I don’t often start a review on this point, but jesus christ, Estival Versus is a game made in Hell and belongs there. Even on the easiest difficulty, this game is hard for all the wrong reasons. Minions, actual name, have way too much health and are far too numerous. And for how often enemies can straight up ignore your hits via a super armor effect, the slightest touch causes your own characters to flinch, allowing minions to easily stunlock you to death. Moreover, the levels the game expects you to grind to are ludicrous for the game’s short length. Due to a 25 character base roster with up to 35 playable, including DLC, the short story mode forces you to jump from character to character, with the difficulty of the game moving ever upward, but forcing you to play numerous level 1 characters. For the uninitiated, this means being forced to use completely underpowered characters all the time even as the game keeps getting tougher and tougher.
The game throws armies of dudes at you, but unlike games like Warriors Orochi, it doesn’t feel satisfying to cut a path through them. Every enemy, even the most basic ones, take far too many hits and they love to poke and prod at you, causing more and more damage. But unlike other games in this third person beat-em-up/hack-and-slash genre, Senran Kagura is needlessly stingy with healing items. Instead, you can transform in a battle once into a more powerful Shinobi form, which also heals you, so you typically want to save this transformation for when you need the health.
More annoyingly, enemies are also capable of dealing numerous status ailments onto you, many of which involve complete loss of control like paralysis, freeze/frozen, and stun. Stun is the most annoying of these since it triggers by just being hit a lot, but also lasts the longest. And unlike many other games with a stun mechanic, being hit doesn’t negate the ailment nor are you immune to other ailments while inflicted with one or the other stun. This gets most annoying with enemies who can freeze or paralyze you, as they’ll stunlock you to death by just switching between the two. Often, you’ll be stunned or frozen and you’ll be inflicted with the other ailment immediately upon recovering from one. On top of this, you can be inflicted with poison and burning to take damage over time, so the entire time, you’re jamming every button on the controller and screaming bloody rage as the game just keeps getting you with cheapshots.
What’s supposed to even the playing field is special ninja arts, but ninja arts can only be performed in Shinobi form or the new Frantic mode, which is an alternative to Shinobi form. Instead of getting all stats improved like Shinobi form offers, it instead lowers one’s defense while greatly increasing attack power.
Levels aren’t the only thing to worry about, however. There is also three mastery bars to worry about called Flash, Yang, and Yin. Flash is gained by fighting in your base form, Yang for fighting in Shinobi form, and Yin for being in Frantic mode. The more you fight in these forms, the more the bars fill, which unlock various passives for each form. All forms begin at level 0 and can go up to level 5. And each form offers different benefits, like level 3 base form offering increased EXP and money when fighting, regeneration for Shinobi form at level 2, and maxed out Yin gives quintuple attack at the cost of 20% defense as opposed to the initial triple attack at the cost of 40% defense.
The problem is that every character has her own mastery bars on top of their own levels. Also, as they level, they gain access to an improved move list, extended combos, and more secret ninja arts. The problem with this is that levels aren’t exactly given out like candy. It can take a long time to gain levels as it doesn’t really seem to do with enemy kills but rather how high you get your combo counts. So getting long combos is essential, but when enemies keep stunning, freezing, paralyzing, etc, it keeps robbing you of your combos to the point where the only way I found to play the game without going insane is to use jumping heavy attacks. These stomp the ground, hitting all enemies in an area and knocking them away from you, so you can just keep performing this attack until everyone dies. However, this gives you a very low combo count, so you don’t really gain levels this way.
The only redeeming factor is you keep all EXP and money gained upon defeat, so losing a mission isn’t a complete waste of time. So if you gained six levels before dying, you keep those levels. This does, however, mean you can just keep throwing your corpse at the game until you win, but at least it’s better than losing all progress for that character.
And that’s important because this game wants you to know the entire cast. Problem being not all of these characters are good. In fact, a lot of them are downright terrible and there’s a handful that make me rage every time I see them. This is different from the series’ typical ‘just pick a school and do their story’ that previous games in the series had. Instead, the game is constantly throwing a random number of characters at you, some of which see a lot more playtime than others. Because in an odd choice, the game will force you to play as specific characters the first time you attempt missions, rather than letting you play as whomever you want. The game would almost be fun if I could just pick one character or, heck, one team to go through the story with.
And then there’s the bosses. The bosses are always the other girls, so be ready to see the same bosses again and again. And this game is in love with throwing a few specific ones at you, who will annoy and anger the player every time. This is because they’re almost all ranged characters and you’ll always be stuck with a close combat character to combat them. And if you try to pick your targets, the other girls will blindside you happily. And I’d like to remind you I’m playing on Easy! Even on Easy, this game will happily slit your throat, if it could.
And let’s get into the story. The story is completely nonsensical. There’s something about a tournament and the winner becomes the Kagura, the most powerful kunoichi in the land. But there’s also some jazz about being granted a wish, which the two girls this game revolves around, Ryobi and Ryona, want to use to wish back their dead sister, Ryoki. And the key is these platforms, from traditional japanese celebrations, that the teams need to defend over the course of a week. But the way the story is told is so ridiculously convoluted that I gave up trying to figure it out within the first two days. To the point where I’m outright skipping the story cutscenes in favor of just playing the stages.
This is mainly because while the concept of the story is simple enough, things rapidly get weird. Like an early mission has Haruka of the Crimson Squad beating down the Gessen Academy team and the losers have to eat their underwear. And the following mission has Katsuragi, of Hanzo Academy, challenges the girls of Hebijo Academy and, if she wins, she gets to grope them. To be honest, while the underwear eating one disgusted me, I actually expected the second, since I’d played Senran Kagura 2: Deep Crimson and both read the manga series and watched the anime, where Katsuragi is clearly both a pervert and either gay or bi. Either way, she delights in groping the other girls.
Which brings me to my final point. The girls in this game are very one-note and not very well developed characters, personality wise. If you want more background, you really have to look to the manga or anime, as the games don’t feature much of this. It’s a lot of T&A but not a lot of substance. You can’t even pick a favorite and go through the entire game with them unless you’ve already beaten it, as once a stage is completed, it can be attempted with any character from then on. In any case, this game is extremely frustrating, punishing on all difficulties, and the amount of screaming in rage I did prevented me from playing this game except in short spurts. The more I play this game, the less I like it, as the base story even falls apart and it seems like nothing more than a bunch of short stories of these girls fighting each other being strung together with a plot revolving around two girls I absolutely hate. Day 4 especially was garbage, as I was forced to play as bad characters for five out of the six stages, with only Yagyu as a character I kinda like. It’s better than anytime the game makes me play as Kafuru, who fights with squirt guns.
I just want to finish the game so I can never play it again, at this point.
Not Recommended
The Professional Protagonist 