after the tragedies of WW2 and blindly believes that humans are greedy & negative creatures.

The family drama escalates into a Kaiju-scale battle as two glowing giants made of positive & negative energies go at it in the town while concurrently ripping off better Anime’s such as Gurren Lagann & Kill La Kill with Minor characters from past episodes returning to show support at their darkest hour while chanting Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” with glowsticks in hand until Fukame is finally defeated.

In Fukame’s dying words, she apologizes to Mayonaka for not getting with the times and seeing the positive aspects of their changed land but before she disappears into purple smoke tells Tomatsu to take care of her. As she turns into purple smoke, Professor Raitu captures her in a vacuum and makes her confess to her crimes which gets the Prime minister arrested for bribery and so the “Akiba Ban” is lifted. With Kage being the newly appointed Prime Minister they can resume the government-backed Midsummer Festival with Urame now being part of the “Manias” Idol pop group after being hit with amnesia and thinking she’s one of the three singers.

This Episode (And hopefully this entire series) ends when Tomatsu is ready take their relationship a step-forward and just as they’re about to kiss, it’s abruptly stopped when futuristic versions of Arisa & Nikawa show up in a time machine demanding they come 100 years into the future with them because they apparently fucked something up which makes me wonder, if the “Hazoku” species have extremely long lifespans which is a valid excuse for Tomatsu & Mayonaka to still be around, how the fuck are Arisa and Nikawa still alive after 100 years?

Our Take

While the final battle tries to be Shakespearean with its family conflict, the final episode moves at such a brisk pace in favor of the large-scale fight later on, that there isn’t enough time to make it compelling and consequently fails to be memorable.