Review – Senran Kagura: Peach Beach Splash (PS4)

When was the last time PBS was this exciting? Senran Kagura: Peach Beach Splash brings the shinobi girls from the beat ‘em up franchise you don’t play around your family to a competitive, third-person shooter you don’t play around your family. Underneath it’s lewd exterior, Peach Beach Splash offers a surprisingly enjoyable shooter game with a lot of heart. Big, bouncing hearts.

Peach Beach Splash’s story goes like this. Each of the four shinobi squads (Hanzo Academy, Gessen Academy, Hibijo Academy, and Crimson Squad) are mysteriously transported (and stripped of their clothes except for a bikini) to a beach in order to participate in PBS: Peach Beach Splash, an ancient tournament for all shinobi good, bad, fugitive, or dead to participate. PBS is water gun tournament in which no one can leave until the tournament is over.  The tournament may or may not also have ulterior motives to it as well.

Peach Beach Splash is a third person shooter similar to Splatoon. In fact, the game feels almost exactly like Splatoon, minus having to cover the playing field in your team’s color.  Basically, you run around the arena shooting big breasted, bikini clad girls with water guns. Controlwise, it has a similar control scheme as most first and third person shooters, so there isn’t any needing to spend much time learning new controls. It’s pretty much pick up and go. In addition to standard controls, you have actions such as the water jets or skill cards. As per the story, any shinobi that participates in Peach Beach Splash is forbidden to use any of their shinobi skills. In their place are skill and pet cards, of which you can set up to a total of 6 and 3 respectively.

These cards have various uses from healing and homing attacks to affecting your opponent’s reload speed and damage power. You obtain the cards in blind packs, similar to real trading cards, by completing any of the game modes or purchasing them from the in game shop. The card’s offense or defense effectiveness is determined by it’s star rating. The higher the star rating the stronger the card. You can, however, enhance any of your card by utilizing all those extras you are bound to get. By turning those extras into exp points, you can increase the card’s level, thereby increasing it’s damage or effectiveness.

Single player has three components to it: Story, Paradise Episodes, and V-Road Challenge. Story Mode has a different 10 chapter story centered on each of the four shinobi groups. You progress through each chapter fighting waves of robot enemies and the occasional shinobi before taking on each of the rival squads. Paradise Episodes are a set of 12 five-chapter side stories. Each of these mini stories centers around 1-4 of the girls. V-Road Challenge is a set of 4 tournament cups where your team of 5 competes against various other teams for the most knockouts. In all, single player mode offers up around 14 or so hours of fun, depending on the difficulty chosen.

Multi-Splash is your multiplayer modes. You got your standard and ranked matches in addition to your co-op survival mode. In co-op survival mode you team up to defeat wave after wave of enemies. I don’t know if it is an issue with my setup or if there is just no one playing when I try to play multiplayer, but I don’t seem to be getting many people to play against. Which is really disappointing  for a multiplayer focused shooter.

After taking on the rhythm genre with Bon Appétit!, taking on the TPS genre seems like the perfect next step for the series. If you can look past the pervyness of blasting off a girl’s swimsuit with a rubber duck, you got yourself a pretty enjoyable shooter game with hours of enjoyment.