NO AMOUNT OF ANIME TIDDIES WILL MAKE THIS GAME FUN.

The final part of the pervert saga! Check out Parts one (Senran Kagura Burst Re:Newal) two (Pantsu Hunter) and three (Senran Kagura Estival Versus).

We’re finally at the end of the pervert saga and I cannot tell you how excited I am to go and plat some normal games again. So let’s get this out of the way, because there’s an ever-growing list of games I want to get to. This review is NSFW.

Senran Kagura Peach Beach Splash Review

This game is more of a spin-off than the other two Senran Kagura games I platted, as such the combat is totally different. It’s a third-person shooter wherein the girls shoot each other with water guns in teams of 5.

As you can imagine, the fun combat of Burst: Renewal and Estival Versus is nowhere to be seen. This poses several problems;

I only found the other games to be enjoyable because of the combat. The diverse range of characters meant there were tens of different fighting styles and move-sets to dig your teeth into and almost every character played differently.

Without this, we have 10 different water guns to use and you can use any water gun with any character, so the huge roster of characters doesn’t even matter. There could be as little as 3 characters on the roster and it would practically be the same. In fact, if not for the differing hairstyles on the characters they might as well all be the same character as they all start the game in the same white bikini.

Any diversity in character costumes will be done manually.

There is a level of card-collecting in the game. After you finish a stage you will get a booster pack to open which will have 10 cards in it. These cards will either be weapons, pets or skills.

You’ll have all 10 weapons after the first few matches but the game will keep throwing them at you anyway. Like 60% of most packs will be weapon cards. Skills are triggerable abilities you can use mid-fight, usually based on one of the abilities from the good games in the series. Then pets are triggerable in the same way but stick around for a while to shoot at your enemies with you or chase them down to poison or stun them, that kind of thing.

Duplicate cards become experience points which can be used to upgrade your character, weapon, skill or pet cards up to a maximum of level 10. Something you’ll be dealing with for a good majority of the gameplay if you decide to plat it as I did.

The gun combat is no fun, either. The water guns all have frustratingly small ammunition tanks and so you will need to recharge often, by holding

The water reserves can be used to soar across the map. Which is pretty neat, but it’s also used to dodge, which is cheap.

(which doesn’t work half the time so you’ll need to press and hold it a few times before the character even starts refilling their tank), this brings the gameplay to a bit of a halt as you slowly try to move to cover.

Another irritating mechanic which puts a halt on the gameplay is that whenever a character reaches about half health, they will get an impenetrable shield which lasts for an inordinately long time.

Imagine if you were playing Call of Duty or whatever your cut-and-paste shooter of preference is. You and another player start shooting each other, then automatically become invincible forcing you both to wait and do nothing for 30 seconds, just staring each other down… It’s just stupid.

Aiming doesn’t mean shit in the game, either, since the game has auto-aim on by default – which let’s face it you’re going to use because the game wants you to be far enough out from your gun’ sights that you get to see your own ass the whole time. But even the auto-aim is broken as all heck because it will lock onto girls who are behind walls or other structures that you obviously can’t shoot them through and there’s no way to switch targets without fiddling around with the controls for a while – which isn’t ideal when you’re getting blasted by the nearest 3 bikini-clad fanservice generators.

Next, there are a few maps with a somewhat haphazard layout which vaguely resembles that of a decent shooter map, but the AI are simple so they will almost always converge in the same spot every time, meaning that regardless of the size or complexity of the maps they have created, every single fight will take place within the same 50 square feet of the map.

This map is neat, with lots of little rooms and nooks to hide away in, combat here should be interesting. But due to the dumb AI you spend the whole time in this open area outside.

There’s yet another tossed together story mode within which – once again – the cast of the series is taken to another dimension or some shit where the rules don’t matter so anyone can fight with or against anyone and the developers have an excuse to throw in old or new characters with little to no explanation.

And, lastly, what all you “Chad Man of Culture Gamers” are here for; how smutty is the game?

More than ever. Somehow, MARVELOUS! Managed to bypass Sony’s restrictions which were placed on the last two games and they got their “Intimacy” mode approved for Western Audiences. So, not only do you get to play dress-up with the girls and snap photos of them in one of many suggestive poses, but you now get to spawn the “Grabby Hands” and pull their tumorous breasts in any number of directions. It’s like playing with Mario’s Face at the start of Mario 64 except if your 7-year-old nephew is in the room he’ll hit puberty then and there.

