English Dub Review: Akiba’s Trip “No Reason I’d Lose”

Possibly the only episode of this show I’ll have a love/hate relationship with…

Spoilers Below

The episode Starts off with Tomatsu at a local arcade with Nikawa at having fun at a claw machine. While Tomatsu decides to play a game of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo when out of nowhere a female stranger in a pink hoodie beats him mercilessly in a match with her as Ryu and Tomatsu as Chun-Li.

After getting his ego bruised from losing to a woman in a fighting game, Tomatsu goes to meet up with Nikawa who’s won various plush toys from the claw machines only to be kidnapped by the same pink-hoodie individual via an elaborate giant claw-machine-style trap and says that if he wants to see his sister again, He needs to enter & win a particular Street Fighter V tournament where she will be.

We then cut to Arisa receiving an email from her Kindle with a random Street Fighter V tournament saying “If you resist you put her life at risk” and has already registered him to partake in it assuring him no harm will come to her until the results come out.

Mayonaka finds this strangely puzzling that they’d resort to kidnapping just to drag him into a Fighting Game Tournament and Arisa knows about a SF5 Tournament called the “Way Way-Cup Evolution” which is supposedly a big event and in the promotional website and notice pictures of the girl in the pink hoodie that who’s name is revealed to be a famous tournament player “Matsuko” who Tomatsu quickly recognizes.

Tomatsu admits he’s not very good at fighting games so Raitu decides to use him as a guinea pig for a “fighting game training program” which leads to one of the worst parts of this episode because he’s subjected to visceral amounts of abuse that’s clearly played for laughs but is painfully unfunny and has nothing to do with using an arcade stick or training whatsoever.

The intensive training consists of: running in a giant hamster wheel, being shot in the face with baseballs at high velocity speed with a pitching machine multiple times, dropped in a pool full of sharks, pressing a button at a specific time or be blown up by a bomb, being run over by a fucking steamroller, having his arms & legs chained to the back of four horses and being burned alive at the stake. Which leads me to ask how the fuck does any of this help you in a fighting game?!

For some reason this strangely helps Tomatsu improve his button pressing which makes a Watermelon explode from just poking it and is now ready to partake in the tournament which is now hosted by the fingerless-gloved lady (who’s name is now revealed to be Mashiro Kuga) and is accompanied by a dude cosplaying Guile from Street Fighter.

The girls Tag along with Tomatsu which include Raitu, Maoynaka and Arisa who’s cosplaying T.Hawk also from Street Fighter which shows a number of cameos & references to the fighting game scene.

Tomatsu has a surprisingly quick loss but determined to save his sister, he enters the final match to go up against Matsuko who doesn’t recognize him or know what the fuck he’s talking about so when their fight begins Tomatsu wins the first round as Chun-Li which at first the girls think he’s winning but until they overhear the other tournament contestants that this is how Matsuko usually does things. She studies her opponents by letting them win the first round so she can study their tactics & techniques (This is something most tournament players in real life actually do so I at least commend them for getting that right).

Matsuko reveals that she let him win Round 1 for the sake of analysis and during the 2nd round, Matsuko decides to mercilessly go all out instantly beating Tomatsu, Matsuko out of nowhere, strips out of her hoodie and into a tank top which Arisa claims is an “ancient chinese martial art” called “fist of shame” claiming that Masters of this particular art disrobe to press themselves into a corner which “awakens all their potential” and has been used for centuries in Japanese culture.

Mayonaka wonders if she’s a bugged one or not since she’d be putting herself at risk from stripping and out of nowhere fights so intensely in the game that Tomatsu doesn’t have time to react and decides to strip himself. First he’s now in a muscle shirt and then to be on even ground with Matsuko, he takes off his pants not caring if his life is on the line and ends up having the upper-hand.

In an act of desperation, Matsuko is now down to her undergarments with her hat still on and Tomatsu gets serious by doing a hand-stand ontop of the arcade stick continuously pressing buttons and movements while being covered in a purple smoke on the verge of death. Tomatsu finally has an edge and beats her by spinning into a cartoonishly firey tornado which in the process makes his underwear fly off and finally wins. It also leads to a cringe-worthy scene where his undies hit Mayonaka’s face and she starts sniffing it erotically.

When Tomatsu is about to die Matsuko throws her pink hoodie for him to wear and Mayonaka deduces that she isn’t a bugged one, otherwise her hair would glow but the only reason she has a hat on is because she’s born with a strange part of her hair sticking out. Matsuko still doesn’t know what the fuck Tomatsu is talking about regarding his sister but in a twist, It turns out that the Guile cosplayer was the kidnapper the whole time as foreshadowed by the pants he wore in the random picture with Nikawa.

The Guile cosplayer who’s turns out to be a “bugged one” is revealed to be the one who impersonated Matsuko and Kidnapped Nikawa. He takes off his wig revealing that his hair has pink glowy parts, But just when he thinks Tomatsu is out of energy, he socks him through a brick wall which sends him flying in the sky Team Rocket style while nude and says “even if you hate me please don’t hate Street Fighter V“!

He finally finds out that Nikawa is in a room within the Tournament building that has a large sign at the door with the words “the hostage room” and finds out not only is she safe, but is busy playing retro Famicom games.  The episode ends with Tomatsu who’s still unfazed that he isn’t wearling wearing pants or underwear and proceeds to help Nikawa play a classic game while Nikawa awkwardly and hilariously tells Tomatsu to “seriously find some pants!” and the credits play some new music that mixes J-pop with a Chiptune music style.

Overview.

The in-game footage was easily some of the best parts of the episode referencing various things in the Tournament scene including “Daigo battle 37” to even cameos of tournament players found in the background.

As much as I loved the fighting game references, the game-themed visual gags, and the fact they used actual in-game footage within the episode, I really don’t like this series. And that’s what makes this episode heartbreaking to me because as a fighting game enthusiast myself, I really wanted to like episode 5 but it suffers from the same problems the previous episodes had where they sometimes lazily draw audience members crudely, and idiot writers think that being perverted, random or brutally violent towards the male protagonist equals comedy when the show itself keeps finding new ways to be painfully unfunny.

It only has a rating slightly up because it got a few things right with the fighting game scene but its flaws can’t be ignored.

I was left annoyed and disgusted by 4 particular scenes:

1.The scene when Tomatsu is putting his life at risk and by throwing his underwear off the stage, Mayonaka gets hit with them face-first when they fly off and in the next shot of her, instead of having removed them, she’s fucking sniffing them. Like, deeply enough that you can hear her sniffing.

2. Do these idiots even care about their jokes? Tomatsu’s training montage where he’s subjected to brutal displays of violence had zero relevance towards how fighting games are played and was easily the 2nd worst part of this episode and ruins it thematically.

3.The ransom message Tomatsu had was a dead-giveaway to the audience who the kidnapper was considering Guile’s color-scheme, also why didn’t Tomatsu call the police when Nikawa was kidnapped to fucking begin with?

And finally 4. In episode 4 “Ham Radio Fighters” I complained about the inconsistency of Tomatsu’s weakness because he was shirtless while receiving medical attention without being at risk of harmed, but it only took him being in nothing but a tank top without underwear to be in any sort of actual danger?

While parts of this episode were mildly amusing, it basically felt like a very long commercial for Street Fighter V.