From this weeks episode (episode 9) of Akiba’s Trip (or AkibasTrip), used as a make-shift card gaming table.

I like the AkibasTrip anime, though admittedly this is a statement coming from someone who hasn’t played the game which shares it’s name, and has little interest in actually doing so. I gather this qualifier is necessary, as aside from the soft Akihabara tourism aspect and the stripping of clothes being necessary to defeat the villains, the anime bares little resemblance to it’s namesake in terms of characters and plot.

As far as the anime goes, though, it’s a combination of the aforementioned Akiba soft-tourism (this episode had a cameo by the well-known Schatzkiste) and some surprisingly deep cuts on the kind of media and consumption common to those stereotyped as frequenting the area that largely makes it tick as a show, and that the two aspects sometimes feel curiously at odds with each-other is what tends to make it all the funnier. The crux is generally that protagonist Tamotsu is something of an omni-nerd – he gets into things way too easily to a kind of excessive degree.

This leads to things like what is probably my favourite episode, episode 3, in which a trip to an idol Live results in Tamotsu getting a little too into high-end audio equipment. As someone who has spent far too much time reading forums full of people claiming that the type of drive they store their FLAC files on causes a noticeably difference in playback quality, or that copying a digital files from one disk to another somehow causes them to degrade, the show referencing things like magic audio-improving stones is something that makes me laugh. That the same episode ultimately ends with the heroines being wrangled into an idol unit in a fashion that invokes Aikatsu in-jokes is ultimately just icing – I’m mostly just disappointed that Tamotsu didn’t end up buying a set of those tiny pylon stands to lay his speaker cables over.

Then there’s the fact that last weeks episode 8 somehow started as an episode joking about the trend of Chinese tourists coming to Akiba to stock up on cheap duty-free electronics they can’t get back home, only to morph into a Pro-Wrestling parody that’s surprisingly on-topic given Tiger Mask W is airing that the moment.

This weeks episode, comparatively, is pretty tame in so much as it’s basically just a straight Yu-Gi-Oh parody. Most of it’s jokes basically amount to two things – subtle shade on it’s often flamboyant-yet-janky art, and rather less subtle shade on the differences between the dramatic way the show presents playing the game and the comparatively rather more mundane act of actually playing a CCG.

Which, admittedly, are both still amusing jokes.

(Also, I should totally get around to going back and watching Sore ga Seiyuu at some point)