Ahaha, this is absurd.

Grabbing is not all the grabby hands are good for, though, there’s also an option to – as the game puts it – “Lightly Tap” the girls. This is a slap. This is a full slap. It doesn’t take much imagination to know what you’ll be using the slap for, now, does it?

Think that’s all? No, no, no good sir. During battle, when you have taken down one of the other girls with pure water-pistol power, you can press

It’s the age-old dilemma, boobs, butt or face?

on them to trigger a “Squirmy finish”. The squirmy finish mode allows you to get up real close to the girls and then shoot them in either the face, breasts or butt. Each one will give you a different sexy, NSFW pose but choosing butt or breasts will cause the targeted bikini item to be removed, letting you see all the hot sexy lens-flare censoring you could ever ask for.

Now, as much as I very clearly did not enjoy this game, it did have a bit of potential towards the start of my playthrough, there’s certainly a market for a Splatoon-type game on PS4… But this wasn’t that. There is a multiplayer mode which I didn’t need to play for the Platinum so I didn’t bother with it, but maybe that’s where the fun comes in?

Playing with and against human players would certainly take the stupidity of the AI out of the equation but the game’s other pain-in-the-ass mechanics would still be present.

My Senran Kagura Peach Beach Splash Platinum Trophy Experience

As with all my Senran Kagura platinum journeys I began with the story. Just like Estival Versus, I stuck with it, watched every cutscene and made sure I was fully equipped to say whether the story sucks or not for this review.

It does. Moving on…

Once the story was done there was a heck of a grind ahead of me. Most of the non-story trophies are for getting kills in a certain way or levelling up some cards to MAX. This sounds okay, but the amount of experience you need to do that is ungodly. At this stage though, I tried not to think about it and focused on getting through the V-Road tournaments. I picked a group of girls who I’d already levelled up a little for the story and used those as my main 5 and gave them all the Gatling gun which was also levelled up a little.

During this time I was also trying to get the trophies for activating “Soaking Power-Up State” 10, 50 and 100 times. This mode activates once your character is *ahem* wet enough to fill up the bar in the top left corner. This didn’t happen very frequently though so I had to equip some skill cards which would aid in the process.

A full Haruka skill deck.

All Haruka skill cards give extra wetness to the soaking power-up bar, so as soon as I could I gave my main character a full set of Haruka cards and used them as often as possible. With this, I was able to achieve Soaking Power-Up mode 2 to 3 times each match.

The V-Road tournaments are 5 matches of increasing difficulty and there are a total of 4 tournaments which also vary in difficulty. The first 2 tournaments, School Cup and Honey Cup were a breeze, I flew through them using the reward money to buy booster packs from the store and using the duplicate cards to level up the Gatling gun, making my team stronger overall without the need to level them up individually.

The third tournament, Queen Cup, started to give me some difficulty and I was struggling to finish it but after a few attempts and many visits to the shop, I was able to upgrade my characters and their weapon enough to make it through.

The final tournament – Venus Cup – was a killer. My characters were about level 3 with my main character being about level 6 or 7 and the Gatling gun was around level 8. I kept replaying the first 3 matches of this tournament until I had enough experience from duplicate cards to reach the following stats:

Full team level 5 or over

Main character level 10

Gatling gun level 10

I gave my other team members a full set of support cards.

After that, I was able to breeze through the tournament, only really struggling in the last match. During this process, I also went for the squirmy finish trophies. I’ll explain my methods a little better in the tips section below, but the tournaments turned out to be a pretty perfect place to farm out the squirmy finishes.

With this done, there was nothing left but the intimacy trophies and a whole lot of grinding for duplicate cards. I started with the intimacy trophies and I have a pretty fun story to go with it.

The two trophies for intimacy mode require you to touch the girls in places they don’t want to be touched and watch their reactions… One for doing this to 5 characters, and one for doing it to 10. In the end, I had to do it to about 16 characters because a lot of them didn’t register towards the trophy for some reason. While I was doing this at 5 am before heading off to work, I was sat in the dark with my headphones on.

The “Quit It!” trophy I was working towards when the window cleaner caught me!

