Help I'm Trapped in Mid-Budget Action-JRPG Heck (02): "Vita means Stank"

Hello and welcome back to my blog thing. Look at me, putting out another blog in short succession to that last one I wrote! Now that's productive! Or maybe not, given that I probably should've been doing my grad studies homework instead of writing this thing, but it's fine. Once again, I'm here writing about the video games I've played for my silly internet streams, or at least what I was playing before I was so rudely interrupted by charity-mandated Sonic Heroes coverage. Sonic Heroes is a piece of shit video game! It's really bad! Run, don't walk, away from your nearest copy of Sonic Heroes! Play Shadow Generations! That game is actually shockingly good! Quite possibly the best 3D sonic game? Oh right, where were we? Video games with numbers in them and smaller-than-AAA budgets? Yeah, that one.

Akiba’s Trip: Undead and Undressed

Developer: Acquire

Release Date: November 7, 2013

Price I Paid For It: Probably like $8 on a steam sale

Budget: Average Playstation Vita Game

Time Played: Around Two Hours

Heaven or Heck: Vita Game

Acquire is one of those Japanese development studios that doesn’t quite get the recognition it deserves, both in support and development capacities. Probably best known recently for their work on Octopath Traveller and its superior sequel, they’ve been making janky mid-budget action-JRPGs since at least the early 2000s with Way of the Samurai and its sequels depending on one’s definition of RPG. Also they’re responsible for the first couple Tenchu games, which one might argue is the original mid-budget janky 3D stealth game, a genre I have no current interest in doing a streaming feature on.

Akiba’s Trip: Undead and Undressed is the second game in the series, the first not receiving an official English release and localization until its 2021 remaster Hellbound and Debriefed. It’s also, quite possibly, the platonic ideal Vita game, a console that basically was sustained by digital releases of popular indie games and mid-budget JRPGs of both action and regular varieties. For reference, “Vita Stank” is a slightly different flavor from its cousin, “PSP Stank.” I mostly define PSP Stank by a combination of fully 3D environments and PS2 quality visuals running head first into a GPU running at 166 MHz. It’s how you get games like Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep and FF7 Crisis Core having fairly impressive character models and fairly empty environments. Vita Stank, by contrast, rarely tries to go above and beyond “lower-end PS3 anime game,” and as a result I think a lot of stuff on that platform looks grungy as hell even when scaled up to HD. This is no exception.

While best known as the video game where you beat up vampires and rip their clothes off, Akiba’s Trip 2 is also a video game where you can walk around a lovingly detailed recreation of Akihabara circa 2012 *and* beat up vampires by ripping off their clothes. It’s not just a game for weird degenerate otaku dorks, it’s also a game *about* weird degenerate otaku dorks. Your protag-kun avatar boy gets turned into a vampire because he wanted rare figurines, but these vampires’ dark hunger being less about blood and more about endless consumption of merch and nerd culture. Get it? Eh? Ehhhh? Honestly though, there’s just enough self-aware irreverence to the game’s writing to make it charming, rather than obnoxious. It knows what it is, it knows its audience, and it’s willing to goof around and have fun with that. Maybe I’d have stronger feelings on the characters had I played more, but they all seemed on the inoffensive side of trope-y.

Now, playing the game is a slightly different measure. It seems to be operating on a short-form mission structure, with various objectives rarely taking over 15-20 minutes. That works for a portable game, and it also works given that the actual combat ain’t great. I’d call it a light brawler in the vein of Yakuza, with equipment and weapons being literally ripped from your enemies or bought from the various shops in Akiba (many of which are based on real shops that were there at the time). There’s not a lot of depth or minutiae to it but you can chain-strip enemies with proper timing and setup, which is categorically funny. I just wish there was a little bit more going on there. Thankfully, if I were to go back, it seems like it’s about nine or ten hours for one of the routes, which seems like an inoffensive amount of time for something like this. Putting this in the “maybe” pile. If nothing else it might make for a good podcast subject.

Trials of Mana

Developer: Square Enix and Xeen inc (!?)

Release Date: April 24, 2020

Price I Paid For It: $20, probably on a gamestop sale like three years ago

Budget: What Was Once Big Budget is Now Mid-Budget

Time Played: Two and a half hours

Heaven or Heck: Pretty Cool

This is one of those things that maybe doesn’t resonate with people slightly younger than me, but it’s crazy to think most of the Japan-only Super Famicom games of legend and yore have come out in the west in one form or another. It used to be that if you wanted to play, I dunno, Final Fantasy V, you had to rely on a dodgy, amateurish fan-translation that may or may not have introduced bugs that weren’t present in the original game. Now, not only have the quality of fan translations gone up (see: Bahamut Lagoon, Fire Emblem 4 and 5) but also a number of these games have come over officially in one form or another. There’s an official switch remake of Live-A-Live for god’s sake! The long-rumored Genealogy of the Holy War remake is probably coming out this year! You young ‘uns don’t understand what you have!

I will be upfront when I say the mystique and legend surrounding these games was always overblown, especially when it came to Squaresoft. I’ve been on record as saying that both Bahamut Lagoon and Front Mission 1 are games that are more ambitious than good, and they often seem to strain against the hardware they were made for. The original Seiken Densetsu 3 occupies a similar spot, with jank and technical issues often overlooked by intrepid importers and emulators simply because “Yo dawg they made a sequel to Secret of Mana that didn’t come out over here.” And to be clear, it’s a tremendously ambitious game for the time, with its multiple character format, branching promotions, and real-time combat. It’s just a lot… messier than you’d expect.

The 2020 remake of Trials of Mana is fascinating in part because it’s very close to a scene-for-scene recreation of the original, but being behind the back and in 3D gives it a notably different feel. It’s still a basic action JRPG whereupon you can do basic combos, dodges, heavy attacks, and special arts, but the change in perspective and the technical quality of the graphics (switch was clearly the lead platform) give the entire thing some Mad PS2 Energy. It’s not particularly difficult, even on Hard (there’s a reason why they added Expert and No Future a few months after release) but even in the early hours messing around with skills, party abilities, and making the numbers go up was a pleasant experience. The fact that the game itself isn’t nearly as grindy as the original is just a bonus.

The other major thing with Trials is, of course, that you only pick three of the six playable characters for your party. I went with Hawkeye, Charlotte, and Kevin for my trio, offering a combination of speed, support magic, and power that could easily be branched out depending on which promotion paths I went for. While the main story is mostly the same regardless of whom you pick, there’s an effort to give each character an unique perspective on events, or at least different commentary based on what’s happening. Localization choices were made, folks, and one must talk about Chawwote’s tendency to talk entirely in uwu baby speak to emphasize that she’s meant to be childish. I think it’s terrible and I think I love it. The english voice acting in general has a very PS2, mid-2000s anime cast to it which works far more than it honestly should. Or maybe I’m just irony poisoned.

Either way, Trials of Mana was a fun enough experience that I could see myself going back to it at some point. The part where a full playthrough is around the 20-30 hour mark is a pretty easy sell, assuming the combat doesn’t get too old or repetitive. If there’s an actual minus, it’s that some of the games I’m gonna talk about next had me even more excited. Me! Excited! Look forward to that. More Vita Stank to come. But this time I'm enthusiastic?