IT’S FUN EVEN IF YOU’RE NOT A PERVERT

I’d better warn you now, this post is most likely NSFW and the screenshots almost certainly will be. So bookmark this one for when you get home!

I plucked this game out of MrZhangetsu’s library who picked it up on sale over the Holidays along with Senran Kagura Peach Beach Splash. To help him complete the collection I also picked up Senran Kagura Estival Versus, so you can expect reviews for the other two soon enough.

I’m calling this phase of my trophy hunting journey “The Pervert Saga” because my list not only contains these three Senran Kagura games at the moment, but also “Pantsu Hunter”.

EDIT: Pervert Saga Part 2 available now!

Senran Kagura Burst Re:Newal Review

Good golly gosh where to begin…

This game was put together by a (japanese, of course) development team known as “Marvelous Inc.” but includes the work of other lewd game developers “Tamsoft”. I have never heard of Marvelous before, but I have played Onechanbara Z2, which is a similarly lewd game made by Tamsoft.

So, I suppose I kind of knew what I was in for, I was expecting a Street Fighter-style one-on-one fighter with what MrZhangetsu and I refer to as “Extra Physics”, a feature which made the Dead or Alive franchise very popular back in the day.

The gameplay was a bit more open than I expected, much more like the Seven Deadly Sins game I platted in that you’re given a small area to explore which is either loaded with small easy-to-beat enemies or a slightly tougher main-line character to fight off against, which seems to be becoming more and more common for anime fighters.

Combat is in open spaces and there can be many enemies at once.

But what really surprised me about the game is just how lewd it is. I mean for god’s sake, almost every enemy and every playable character is a female and you defeat them by literally hitting the clothes off of them, thus leaving them in their underwear, usually in a very suggestive pose.

Defeating them in a certain way causes them to become completely naked. But, of course, there are huge lens flares conveniently taped to the more NSFW body-parts.

I was almost as surprised as my girlfriend was when she walked in to see what I was playing and saw a busty anime character flying through the air, moaning as her clothes literally exploded from her body.

Luckily the line “It’s for a trophy” gets me pretty far these days!

Is it still fan-service if the whole franchise is like this?

It gets slightly worse, though (or better, depending on your perspective) there is the option to dress up your characters with all manner of outfits you can buy and unlock throughout the game, but also a model viewer called “Diorama” mode.

This mode allows you to place the camera anywhere you like and even select outfits and poses for the characters to be in, some far more lewd than others…

“Lying and Begging”… Oh, Japan…

If you think that’s bad, though, Sony actually asked the developers to remove a certain game mode from the Western release which allowed you to fondle the girls. I’ll let you do your own night-time research on that one.

I think I’ve gotten the point across now, the game is just about as close as it can get to full nudity without having any, so I’ll talk about some other aspects…

The story follows two groups of girls from two rival shinobi schools who all fit into cliche anime girl archetypes and you can play the story from the perspective of either group.

I started following the story at first, watching all the cutscenes and reading all the conversations, but over time the game hit me with more and more huge walls of text until eventually I started skipping them.

This. There would be like 10-15 of these back-to-back and I’d just be sat waiting to fight some folks.

Because of this I soon lost track of – and interest in – the story and started skipping all cutscenes so that I could get to the meat and potatoes of the game, the combat.

Each character has their own level, from 1 to 50 and they level up via experience or strange medicine you can buy in the store or find during missions.

As well as this, they each have a Yin level and a Yang level from 0 to 5, I’ll come back to these.

Yang level increasing.

Each character also has their own weapon and fighting style which changes the combat quite a lot. Asuka’s dual-katana fighting style is quick and easy to use whereas Yomi’s heavy Buster Sword fighting style is slow and requires you to dodge and counter a lot more.

There are a variety of abilities available to the player too. Pressing

to enter Burst mode makes your character much stronger and faster for a short period until the burst bar is depleted and the character unleashes a powerful attack.

The player can also press

Shinobi Transformations obviously offer a cutscene of the character becoming nude and then generating a second set of clothing.

to enter into Shinobi mode, which changes the character’s outfit and gives you access to special moves triggered by pressingor

This is the standard combat system and using it will increase the character’s Yang level, which offers various boons at each threshold including increased strange medicine drops.

Increasing a character’s Yin level requires you to play in frantic mode by pressing

together before the start of a mission. Doing so will strip your character down to her underwear, making her take increased damage, but will also put her in a state of permanent burst mode, increasing speed and attack power.

In frantic mode, shinobi transformations are unavailable but you can use the

Frantic Mode = Nudity

special abilities at any time and pressingwith a full burst bar will perform the powerful burst move immediately.

Reaching Yin level 5 will make it so attacking enemies will heal your character.

This combat system is truly the best thing about the game and is genuine fun throughout. I found myself slightly addicted to the combat, trying to find new ways to defeat enemies quicker and quicker, often using frantic mode for its added difficulty but satisfying damage output.

There are 5 chapters per story and 8 missions per chapter. Some chapters have secret scrolls hidden in them which unlock lore about the game in the library section of the menu, but I never read any of them, it was just another thing to do for the platinum.

Overall it is certainly one of the more fun anime fighters I’ve played and the art style is executed well, though not as well as it could have been, lot’s of muddy textures in the stages. The environments could be a bit more interesting and the story could have been delivered better, but the gameplay outweighs the bad.

My Senran Kagura Burst Re:Newal Platinum Trophy Experience

Platting this game was fairly simple.

I noticed there were a lot of miscellaneous trophies which required me to do things in the wardrobe like posing a character, resizing an accessory and changing an outfit, so I got those out of the way immediately and then began playing through the game’s campaigns.

Trophy for resizing an accessory

To start out I just loaded up the Hanzo shinobi school’s story missions and smashed through them.

I focused on using Frantic mode for this run until eventually I got Asuka to Yin level 5, from which point I started to play normally using shinobi transformations instead to try and increase a character’s Yang level to 5 too. I wouldn’t manage this until much later, though.

Once I completed the Hanzo story I used all my strange medicine to increase Asuka to level 50 and then went back through the story looking for collectibles and defeating the secret shadow enemies (who also drop collectibles, but there is a trophy for each one you defeat).

Level 50 Asuka

After that step I loaded up the “Free Missions” which is a collection of 40 missions not tied to the story which you can play with any character. These missions unlock as you play, half of them unlock through the Hanzo storyline and the other half unlock through the Hebijo Clandestine storyline.

I completed the half which were available to me from completing the protagonist storyline and defeated the 2 secret shadow enemies which were available too.

Even after doing all that, Asuka was still not at Yang level 5.

I then switched to the Hebijo storyline and completed the story, doing my best to get any collectibles I could, even replaying missions if I missed one.

By the end I had all of my Hebijo characters up to level 30 by equally distributing strange medicine between them and I had completed the antagonist story as well as getting all of the collectibles except those guarded by secret shadow enemies.

Since you can replay any mission you’ve already completed with any character you like, I used Asuka to go back and get the rest of the scrolls from the shadow enemies.

Defeating difficult shadow enemies as Asuka.

The last stage here was to just run through the free missions, complete the antagonist half of them and kill the remaining 2 shadow enemies. With that, I finally got Asuka up to Yang level 5 and secured the platinum.

Senran Kagura Burst Re:Newal Trophy Guide

This is our first full separate trophy guide here on PlatGet and we hope to do more in the future.

It includes detailed information for each individual trophy in a recommended order. Click here to check it out.

Otherwise, continue on for my final verdict on Senran Kagura Burst Re:Newal.