Message #333773

[The Truth]

Game being rated: Senran Kagura Burst

Graphics: so/so. It was made two years ago, and it does show in the models. But the cutscenes and anime sequences are high quality. 7/10

Music: Some of the best video game music. My favourite is Haruka's non-transformed theme. I like Asuka's theme too, even if it does make me think of square-dancing. 9.5/10

Story: Surprisingly, the story is really good. The original storyline, for Hanzo side, is a bit generic, but the writers went all-out for the Hebi story - it's funny, the characters seem real, and it gets really, really dark. The only real issue is that the Hanzo and Hebi stories clash at points - one story implies the characters just met, while the other mentions them being friends for years. it also makes it a bit confusing who wins what battles, and totally changes one of the main plot points. In Hanzo side, Haruka steals the scroll and Hibari goes to Hebi to recover it. In Hebi side, Dougen hypnotizes Hibari into bringing him the scroll and joining Hebi. Aside from those little conflicts, however, the story flows nicely. 8.5/10

Gameplay: Extremely face-paced beat-em-up style. If you're not getting 500+ hit combos, you're doing it wrong.
Each character is unique, so there's a bit of a learning curve with each character.
The game forces you to use all the characters, which is usually good..unless it forces you to play a character you're bad at. I for example am terrible with ranged characters, so playing Yagyu was painful for me. 9.5/10

Performance: Minor lag in the hub zone, but the stages themselves are lag-free.

Voice-acting: The localization team kept the original Japanese voiceacting, which was a good decision. 10/10

Translation: XSEED seems to have been slightly lazy with the translation, with some grammar/punctuation errors and seemingly random changes. "Itadakimasu", which basically is like saying Grace, somehow turned into "rub-a-dub, thanks for the grub", for example. But the plot is still coherent and the issues are not distracting. 8/10

Price: Burst is actually two full-length games in one - an updated version of the original Senran Kagura, and Burst, the "sequel". So yeah, $30 is a pretty good price.

Replayability: Each stage is fairly short, and you'll need to run them all multiple times. Each character has their own ranking when finishing a stage, so even if you got an A ranking on one character, you can still go for the A rank on all the others. Plus, there's apparently a reward for finishing every stage in Frenzy Mode, but since Frenzy Mode is really hard, I don't know what the prize is.

Other Features: The dressing room feature is kinda silly, but it can still be fun to mess around with. ...I gave all the characters giant glasses and a piece of toast.

Other: There is a very good chance that I am crushing on Haruka. I would say 100%.