English Dub Review: SENRAN KAGURA “PBS”

This week: nothing but ninjas and boobs.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Yumi and the others at school are hanging out in the yard when a mysterious arrow delivers a flyer for the “Paradise Beach Spa.” The girls immediately decide to go on a spa trip despite the mysterious circumstances. To celebrate their new trip, the girls played a game of “Rock, Paper, Scissors, Boobs.” which is about as interesting as you might expect.

Meanwhile, Homura’s band of renegade ninjas tries to pull off an important job for their crew through the assassination of a corrupt politician. Things go fine until it’s revealed that Miyabi and her team are on the politician’s security detail. Homura and Miyabi fight with such intensity that their clothes fly off, but their fight ends with a draw, as Miyabi turns on her employer and makes him confess his evil deeds. At the end of the mission, Homura’s crew finds the same flyer for the beach resort that the other girls did.

Miyabi and friends arrive at the spa dedicated to have a good time, complete with plenty of girl-on-girl flirting. They soon run into the good ninjas and the renegade ninjas as well, who are all a bit worried about this trip being some kind of trip. Despite that, the girls have a great time at the spa/water park, even breaking out into an impromptu squirt gun fight with a liquid that dissolves the bathing suits of the people tagged.

Everyone has a fun, jiggly day at the water park until two enemy ninjas, Gekkou and Senkou, arrive to invite the ninjas to a ninja tournament called the Shinobi Masters. To insure that the ninjas show up to the tournament, Gekkou and Senkou reveal that they have four Hanza ninjas captured, and that their lives are at stake. Everyone begrudgingly accepts their fate and the girls return home to begin training for the upcoming tournament.

Our Take:

Well, its time for the inevitable swimsuit episode of Senran Kagura, a show so dedicated to being hot anime garbage that I knew it wouldn’t be long before it employed this never-ending cliche. Its an episode that goes about as well you expect, just using this setting to find new and exciting ways to get bodacious anime babes to fall out of their clothes. I hope you know what you’re getting in for with this series by now, because anyone hoping to watch this anything more than a mildly entertaining bit of lewd entertainment is going to be sorely disappointed.

A good two-thirds of the episode is just a sequence of different ways the girls find to have good times at the water park. And to that end, the episode has it all. The girls hang around in the pool, flirt with each other endlessly, go down water slides and, in the most entertaining part of the episode, get into a giant squirt gun fight. The squirt gun fight is the centerpiece to the whole thing, and its at least more interesting to watch visually than the rest of the episode. Though the concept of this water dissolving the swimsuits of everyone is just totally odd. Creative, but odd.

I will concede that while Senran Kagura’s story is thinner than a supermodel’s waist, the visuals are surprisingly well made. Most of the animation quality is spent on jiggle physics and sparkly transformation sequences, the visuals are quite well done. This style could be used for some really interesting fight sequences if the story had more going for it, but here its basically just really sparkly paint used to try and cover up the fact that we’re watching porn.

You know, I’ll give Senran Kagura some credit. For the shallow, lewd, smutty smut that it is, it does find a way to at least be creative. The squirt gun fight was a good use of the ninja powers of the cast to give everyone something to do. But this episode doesn’t do much at all in the way of story; its mostly just an extensive beach episode about seeing the Senran Kagura girls in the skimpiest swimsuits imaginable. Everything else around that is just…eh. Like I said the last episode, this is basically just hentai with some quality animation and fight sequences. For what it is though, its watchable, but nothing I would spend a lot of time with.