A little while back, I was breadcrumbed to a certain beat-em-up video game: Senran Kagura (specifically Burst Re:Newal, the re-remake of the first game of the series). It was aggressively fanservicey, but the button-mashing gameplay was fun enough and, like many before me, I found that the writing in the visual novel segments between missions was… better than it had any right to be. Don’t misunderstand, the game is not high art or anything like that, but for something that could have gotten away with the barest minimum excuse plot to get busty ninja girls taking clothing damage while beating up hordes of generic enemies? It went several steps above and beyond the call of duty to actually develop characters and a scenario that were likable and effective, so that most of the cast had more than one dimension and the conflict had at least a little meat to it.
And, as is the case with more than one dubious and fanservice-laden series, there was an anime of Senran Kagura. Actually, there are two seasons, but this time around I’ll be focused on the first season (Subtitled Ninja Flash!) since that covers the first game’s main storyline in terms of adapting the story.
The show opens, oddly enough, with a ninja on a mission. This is Asuka, our main character and the typical “heart of the group”. She does some cool ninja stuff, fighting off villains apparent, and even slips the audience some fanservice too when she loses her sweater to give her foes the slip. We catch up with her after the intro returning home. She encounters an oddly “designed like a main character” girl on the boat back and then heads to class. Of course, Asuka’s no normal student, and she soon makes her way to the hidden chamber where she and her ninja classmates are prepared in secret.
Those classmates are Ikaruga, the calmly serious class rep; Katsuragi, the comedic perv; Hibari, the lovable weak klutz; and Yagyu, the cold and gloomy girl with an eyepatch (and a massive soft spot for Hibari). Their teacher, Kiriya, who in the show seems to enter and leave scenes solely via smoke bomb, also makes an appearance to give Asuka her grade and set everyone training.
We shortly catch the plot when Asuka encounters the girl from the boat again, and it turns out that said girl, Homura, is an evil ninja trainee with her own posse and their sights set on Asuka’s school – not that Asuka catches on. In the anime here, she’s kind of bad at ninja stuff, a bit like Hibari, rather than just being overeager compared to her level of training. This does lead to the group and their teacher becoming aware that there’s trouble to be found, in the form of enemy ninjas, but not anything about those ninjas just yet.
As the opening acts (and narrator) introduce us to the action excuses like transformations, barriers, and secret arts, we get an episode largely concerned with team bonding and getting Asuka over her fear of frogs (Because, again, we’re doing the thing with her where she sucks starting out), until it’s time for the evil ninjas to strike again.
As a side note, the terms “good” and “evil” are used a good deal for the factions of shinobi, but they’re more along the lines of “Government” and “private or criminal” than a matter of cosmic morality.
The first attacker quickly gets out her grudge against society, hinting at a broader backstory, and fights Ikaruga while Asuka… um… is there too. Ikaruga gets her rear handed to her and outfit shredded, but Yomi pulls the good old “That’s enough for today” like tipping your hand and sauntering off isn’t one of those things that villains should really learn to never do. This launches into an episode focused on Ikaruga’s struggles and backstory (That she was adopted into her rich family and has a jealous goon of an older brother who hates and is jealous of her for reason of being passed over for her).
This was also about where I noticed that the narrator in this show is fairly unnecessary. A couple of the early explanations about shinobi powers are alright, but there’s a scene here where we see Ikaruga’s adoption and that her “big brother”, who looks like a hell of a punk, is giving little Ikaruga the stink eye, so I don’t think the narrator needed to explain that she was adopted. We saw that well enough.
Said jerk older brother comes to visit and tries to steal Ikaruga’s sword. He gets nowhere, but she feels even more out of sorts regarding family and bonding, an issue remedied (along with Asuka’s frog fear) when Asuka’s master ninja grandfather suggests that the class is, basically, family itself, and Ikaruga applies herself with the bond she always wanted. It’s basic, but welcome character growth stuff.
Over the next few episodes (which aren’t as single-story focused, though the narrator does make sure to spit out more backstory we could have guessed from imagery) we get some more encounters with girls from the evil ninja school, Hebijo, in which they attack but break off the engagement fairly quickly. It’s still kind of stupid, but on the other hand the show actually acknowledges that their behavior of striking and then leaving without killing anyone or stealing anything is pretty strange, causing Kiriya (who is also thinking a lot about a past student of his, who he blames himself for the death of) to wonder about their motives.
