Akihabara Crash! 123Stage+1

Genre: Arcade Brick Breaker

Players: 1

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Review:

Akihabara Crash is an Arcade-style game where you’re using a paddle to bounce balls off of bricks you’re trying to break, much like Breakout, Alleyway, and Arkanoid. This is actually a game in a long-running series that is only just now making it to the United States… and man, it is obvious why this series never came to the US before.

Akihabara Crash is a game that borders on an Ecchi game, with the same sort of formula a good number of those sorts of games have taken to over the decades – as you remove blocks from the playfield, you reveal more of the photo of an attractive girl underneath.

~sigh~ Okay, fine. Look, I’m not gonna’ knock the game for being what it is. Hell, I don’t even have a problem with porn games, at least in theory. If someone enjoys a thing for whatever reason, even if I don’t really get it, I can at least appreciate that it’s filling a niche. I mean, I feel like, if you want to look at pictures of attractive ladies, why wouldn’t you just look at, you know, regular porn? But whatevs.

But here, as I said, this game only borders on Ecchi game territory, as the girls depicted here aren’t really in a state of undress, so it seems odd that the game would still be trying to titillate players by revealing them… except its not even doing that well, since even when clearing blocks, the playfield remains covered with unbreakable elements, and covered with a colored filter that makes the image behind the game difficult to see even with the playfield being cleared.

Okay, so were these guys even trying to make an Ecchi game in the first place? Maybe the girls are just… I guess, decorative? But then I have to wonder… why? Why even bother having the photos there? Why not try to give the game its own interesting theme, or work on just polishing the presentation? Maybe the game was built around more risque photos but then the developers got cold feet and replaced them with the least risque photos of attractive girls they had?

Okay, so the presentation is about as innocent as the game can possibly get while still being something you’ll be deathly embarrassed to play in front of your family… but how is the gameplay?

In short, the gameplay here is about as boring and uninspired a Breakout clone as you could expect to find in a videogame. It doesn’t do anything especially noteworthy or original, and it feels like it was pieced together in a first-year programming student’s homework assignment. It all works decent enough, but there’s nothing here to recommend it.

Also, can someone explain to me why this game is 1.2GB big? It’s just a few dozen still photos with a cheap Flash game on top. Why does that require such a huge amount of space on my Switch?

Look, I’ll give anything a chance, even if I know it’s not my cup of tea. I really don’t want this to seem like I’m just complaining that Akihabara Crash is an Ecchi game, because I’m not. I also don’t want this to seem like I’m complaining that this game isn’t an Ecchi game, because I’m not. I’m complaining that I can’t for the life of me even figure out who this game was intended for. I feel like it’s simply not pervy enough for the pervs, and it’s too pervy for just about anyone else, and either way, the gameplay is cookie-cutter and uninspired. If this game interested you even in the slightest, I recommend you either go play a better Breakout clone, or you just look up some porn, because this game doesn’t succeed in anything it’s aiming to do.

tl;dr – Akihabara Crash is an Arcade-style brick breaker game that tries to toe the line of being an Ecchi game without really having any truly risque content, and as a result it ends up being a game for no one. It’s just creepy enough to be uncomfortable, but not sexy enough to be titillating, and the actual gameplay itself is so uninspired and cookie-cutter that there’s simply no reason I can think of that anyone would find this game entertaining.

Grade: D-

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2019 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: The “Why is this taking so much space on my memory card!?” Award

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