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Senran Kagura 2: Deep Crimson Review – Bags Of Sand

By Rebekah Valentine

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Playing Dress-Up

Outside of the combat, there are a few other gimmicks to keep you busy. I was pleasantly surprised in the Library, which offered a rewatch of all cutscene movies, details on different types of enemies, and music that unlocked as I heard it in-game with details on its composition. A co-op mode exists that I was unable to test, but it looks like you can complete missions either online or locally with a friend. Finally, there was the Dressing Room, which brings me to discussing the other primary gimmick of this game: there’s stripping. Lots of it.

During combat, whenever the enemy gets a solid hit on you (or does enough damage…I still couldn’t quite tell you what triggers it) a short cutscene will play of your character being knocked back, and her clothes tearing off. It only takes a few of these before the girls are battling in their panties and tiny bras, and the gimmick applies to some enemies, too. Each character also has a shinobi transformation sequence that features her in bra and underwear pushing…some scroll-thing…between her jiggling breasts before her new clothing pops on (complete with up-skirt shot, of course). Upon defeat in battle, your character will collapse in an insanely seductive position, and the 3DS can be tilted to view her from the most provocative angle possible for a photo op. You can do the same thing from a separate mode in the Dressing Room, allowing you to select seductive poses and backdrops, even using the AR feature to set the girls up for pictures against real backgrounds. It’s…a bit creepy.

Even when the characters are clothed, Senran Kagura features some interesting “boob physics” resulting in almost every girl having what amount to enormous water balloons attached to her chest, which flop around distractingly in every cutscene. Seriously, the boobs are ridiculous, and while they obviously took a lot of work to animate, other items are less than lucky with the result of some bizarre clipping in combat and cutscenes when stray hands get too near someone’s breasts. Oh, and not only are there lots of weird boobs, but there’s lots of weird boob dialogue, too, largely consisting of really, really awkward innuendos.

For the sake of keeping my ladies clothed, I did enjoy the Dressing Room, which allows you to change each character’s regular outfit, shinobi outfit, hairstyle, accessories, and underwear. The clothing options were fairly impressive: you can change into any combination of other girls’ outfits and their palette swaps, plus other styles that are unlocked as the game progresses. It would all be a lot more interesting if the clothes stayed on their bodies for longer than a few minutes, but alas.

Senran Kagura: Deep Crimson 2 is by far one of the most mediocre games I’ve played in a while…

Senran Kagura is known for its scantily-clad females, and that’s fine. But the execution in Deep Crimson is plain weird. While the first few missions of stripped-bare ladies and jiggling breasts may have surprised me, it quickly became boring and time-consuming to watch the exact same shot of a girl’s underwear every minute or so, especially when it interrupted the flow of combat and making my attacks miss due to the delay exiting the scene. Plus, it was just…repetitive. The same crotch-shot, over and over. The same girls in swimsuits fighting over and over again. Senran Kagura has none of the classy elegance of Bayonetta; it’s pure fanservice, through-and-through. Which is fine on its own, but in this case, it didn’t play well with the other lackluster features.

Verdict

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Senran Kagura: Deep Crimson 2 is by far one of the most mediocre games I’ve played in a while, which is weird to say about a game with boob physics. The story was moderately interesting, but the repetitive gameplay, bizarre difficulty spikes, uninspired levels, and strange fanservice execution took most of the energy out of the game. That said, nothing in Senran Kagura is explicitly bad. It’s mostly just…average. Really, really average, and a bit niche. If you’ve liked previous games in the series, or get a kick out of scantily-clad anime girls fighting each other, this is a decent title. But for pretty much anyone else, the $40-$50 (depending on if you wanted the soundtrack or not) you’d pay isn’t worth the experience.

A copy of this game was provided to GameSided for the purpose of this review. Click here to learn more about our Review Policy.

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