Senran Kagura: Peach Beach Splash is a spin-off from the series. Instead of a hack n slash like previous games, this is a third person shooter, albeit one using water guns. As you can glean from the title, this is a pure fan service game where the characters are fighting on the beach in swimsuits. The setup is simple, and this is not a surprise given the series is not known for its story. Supposedly an ancient tradition for shinobi to battle it out in a competition on the beach using water guns, the Peach Beach Splash competition returns after getting all the characters from the different schools together to participate. There is supposedly a deeper, darker, reason for why this competition exists but you just need to know that the characters agreed to it, and they will all be wearing swimsuits firing water guns at each other.
Considering the genre change, the controls feel good. It has a stock standard third person shooter control scheme. You can quick toggle between manual aiming, or auto-locking onto an opponent (i.e. heavy aim assist). The slight twist here is that each character can use the water as jets to jump and stay high up in the air, which is really fun to do. They can also use the water to dodge and slide forward in high speed. Both manoeuvres aren’t mandatory in single player mode as the game is pretty easy overall. The ammo for each weapon is represented by four water tanks on the screen and you will need to reload by holding down the square button. This causes the character to crouch and slow down so you need to be careful and keep an eye on how much water is left.
Each character basically plays and controls the same. Their only point of difference is their melee attack, which is unique to each character but something you don’t really use that much. Each character has a loadout which is based upon the card system. Therefore, the gameplay differs only with what you have selected as your weapon, which ranges from assault rifles, pistols, shotguns, and rocket launchers. The card system allows different abilities to be equipped to a character, such as homing attacks, buffs, and debuffs. This means that there are randomized card packs that you get from completing the missions to unlock new cards, as well as an in-game shop. There are hundreds of cards in the game, and the rarer ones give better effects of the same ability. Any duplicates you get from card packs are used to level up existing cards and characters.
The gameplay ends up becoming hectic and chaotic, especially thanks to the water splashing effects where you hit and get hit. This is mostly a team-based game but unfortunately, the AI is terrible. During harder matches, especially on higher difficulties if you select them, the AI will die. In story mode, they will not automatically revive and since it takes time to revive them yourself, it is better not to do so because you would currently be the target of the enemies. The game tends to overwhelm you with numbers. It’s not fun when you are knocked down and it takes forever to get back up. This is especially egregious in boss battles where the objective is to defeat the boss, but there are unending spawns of mooks that get in the way.
The single player story mode tells the story from five different perspectives, basically one from each of the schools / groups. Each story arc has ten missions. Perhaps most disappointing is how quickly these matches go by, they usually take anywhere from less than a minute to five minutes. It feels like you are just getting into the groove of the match and then it ends. Many missions have you fighting against generic enemies and there are only one of two objectives, either defeat every single enemy, or put out some fires. Each story arc takes just a bit over an hour to complete, so there isn’t much time for any sort of story, and it is over too quickly. The story is told via text dialogues with the character models onscreen, so it’s not very engrossing either.
The structure of each story arc and its objectives to too similar to each other, so it will get repetitive. The boss battles aren’t designed too well and it keeps making the same mistakes. It generally has a boss that is situated high up in the end and then swarms you with enemies. Your teammates will struggle to stay alive and die. This means that the game is too reliant on the player having good skill cards to equip on everyone so that they can survive a bit longer. This isn’t great when you are playing story mode the first time through as you won’t have nice cards by that point. The level designs also require improvement. They are supposed to be complex stages with varying heights and paths. However, due to the gameplay favoring speed and chaos as everyone zips around, some parts of the stages feel too cramped. You’ll often find yourself blocked by the varying heights as you try and wrestle the controls to get back up to the platform you fell from.
You are expected to level up your characters, weapons, and skills over the course of the game. The problem is that if you are playing only the single player content, then you will not earn enough in-game money and get enough cards to level up to keep pace. Each level takes exponentially more duplicate cards, but you earn duplicate cards and in-game money as roughly the same pace across all ten missions in a story arc. This can me while the first difficulty is too easy, the next step up, and the one after, will become too hard to certain stages. There is a real amount of grind to leveling up the everything that you would like to use. Obtaining all the unique skill cards is also a mammoth task. You’ll probably lose interest with the game long before you even get close to 100%.
Once you are done with the main story, there are 50+ more missions that cover off some side stories. These are sillier in nature compared to the main story. Not as much effort was put into them though as each one basically has some text at the beginning (without any in-game models either), then you play five consecutive stages back-to-back, before some text at the end to cap it off. The last piece of single player content are four tournaments of increasing difficulty. You can play these using any characters for your team. These are lucrative in terms of rewards and they’re more fun in that it’s a deathmatch instead. Each battle has a time limit, and you need to get more KOs than the other team to win and progress.
In the beginning, you will feel that the UI layout needs a bit of work. what we got isn’t the best in terms of delivering the info you need at a quick glance. When the action is so quick and frantic, the last thing you need is slow down to check your health, or check where the enemy is, or what skill cards you have that are available to be used. You also run out of water (i.e. ammunition) relatively quickly so that you are constantly shooting and then reloading after one or two enemies, which slows the pacing down. The graphics are fantastic though with a bright and colorful palette. It uses this to its advantage when you down an opponent, there is an option to repeatedly splash them to reveal further scenes of fan service. There is also a separate mode where you can “interact” with any of the female characters, which is surprising that it managed to make it through to the final version of the game given how... controversial it can be.
Overall, Senran Kagura: Peach Beach Splash, is a fun spin-off to the series. The pivot from hack n slash to a third person shooter, but with water guns, actually works out really well here. The core game mechanics are fine and surprisingly good. It’s just that there are some nitpicks in the game design that can make it more annoying to play. The huge emphasis on random card packs to get better skills, and the sheer number of duplicate cards you need to grind to level up anything to a decent level, are the main pain points. The story has never been a strong suit of the series and it’s not great here, but it is enough to push you through so that you can enjoy the gameplay and fan service instead.