English Dub Review: Senran Kagura “BE HONEST”

It’s like watching a train wreck explode, over and over again.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

The Shinobi Masters has begun, and Kagura’s team has arrived to join the party. With the three ninja teams all facing each other, their first game of the tournament is “Naked dodgeball.” In this game, the girls play dodgeball with each other where the penalty for loss is their clothes coming off. The teams duke it out each with their own individual powersets, but the Gessen Girls Academy eventually takes the match.

The next match is a game of “Cavalry”, where the goal is to knock the individual players off of their team captain, who is their horse. The fight is intense and full of nudity, but Hebijo Academy eventually wins when Kagura strangely forfeits the match unilaterally. Meanwhile, Homura’s rogue shinobi work behind the scenes with Suzuna to sace the girls of Hanzo Academy from the sinister machinations of this tournament. This is just in time for the last two teams to face each other in a game of “Naked Pole Topplin”, where the goal is to knock your opponents into the water which makes all clothes translucent. Gessen manages to win this one at the last moment, making them the winners of the tournament, or so they think. It turns out the final round of the Shinobi Masters tournament is to fight the tournament runners.

Senkou explains that they’re doing this to enact Kurokage’s true teachings on the girls. Asuka soon steps in to also challenge Senkou and her team, which helps mend the bond between Yumi and Asuka, who ally themselves to face Senkou together.

Our Take:

Senran Kagura continues its descent into anime hell, proving to us that the only thing in this show worse than watching our characters do nothing is watching them awkwardly fight each other. I cannot begin to express how frustrating this episode is to watch. What’s worse? The egregious amount of bad animation? The horrible lines and awkward voice acting? The fact that this show is still basically pornography with more words? I don’t know. Rest assured, there is nothing of any redeemable quality to watch here. Please avoid this episode at all costs.

Literally every character introduction comes with a boob jiggle in this episode. Literally every one. I realized that in a show that is basically pornography this isn’t necessarily something worth complaining about, but I insist on this point as an indicator of just how terrible this series is. From a creative perspective, obviously there’s something ridiculous and annoying about the endless amount of boob jiggles present in the episode, but there’s more to this than just the obvious. If you’re watching this show for the kind of purpose than an ecchi anime is made for, then random boob jiggling doesn’t offer you anything of value for your purposes either. It’s just a weak attempt by the showrunners to try and add extra sexuality to scenes that are boring and poorly animated to distract your gaze. 

And that’s really all this, and all episodes of this show, are: distractions. Senran Kagura exists as this annoying middle ground show which spends all its time walking us through annoying dialogue and then tries to make up for it with obvious pandering. Even the premise of this episode, “Naked Dodgeball”, is a blunt way of getting our cast naked and decking them out with cat gloves. This is a trend you might notice across all episode of Senran Kagura, that each episode tries to hit another popular kink or fetish in a desperate attempt to keep interest in the series.

If you’re still watching this show at this point, then I don’t think there’s anything I could really tell you that would dissuade you from watching it further. The cast is still too big, the story is half-baked and the animation is sloppy at best. I can’t find any redeeming qualities in this episode, whatsoever, and would recommend you watch literally anything else.