Senran Kagura: Shinovi Versus Strips Away the Excess and Delivers a Solid Combat Experience

Senran Kagura: Shinovi Versus arrived in Japan on Feb. 28, 2013, as a PlayStation Vita game, and it took its time reaching everyone else. North America got it on Oct. 14, 2014, Europe a day later, and a PC version landed on June 1, 2016. Tamsoft developed it; Marvelous AQL published it in Japan and Europe, XSEED Games in North America.

It is the third game in the Senran Kagura series and the sequel to Senran Kagura Burst, and it is a fighting game with beat-’em-up bones. It scored 7.2 out of 10 across eight outlets. That number is fair, and the reasons are visible in the first hour.

Trailer, via IGN.

Twenty Characters and a Roster Split Down the Middle

The single-player mode runs a roster of 20 characters. Ten come back from the original game. Ten are new, drawn from Gessen Girls’ Private School and the Hebijo Clandestine Girls’ Academy.

That split is the whole architecture. Shinovi Versus is not a game about one school. It is a game about four female ninja groups from dueling shinobi schools, and it expects you to care about all of them.

Four Schools, One Battle Royale

The plot picks up the fight between Hanzō National Academy and the rival Hebijo Clandestine Girls’ Academy, then adds Gessen Girls’ Academy as a third faction. A fourth group waits behind the story.

Each school enters a competition called the Shinobi Battle Royale against another school. One team invades the other. The attackers have to beat every enemy in front of them, and if they do, they earn the right to burn the attacked school to the ground.

That is a nasty premise, and the game knows it. The sequel lets you see the story from four different perspectives. Play through one school and you get one version of events; play another and the same war looks different.

Giant Pancakes and Light and Heavy Attacks

Combat is built on light and heavy attacks, with a range of weapons per character. The weapons include giant pancakes. That detail tells you what kind of game this is better than any paragraph about frame data could.

The pancake is not the problem. The problem is that the light-and-heavy system carries 20 characters without giving most of them a reason to be picked over the others.

Homura’s Crimson Squad Is the Reward

Finish the story lines for each of the game’s schools and you unlock Homura’s Crimson Squad, the playable group built from Homura’s team in Senran Kagura Burst.

It is a real reward rather than a cosmetic one. The Crimson Squad is the payoff for playing the game the long way, and it gives the roster a second life after the credits.

Online Multiplayer, Four Players, Falling Panties

The online side supports four players against each other, plus a two-versus-two mode with teams of two. The competitive mode asks players to collect panties as they fall from the sky.

Here is the ranking of what actually holds up in Shinovi Versus:

1. The four-perspective story structure, which gives the schools real weight.
2. Homura’s Crimson Squad as an unlock, because it rewards completion instead of selling it back.
3. The four-player and two-versus-two online modes, which work but thin out fast.
4. The 20-character roster, which is wide and shallow at the same time.
5. The competitive panty-collecting mode, which is a joke that runs longer than the joke is good.

What the 7.2 Gets Right

Shinovi Versus is a Vita game that eventually found a PC audience, and it plays like a series still working out what it wants to be. The fighting is serviceable. The story is more ambitious than the combat deserves, and the four-perspective structure is the strongest idea in the game.

The roster is the weak point. Twenty characters sounds generous until you notice how many of them fight the same way, and the giant pancakes cannot cover that.

This is a sequel that improves on Senran Kagura Burst in structure and scope without fixing the core. It is worth playing for the story and the Crimson Squad unlock. It is not worth playing for the fighting.

beat 'em up · fighting games · PS Vita games · Senran Kagura · Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus · Xseed Games