1842: Soton’s Trip

Playing Akiba’s Trip as I have been for the past few days, I’m reminded of something I wrote about a while back: the fact that certain places in the world manage to become iconic, while others simply… exist.

Akihabara is a popular setting for a lot of visual novels, games and anime because it’s directly relevant to those who are engaging with the medium in question. Akihabara is the spiritual home of Japanese games, anime, manga and all other aspects of moe and otaku culture. It perhaps makes sense to set a Japanese adventure-role-playing-beat-’em-up-type-thing (Akiba’s Trip) there, much as it makes sense to set a visual novel about the Internet, urban legends and all manner of science fictiony goodness (Steins;Gate).

But what about other places? Big American cities get a lot of love — New York in particular, but we’ve also seen places like Chicago and San Francisco come up a few times. If a game ends up being (at least partially) set in England, it’ll inevitably be in London, of course. But, as I’m fond of telling visitors to this fair isle (people I know, obviously; I don’t just sit at the airport arrivals line and tell foreign strangers they should go outside the M25 once in a while), there’s a lot going on in other places.

That, of course, got me thinking what something like Akiba’s Trip might be like were it set in, say, sunny Southampton instead of Akihabara. Southampton is not, of course, quite the same sort of otaku Mecca as Akihabara, but there are plenty of nerdy hangouts, and the historical side of the city could make for some interesting situations.

The main street of Southampton is long and wide; ideal for large-scale battles against armies of Synthisters. It often features market stalls just ripe for flinging an assailant through in dramatic fashion, and plenty of opportunities for environmental attacks such as making inventive use of a slushie machine or a curry hotplate. Its centrepiece is the shopping centre WestQuay, which is large and interesting enough to form a good interior setting: there are plenty of shops to go in, many of which sell clothes (acquiring various outlandish — and not-so-outlandish — outfits is a key part of Akiba’s Trip) and the multiple levels would seem ripe for some Resident Evil-style environmental puzzles as ways up and down are blocked off in various ways, and you’re forced to brave the horrors of, say, John Lewis in order to make your way down into the depths of the underground car park where otherworldly horrors await you.

All right, yes, I have let my imagination run away with itself a little bit here — and I must confess, any time I’ve been into town on a Saturday I have fantasised on more than one occasion about slamming someone into a slushie machine, though never, I might add, acted on it — but it just goes to show, really, that you can make pretty much anywhere into an interesting setting to do something in. So why do we always find ourselves taken back to the same places over and over again?

Perhaps it’s the fact that they’re universally recognisable. Perhaps it’s the aforementioned relevancy angle. Or perhaps it’s just laziness.