All of my reviews contain spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning. Akihabara. It is a city of dreams that accepts everything. Colorful character designs a commitment to truly nerdy comedy a doofy premise enough product placement to set Karl Marx aspinning in his grave more than a few small dashes of the old otaku persecution complex and more openhearted sincerity than you might expect. Mix them all together and you have Akibas Trip a 2017 series nominally based on a game of the same name from the weanimateanything folks at Studio GONZO. 880https://i.ur.com/2GAJOmX.png Akibas Trip fundamentally is a love letter to the city of Akihabara and to otaku culture itself. The bad news is that it has quite a few glaring flaws and how you feel about it is going to heavily involve your tolerance for nerds patting themselves on the back for liking really cool and/or dorky shit. The good news is that Akibas Trip itself while certainly not up to the level of some other anime in this category is a pretty cool and/or dorky thing. Its finale in particular is far stronger than what might be expected given the series mixed reputation. The series plot ostensibly revolves around the comicallynamed trio Electric Mayonnaise who defend Akihabara from infected superhumans called Bagurimono or Bugged Outs depending on whose subs youre watching. However for most of its runtime Akibas Trip leans heavily on the comedy half of the term actioncomedy anime. Most of the series is highly episodic with each episode featuring our protagonist Tamotsu diving into some esoteric hobby or another only for it to inevitably lead to conflict with a Bugged Out which he along with costars Matome Mayonaka and Arisa Ahokainen must defeat. 880https://i.ur.com/jRC1HrU.png Pictured: Tamotsus younger sister Arisa and Matome. Not pictured: Tamotsu. The content and quality of these episodes varies pretty wildly. Some are quite good: one involves Tamotsu getting caught up in the workaholic subculture of a butler cafe in a surprisingly sharp piece of commentary. Another involves ham radio and like many of the best of these episodes coasts on the simple joy of watching other people geek out about a cool thing they like. That it ends with a tussle with a radioobsessed Bugged Out who wants to black out the entirety of Akiba almost feels incidental. 880https://i.ur.com/jkjvgyq.png Theres also a YuGiOh parody in there somewhere. Other episodes are to put it mildly less great with an early episode that cracks a lot of downright gross jokes about the female half of our cast being nearly duped into doing porn being by far the worst of the lot. 880https://i.ur.com/xttszW6.png Yeah....why? We also must bring up the shows near constant shower of fanservice which is the sort of thing as with say Senran Kagurahttps://anilist.co/review/5793 that one must take or leave. If youre bothered by it youre not going to like this series full stop. It doesnt help that the series particular mechanism for doing thisshred a Bugged Outs clothes and they either revert to normal humans or disappear in a puff of smokemay remind viewers of the infinitely better Kill la Kill which is a comparison the series should be striving to avoid at all costs. The production values are also quite inconsistent and the show is somewhat infamous for having both quite good and hilariously bad animation at different pointsoccasionally within the same episode. Some of the aforementioned fanservice parade in fact is rendered more laughable than whatever your default opinion may be by the intermittent low drawing quality. Another aspect that must be touched on is the absurd amount of product placement in the series. There is a lot of it and not always for what one might expect. A maid cafe? Thats about onbrand for a show about the Jerusalem of otakudom. That Carls Jr. shows up more than once as a place where Matome drowns her sorrows in hamburgers is such a crass display of selling out that it loops back around into comedic gold. Is Akihabara known for having a really good Carls Jr.? I frankly dont know though I kind of doubt it. But all of this is fairly incidental compared to the shows real strength which is believe it or not its central narrative. Even the best of the more comedic episodes pale in comparison to those where Akibas Trip decides to get well not serious exactly but to remember that it is also an action anime at the very least. Fukame Mayonaka Matomes grandmother and the organization of Metrotica that she controls are the shows central antagonists and if I can levy one major complaint against Akibas Trips pacing its that Fukame gets nowhere near enough screen time. What we do see of her is fascinating and in the final few episodes her plot to eradicate Akihabara and the humans who live there makes her by far the shows most interesting villain. 880https://i.ur.com/2eFaQrD.png But well this has its issues too. That old otaku persecution complex rears its ugly head here in a few ways both overt and subtle. The point of Fukames character is evidently that she is intended as a metaphor for those who abhor anything they consider abnormal or deviant and who will do anything to get rid of it. Over here in America we had people who tried to get Doom banned. In Japan they have prefectural governors who claim anime inspires people to be murderers. The stages are different the effect much the same. The impulse to be defensive is understandable. However when writing a character who operates like this its important to do so with a lot of care as its easy to overshoot and just turn them into a caricature. Fukame herself does not fall here fortunately but one of her assistants a greedy ranting government minister who passes a law to ban Akiba itself? Yeah its a little much. 880https://i.ur.com/2EI7A8N.png 880https://i.ur.com/DJt8AYY.png More than a little much is the shows clumsy coopting of Nazi imagery to portray Metroticas agents who burn doujins and the like in the shows closing arc. It is true that the actual Nazis did in fact prohibit what they considered to be degenerate art but their true crimes were those of horrific genocide as were those of Imperial Japan and to conflate that with this seems somewhere between clueless and downright harmful. The show neglects to explore any deeper connections between these ideologies and what that might say about Japans own past. Its probably far too much to expect something as goofy as Akibas Trip to have any genuine insight into how disdain of the other can abet and inflame fascism but its not too much to expect the show not to go there if it cant walk the walk. It strikes more as illconsidered than deliberately inflammatory but its still not really excusable. The shows actual finale then being as good as it is is something of a minor miracle. 880https://i.ur.com/4AYXqUn.png To simply recap it would be to miss the point but when a series ends on a gorgeouslyanimated fight between two massive pink energy constructs while an idol song that jacks the melody to freakin Ode To Joy pumps along in the background none of these criticisms suddenly seem like they matter all that much. Obviously this will vary from person to person but it is much easier to take Akibas Trip on good faith when it ends as well as it does and the series final few moments seem wideeyedly optimistic in a peculiar meta way. The shows final sequence sees Arisa as well as Tamotsus younger sister abruptly emerge from a UFO. Frantically they explain that they come from 100 years in the future from the Akiba Empire and they need Tamotsu and Mayonakas help. The show may not be the allencompassing openhearted call for nerd acceptance it entirely wants to be but however unintentionally the finale seems to suggest that maybe someday the world will be peaceful enough that we can entertain such ideas. Its an oddly pure almost cute notion for the series to end on but for all of its flaws Akibas Trip very clearly believes in the promise of Akihabara as a place where everyone is accepted. It is in this way a fitting end. To then a future where we may all share our passions in harmony. Somewhere in the city of dreams theyll be waiting. 880https://i.ur.com/0C8SbVb.png