By Dustin Cabeal
I made the mistake of looking at what others were saying about this before writing my review. I wish I hadn’t done that because it blows my mind that people don't like it. First off, I don’t know shit about the franchise. I saw that it’s a game by Seed X or X-Seed… whichever, both are terrible, and either makes bad games. This show, though, is funny. It’s stupid as hell, but it’s funny.
The episode does have an annoying start. It’s what I call the “we’ll get to that later” opening in which we see the beginning of the final scene of the episode. From there, it jumps to the real beginning of a nerd Otaku taking his weekly… daily… hourly visit to Akihabara. If you don’t know what that is, good news, you’re on the internet, and you can highlight, right click and search via your browser of choice and get the answer. We meet his supporting cast via short scenes. The first is his little sister dressed in some panda costume. The other is a girl with glowing red hair that falls from the sky with a baseball bat and steals the clothes from a cosplayer.
Poof, an evil spirit is vanquished.
Let’s cover that again. She steals the clothes off of a cosplayer and poof, an evil spirit is vanquished.
That’s when I knew I was in love with this show because this concept is so dumb that it’s funny.
Next up is the fantasy dream girl Otaku. She’s blonde, has big boobs, cosplays in public, and of course knows everything that the main character Otaku knows and loves. A complete fantasy, but I’m sure she’ll be good for boob jokes and just idiot humor. She’s an idiot, by the way, no concept of how the real world works.
Eventually, the main dude gets killed saving the red-haired girl with the bat… which gets broken. RIP bat. She kisses him the only way anyone should kiss which is to mount his dying corpse and tongue kiss him. He revives with glowing blue hair and they go to town taking the clothes of evil cosplayers and thus vanquishing evil spirits and leaving confused naked people to be photographed and posted on the internet for weirdos to beat off to.
I’m not saying that this show is brilliant in the sense of something like Erased, but it is brilliant at what it does. It knows 100% what it’s setting out to do, and that's goofy nerd fantasy fun. If you can’t see that and see that it’s doing that better than the majority of anime that attempts this seasonally, then you’re just jaded as fuck. Which, hey, we all get there, and I understand that, but for me, this show was just stupid fun, but not stupid offensive fun. It has a dumb teenager quality to it, and for that reason, plus the great animation, I will continue watching and enjoying this series.
Score: 4/5
Akiba’s Trip: The Animation E.01