English Dub Season Review: Akiba’s Trip Season One

So what did I think of this nonsensical show?

Videogame-to-anime adaptations are rarely good such as my personal favorites being Street Fighter 2: The Animated Movie, Nightwarriors: Darkstalkers Revenge, The Devil May Cry Anime from Madhouse, and Bayonetta: Bloody Fate from the Animation team “Gonzo” (who also made Akiba’s Trip) just to name a few. So when I got into reviewing this series, I heard very little about the game which leads me to carefully research what it was about.

Inconsistently, both the titular video game franchise, and Funimation’s synopsis on their site say the enemies our protagonist’s encounter in the anime are supposed to be vampires but it doesn’t really matter since the creatures of the game are called “Synthisters” that only share minor vampire-like characteristics such as feeding on the “social energy” of their victims to multiply themselves and sunlight killing them when they’re nude which is the closest to anything vampire-related. The “Hazoku”, “Kuro bugs” and “bugged ones” as the Anime calls them don’t really have pointy fangs or suck blood as the Funimation synopsis claims, many of them look like tiny black imp-like creatures in hoodies but when they posess people it’s visibly shown through colorful highlights in the victim’s hair and rabid behavior until they’re stripped nude and explode in a cloud of purple smoke so you might as well say they have herpes for all the difference it makes!

The protagonist Tomatsu is an annoying tool who’s forced into a series of predictable anime cliches such as being the only male lead in an all-female group which is borderline creepy when one of the girls is his sister. Given that Tomatsu has “main character powers” he ends up progressively more powerful than the very person who gave him said powers to begin with!

For the supporting cast, Mayonaka despite being the Trinity to Tomatsu’s Neo is a verbally & physically abusive bitch who out of plot contrivance is forced to be the romantic interest to the simple-minded Tomatsu but is incapable of expressing her feelings unless the plot demands it. Arisa is arguably the only interesting character because she’s a rich college educated kung-fu practitioner from Finland who wears her Otaku pride on her sleeve as demonstrated with the random outfits she wears throughout the entirety of the series. And Tomatsu’s sister Nikawa soley exists to either be kidnapped or gratuitously sexualized as episode 3 was guilty of doing which left me rightfully disgusted.

Occasionally an episode or two will get topical or thematically relevant to what’s going on in the episode like under-handed companies who force employees into detrimental workaholic lifestyles, Parody card-battle games or briefly get something right when it comes to the fighting game tournament scene. The Main villain who’s Mayonaka’s Grandmother is briefly introduced in Episode 2 but is pushed aside or almost forgotten until near the very end which almost undermines her as a threat and her final battle blatantly ripping off much better Anime’s in terms of epic scale.

For people who actually played the game, it’s an insult when they can’t even respect source material unless it’s a random visual cameo of a game character or two. The show displayed both the best & worst of otaku and by extension Japanese culture but was overshadowed by unfunny self-aware humor, low brow sex jokes and gratuitously brutal female on male violence for cheap laughs. If the show spent more time developing the family conflict of Mayonaka’s history throughout this whole damn season instead of frequently doing this “bad guy of the week” format, it could’ve had potential to make a compelling plot instead of being all over the place’

Please Gonzo Animation team, quit while you are ahead and don’t even try to make a season 2… Ever!

4.5/10