I could faintly hear a noise in the room but figured it was just the wind making the windows bang against their frames, it’s been very windy here lately and the windows are old and wooden because the city has some rules about preserving the history of the town or something like that.

Anyway, this went on for about 5 more minutes until something in my periphery moved. I whipped my head around to see what it was and my eyes met with a very smug Window Cleaner, who had been washing the windows of my fourth-floor apartment for a while now – watching me fondle the breasts and slap the buttocks of many busty anime girls.

I got up. Slowly moved towards the window where I could see his smirk in full detail, and I closed the blinds on him before sitting back on the sofa in shame.

Putting the fears that I’d ever see this man in the streets of the city out of my mind, I continued on to get the trophies, leaving only the levelling trophies and a few defeating-enemies-in-a-certain-way trophies to be done.

To start with, I wanted to fully upgrade my team of 5 girls, just so that repeating the same match over and over again would be a bit easier since the AI would destroy the opposing team for me with ease.

Maxing out my fifth team member.

To do this, I would play the final match of the Venus Cup twice, netting me 20,000 money, with which I could buy 20 decks and get up to 200 duplicate cards per run. Different duplicates were worth different amounts of exp, too, as below:

Common Card: 1exp

Rare Card: 5 exp

Super Rare Card: 10 exp

Super Super Rare Card: 50 exp

Ultra Rare Card: 100 exp

Eventually, after replaying this level maybe 8 to 10 more times I was able to max out the rest of my team making us absolutely indestructible.

Somewhere amongst all this, I took a little detour to grind out the trophy for defeating 100 enemies with a melee attack. It is really hard to land a melee attack and it’s very hard to time it so that the melee attack will defeat the opponent you’re hitting as it doesn’t do much damage, especially not in that final venus cup match. On top of this, most of the time my newly undefeatable team would get the kill before I had a chance.

To get around this, I loaded up the last mission of the paradise story episode “Hikage in the Heat” which would allow me to face off against 4 other characters solo, without my team to steal my kills.

Since I’d beaten it once I could bring in one of my level 10 characters and play it on easy to smash out the trophy real quick. More info on this strategy in the Tips section below. Since there were 4 enemies to beat and I needed 100 melee kills, I had to play this level a minimum of 25 times, but it was more than that because every now and then I’d sneak in a cheeky pet or skill card kill to add to my totals for those trophies too.

After almost an hour of repeating the same mission, I finally saw that trophy pop!

Once that was done and I had the melee trophy, I went back to the final match of the venus cup to farm more duplicate cards and get the skill card and pet card kills needed.

Once I had about 2000 exp in the bank, I went for the max level weapon trophies. This was easy using the method I detail in the tips section below. Essentially I would quit out before the game could auto-save after the trophy popped, letting me use the same 2000 exp to level up all of the weapons and then still have my 2000 exp by the end.

At around 4500 exp I tried to do the same for the Skill cards. I got the trophies for upgrading 5 and 10 skill cards to MAX and then at about 26 skill cards, I realised something horrendous.

Since you don’t get “change” from the bigger cards a lot of exp actually goes to waste. For example, the UR cards are worth 100 exp and it takes 143 exp to upgrade a 1-star common skill card, you would need two UR cards to max out that card (if they are all you have left) which is 200 exp. That extra 57 exp is not refunded, it’s just lost to the ether. So eventually I ran out of exp despite having enough, in theory, to max out all 30 skills cards needed.

So I loaded my backup save, played the final venus mission 3 more times, bought 30 more packs of cards and then tried again, finally able to get the trophy.

At this stage, I just needed to max out 5 more characters. At 6500 exp in the bank I made another backup save and gave it a shot. I was able to max out 4 characters and get one character to level 8. After doing the Venus mission another 2 times I was finally able to max out that last character, plat the game, and delete it from my console.

At long last, The platinum.

Senran Kagura Peach Beach Splash Platinum Trophy Tips

For the most part, the platinum for this game involves playing the same couple of missions over and over a stupid number of times, so the first tip I’ll give you is to find some external entertainment. Music, Audio-books, YouTube Videos, Netflix shows. Anything.

For me, I listened to System of a Down and relived my teenage years for 5 hours straight yesterday, trying to finish this game.

For any trophy which requires you to max out cards, you can save time by using backup saves. If you don’t do this, you will be adding about 5 hours of grind to the trophy process. If not more.

