Hood with a submachine gun under her petticoat, and Haruka combines Hibari's close-up combat with homemade chemical bombs. On the Hebijo side of the tracks, Homura one-ups Asuka with six-bladed style, Yomi carries the big sword, Hikage shakes things up with her collection of knives, Mirai goes B.B.
SENGUO KAGUA BEAT BLAST CODE
On Team Hanzō, Asuka is a quick fighter with dual swords and a penchant for air-launches, Ikaruga swings an impossibly large broadsword ala Code of Princess' Solange, Katsuragi keeps things lower to the ground with her powerful kicks, Yagyu uses her umbrella to slash and fire projectiles, and Hibari fights with the incredibly endearing art of seemingly random flailing. There are five girls to play as from each Academy, and while each Hanzō shinobi has an obvious Hebijo counterpart, the correspondence isn't a simple one-to-one: think Ryu and Sakura rather than Ryu and Ken. And though the actual button pressing gets repetitive very quickly - it's easy to find a few combos that work best for you and rinse-wash-repeat your way through levels - there's a ton of variety in how each character plays. Capcom 2 levels and a hypnotic combat cycle that lets you string together hundred-hit combos with ease. It's fast, frantic, and a whole lot of fun, with airtime approaching Marvel vs. By chaining together weak and heavy attacks, you can launch enemies into the air and follow after them, bringing the beatdown to the skies with gravity-defying Aerial Rave attack sequences before diving like a hawk onto baddies back down below - all without breaking a combo. Like the Hanzō and Hebijo heroines, brawlers live and die by their fighting style, and it's here that Senran Kagura really delivers, with an emphasis on speed, aerial action, and massive combos that gives it a feel of its own. Senran Kagura's gameplay consists of side-scrolling beat-'em-up action in the proud tradition of Final Fight, Streets of Rage, and Code of Princess: you'll move from left to right (or vice-versa) slashing up dozens of evildoers per screen, before a blinking "GO" command gives you the OK to move on. Of course, in-between discussing the merits of bean sprouts and having meaningful flashbacks, these teenage ninjas spend their after-school hours doling out extracurricular, iron-fisted justice - and that's where you come in. The rest of the game is stuffed with what is euphemistically described as fan-service (read: voyeuristic camera angles, ridiculously impractical sushi-eating techniques, and an alternative interpretation of gravity localised to a predictably puerile place on our otherwise sharp-edged shinobi heroes), but the story is (mostly) more muted in tone.
The characters are mostly built around anime tropes, but they're still likeable and interesting, and the unexpectedly poetic visual novel scenes give players well-worded reasons to care about their motivations, trials, and triumphs. Slice-of-life episodes of the story are told through voiced, character model cutscenes, while more major plot points advance through visual novel segments, and both are surprisingly good fun. Hanzō is ostensibly "good" and Hebijo "evil", but thankfully it's a bit more complicated than that, and each side is worth exploring you can play through both stories simultaneously or tackle them one at a time, and they overlap in interesting ways. Senran Kagura lets you follow the day-to-day, butt-kicking lives of two secret, rival schools of the shinobi way - The Hanzō National Academy and The Hebijo Clandestine Girls' Academy.
Taking its gameplay inspiration from classic side-scrolling beat-'em-ups, and its over-the-top, undergarment-filled style from anime and manga, this is a fun, frenzied fighter with a unique feel that shines in spite of its faults. Fresh from the friendly fields of Rune Factory 4, XSEED returns with another, decidedly more deadly offering from the Land of the Rising Sun in Senran Kagura Burst.
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