I was curious to see just what the game experience is like for Senran Kagura, so I checked out a youtube search and found an extended sample. It ran on something called a "PS Vita" and it's surprisingly good. The main characters gainax nicely during play. (Actual game play begins about 2:00.)

As one of the main girls gets progressively more damaged she loses her clothing. It's obvious why they did that -- but the incentive structure is wrong. If you're playing Asuka (for instance; that's who was being played in that video) then you get rewarded for losing. The right incentive structure would be for her to lose clothing as you gained points -- but of course that wouldn't make any sense.

Not that the game makes a lot of sense anyway.

I don't play games like that; I never have. But I enjoy watching other people play them, on occasion, and this one isn't the worst game I've ever seen.

I wonder if you can play all five of the main characters from Hanzou Academy? Hibari would be the problem, because she's not as good as any of the others. Her big thing is special attacks, and I wonder if she accumulates mana faster than anyone else?

In that video, Asuka used two special moves. One was an enhanced attack. The other was a heal that restored all her clothes (boo). She didn't call her frog, and in fact I don't recall her ever summoning her frog in the anime. But Hibari calls her rabbit a lot of times. I wonder if she can do that in the game? (Yagyuu summons her squid a lot of times, too, but Ikaruga and Katsuragi never summon their totems.)

I would think that Ikaruga and Yagyuu would be the best two player characters, and then Asuka, then Katsuragi, and finally Hibari. But I imagine they've done things to balance them all, so that they're approximately equal.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at 01:35 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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