Essentially, save up all the exp you need, backup your save, spend the exp, get the trophy, load the save and you’ll have the trophy and your exp back.

With weapons, this is even easier. Once you max out a weapon you will see a pop-up which says “This card’s level is maxed”. If you don’t press

to proceed past this pop-up, the game won’t auto-save. But the trophy will pop. Simply quit the game here to keep your trophy and the exp you just spent.

Here’s a guide to the EXP you’re going to need to Max out your cards:

1 Skill Card (1-star): 143 experience

30 Skill Cards (1-star): 4,290 experience

1 Pet card: 143 experience

5 Pet cards: 715 experience

1 Weapon card: 1,003 experience

All Weapon Cards (not recommended, use above tip instead): 10,030

1 Character Card: 1,290 exp

5 Character Cards (in-case you keep a team of 5 upgraded like I did): 6,450 experience

10 Character Cards: 12,900 experience

Please note the warning I gave earlier, here it is again for convenience:

“Since you don’t get “change” from the bigger cards a lot of exp actually goes to waste. For example, the UR cards are worth 100 exp and it takes 143 exp to upgrade a 1-star common skill card, you would need two UR cards to max out that card (if they are all you have left) which is 200 exp. That extra 57 exp is not refunded, it’s just lost to the ether. So eventually I ran out of exp despite having enough, in theory, to max out all 30 skills cards needed.”

Irritatingly, from what I could tell there was no value in-game which would tell you the total experience you had available. To make things easier I made a calculator in Google Sheets, which you’re welcome to use. Since it’ll get a bit messy if more than one person tries to use it, it’s not editable. But if you go to “File” and then “Make a Copy” you can clone out an editable version for your personal use.

Squirmy Master Watched all Squirmy Finishes.

There are 30 different squirmy finishes. The squirmy finish is different depending on which of the 10 weapons the downed character is using and there are 3 places to shoot the character, making the total 30. You can’t track this in-game so you would need to track it yourself. It’s hard to tell at a glance which weapon a character is using but you’ll start to notice that the pose they fall into when they get downed is indicative of each weapon type.

The way I did it was to just do a squirmy finish every chance I got while working through the V-Road tournaments. Since the same characters can be downed multiple times, all you need to keep track of is what you’ve done on the 5 characters in each match. Try to get each character at least 3 times and shoot them in the face, chest and butt, keeping track of which you’ve done. Eventually, you should get the trophy without too much trouble. I had it by the time I started on the third V-Road tournament.

Soaking Sergeant Achieved Soaking Power-Up State 100 times. *inc. Multiplayer

As I stated earlier, Haruka cards increase your soaking gauge. For a lot of the time that I was farming duplicate cards for exp, I had a full set of Haruka skill cards equipped and activated them every chance I got. I would enter Soaking Power-Up state around 3 times per match, sometimes more.

Rulebreaker! Defeated 100 playable opponents with melee attacks. *inc. Multiplayer

These Aren't Ninja Arts Defeated 100 playable opponents with skills. *inc. Multiplayer

Say Hello to My Little Friend Defeated 100 playable opponents with a pet. *inc. Multiplayer

For these trophies, there is a pretty good farming method. You probably won’t need to do it for the skill and pet kills but it’s an option either way.

Load up the Paradise stories “Hikage in the Heat” and do Mission 5. In here, you’re alone against 5 girls and you can hit them with your weapon until their automatic shields come up, and then use melee or a skill/pet card to finish them off. With a maxed out character and the mission on easy difficulty, you’ll beat them in one hit.

Getting them to one hit away from defeat is pretty easy with the Gatling gun. Since the AI is absolutely moronic, they all run at you in single file, so you can just fire in their direction and take them out one by one with minimal effort. Once they come back with their shields up, wait for it to disappear and use whichever method of dispatching them that you need.

Every other trophy is easy and will likely happen while going for these main grind-y ones.

All in all though, I don’t recommend doing it.

I don’t mind a grind-y platinum trophy, sometimes I even enjoy it, but the game has to be fun first. Playing the same level, going to the same place, on the same map, against the same AI over and over and over again until you get a platinum isn’t my idea of fun. I’m glad it’s over and I cannot wait to play a normal SFW game… But which one? There are so many in my list.