English Dub Review: Senran Kagura “TWO HEARTS”

Isn’t one heart enough?

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Yumi, accompanied by Kagura and the others in her group, go to a cute mountain hot spring village. Once there, they find that Fubuki has arrived as well. Strangely enough, they don’t just start fighting immediately, as Fubuki apparently doesn’t want to fight them anymore. Homura is also present at the hot spring, as well as the girls from Hanzo Academy. Homura gets into a ping pong match with Miyabi where, naturally, they have to take off their clothes when they get scored upon.

Next, Yumi and the girls head to the spa to get some R and R, but Yumi decides to go solo and talk to Fubuki. The two enter the hot spring together, and Yumi tries to reach Fubuki, but she is still holding her hatred against the ninja. Fubuki leaves Yumi behind, insisting that it was the ninjas’ indiscriminate killing of the youma that are what took her mother in the first place.

Later that night, Fubuki confronts Kagura to kill her with her powerful youma. The two confront each other and transform to face each other one-on-one. Meanwhile, Homura, Yumi and the others meet to discuss the possibility of not killing the youma indiscriminately. They agree that they shouldn’t do it anymore, even if it is against the rules. The battle between Fubuki and Kagura rages on outside, with Kagura getting pummeled pretty hard. As the battle climaxes, the two release powerful energy blasts at each other just in time for Yumi to arrive. Kagura then loses and is reverted to her child form, making Fubuki the victor of the night.

Our Take:

What kind of drugs do you have to be on to make an episode like this? Or, more accurately, an entire series like this? This is just nonsense from start to finish. It ranges from just about functional as a story to barely incoherent, where character motivation is nonexistent and things just mosey along from one scene to the next. I don’t need to explain for the umpteenth time how this series doesn’t have anything going for it other than tig ol’ biddies, but even for softcore porn its annoying. I cannot overstate how much this episode, and this show, completely fails to do anything right. Its not sexy, its not funny, its not interesting, and its very existence makes me ashamed to be an anime fan.

How many characters are even involved in this mess? I swear, for the life of me, it feels like every episode has some new character that’s been there the whole time but that I don’t remember. No doubt this is because the show has a cast size it has no business even trying to have, but it doesn’t help that they all blend in together. Their personalities are so finite, so limited, that they can barely even qualify as characters. Some of them are defined merely by their fetishes, while others seem to have only aesthetic appeal.

There are these random inserts of drama, like Fubuki’s conversation with Yumi, that are surrounded on both sides by ecchi silliness, so they fail to retain any kind of seriousness. Not that it really matters, because Fubuki and Yumi are so simplistic and their dialogue so weak that you’ll be in hysterics just from listening to these two talk to each other. There’s a certain degree of corniness expected from an anime, but this is just pushing the limit. This is the kind of writing that makes “The Room” look like high art.

And can we talk for a moment why Fubuki is even allowed to exist in this hot spring with the ninjas? Why don’t the ninjas just attack Fubuki on sight? Why do they treat her like just another person when in the last episode she unleashed a horde of monsters on the city? This episode is going to give me an ulcer with how stressful it is to watch. Please avoid this series at all costs, there are better shows, and much better pornography out there for people to enjoy.