English Dub Review: Senran Kagura “BURN”

Burn this episode.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Youma have overwhelmed the city, and the ninjas are doing their best to fight them off, despite being outnumbered. To defend the city, Kagura shelters the city with an enormous energy barrier, but the barrier has the side effect of dissolving away everyone’s clothes except for their underwear. With everyone half-naked or, in some cases, fully naked, the teams continue to fight against the youma in the city. Fubuki joins the battle but Senkou and Gekkou try to stop her, though they’re clearly outmatched.

The battle continues, and a giant youma emerges in the city center. Homura and the others work to take it down and eventually are able to bind it and make it collapse. Asuka then uses the technique she learned from Kagura to create a portal of light that sucks the fallen youma into it. With that, the battle is over, though Gekkou and Senkou lie defeated on the ground.

Things return to normal in the city and the girls go back to their work as Christmas Santas around the city. Yumi and Asuka get tea and reflect on when Asuka fought Fubuki earlier in the season. The two reaffirm their beliefs to fight until the very end against evil, even when Fubuki confronts them to try and persuade them away from their sense of justice. Fubuki reveals that she is the offspring of a youma and a human, much to Yumi and Asuka’s surprise. Meanwhile, Kagura senses that the door the other world is opening and its located at a hot springs town.

Our Take:

What is there to say about Senran Kagura that hasn’t been said many times over? Its a series that shouldn’t exist, plain and simple. Something that doesn’t know if it wants to be an action series and commit to that, or just a lewd time waster, delightful and fun, irreverent in its own existence. But instead it ops for the easy way out of trying to have its cake and eat it too, not committing to anything and, in turn, wasting everyone’s time in the process. Its a show that would be better suited to exist on Pornhub than Funimation’s streaming service. I can’t even imagine what kind of bonehead executive decided that this show would be worth dubbing. I imagine its intended audience exists in the dozens, and even fans of the original games, as I’ve been finding out, can’t abide this waste of a series.

The episode is bad. Of course it is. They’ve all been bad. Not one episode has even come close to crossing the threshold of “good enough to enjoy” in my eyes. The question here is to what degree of bad are we talking. And that’s really just dependent on how much stupid anime bullshit you’re willing to put with in one sitting. Personally, I lost my goddamn mind as soon as Kagura put up a barrier that made everyone’s clothes disappear. Everything after that is just kind of a blur, where the events taking place onscreen were so stupid, so pointless, that I temporarily drifted into a fugue state where all comprehension of the next 18 minutes simple ceased to be.

This is a show that aspires to nothing, and so it is nothing. The action onscreen is little more than colorful vomit accompanied by characters whose names I can’t remember because there’s just so damn many of them. Then, just like that, the action is over and we go back to seeing the cast in skimpy outfits once again. Of course, there’s just enough time for a sloppily written speech about “justice” and a big dumb reveal about Fubuki that simply no one gives a shit about. I wish I could give this episode a negative score. I wish I could get the 22 minutes I spent watching it back, so I could use them to watch something better. Or eat ten servings of minute rice and then spend the next ten minutes purging. That would be preferable to watching Senran Kagura.