Soon enough, the evil ninjas attack the school, each one having a cage match with her main character rival, including a formally hostile meeting between Asuka and Homura. At the end of the attack, Asuka, Ikaruga, and Katsuragi are perhaps shaken but little worse for the wear. However, Yagyu was badly injured going the reckless extra mile to protect Hibari, and Hibari herself, while spared such damage, was left with an obvious plot trinket by her evil rival. It’s also strongly implied that the precious student Kiriya believes died is the immediate boss of the evil ninja girls (though she answers to a higher boss of her own there)
After a training episode (which also introduced another more senior ninja, Daidoji, who goes on to work with Kiriya) and a backstory sequence (showing how the class met each other and developed over Katsuragi and Ikaruga’s three years) – both actually good episodes that show us the characters relating to one another rather than having the narrator explain it – Hibari is mind controlled via that trinket that her rival left her, causing her to steal the school’s McGuffin (the Super Secret Ninja Arts Scroll). Her rival, upon taking it, convinces Hibari that she’ll be regarded as a traitor and thus convinces her to come to the evil ninja school, though Hibari does so after some thought and with some hope of stealing the scroll back.
Now, so far I’ve avoided making direct comparisons to the game’s story – the plot lines have a good number of differences, even if more similarities, and most of that is probably due to having only twelve episodes rather than having to fill something like fifty missions. But this I really can’t let stand without comment. In the game, Hibari takes the scroll herself, hoping to use its power to redeem herself after Yagyu got hurt on her account. Once at the evil ninja hideout, which she actually managed to discover on her own (even if a trap was set), she found she couldn’t use it and would thus be trivially overpowered. She then made her own choice to enroll specifically because it might give her the chance to steal the scroll back, and from there discovered a lot more about their enemies and how those girls were, themselves, mostly surprisingly decent people with friends of their own and not just monsters.
To be fair, that’s a complex movement, but not much of it is actually shortcutted by having Hibari be mind controlled. Instead, she’s just robbed of agency and the question of her guilt made clear. This takes a character arc that was kind of unique and showed her strengths as well as her obvious technical weakness and encouraged her to grow both by overcoming her faults and learning to do things on her own and by bonding with others and makes it a dry, familiar one in which you could substitute anybody in the nervous or timid spectrum.
A lot like making Asuka a loser with potential rather than an up-and-coming student with heart, this wastes a good deal of what was unique and interesting about the character in the first place to instead give us something more standard. Game Hibari was a crybaby and a weakling, but she was still a shinobi, and dedicated to living up to that fearsome title. Show Hibari is every crybaby weakling you’ve seen a hundred times before; a serviceable stock character but little else. At least they let Asuka grow into her full role. Even if Hibari has the same experiences at her new school, she can’t really experience the same arc.
In any case, Kiriya’s former student (called Rin then or Suzune now), indeed now a teacher at Hebijo, leaks the school’s location (once again taking a little agency from the girls), which sees us set up for the final showdown as our four heroes go to get Hibari back (and also the scroll) while the girls of Hebijo prepare to defend their school, with death by evil ninja technique, courtesy of the headmaster, Dogen, awaiting them if they fail to defeat their rivals.
Naturally, the attempt to infiltrate the castle turns into a series of one-on-one battles between each main character and her own personal antagonist. Even Hibari gets in on it when she’s caught eavesdropping. She manages to use a telepathy technique to get out the information that the Hebijo girls have their boss holding death over their heads, which then paints said boss with the primary target.
This eventually gets us to a boss battle with Asuka and Homura against Dogen and his summoned monster, which everyone else helps out with by sending their feelings to their friends via astral projection. Dogen pulls the old load-bearing boss routine, and threatens to activate the kill spell unless he’s allowed to escape, so Rin takes the third option of grabbing him and diving for what looks like a mutual kill but doesn’t afford him the chance. The main girls escape while the Hebijo girls head back into the collapsing building to get all the other no-name Hebijo students out to safety. Some time later, Asuka is moving up in her ninja ranks and a surveillance of the ruins finds no signs of any of the Hebijo students, suggesting that they got out alright and will be met again some time. The End.
Senran Kagura: Ninja Flash! is not the worst thing, but it does have one glaring, almost fatal flaw – it tells its story worse than the game. Now, you’d expect some restructuring; Senran Kagura is not a particularly long game, so by raw time you could probably fit everything, but a game and a show are structured in different ways; again, twelve episodes instead of something like fifty missions. But by the same token, Senran Kagura wasn’t a long game. It didn’t have some epic story that couldn’t be fit into twelve episodes. In fact, you could probably beat the game in about the time it takes for the anime to run, just playing casually, and there would be a lot of that time sunk into, you know, the gameplay that wouldn’t need the same kind of focus even in an action show. So, adapting it from one to the other, you’d expect the anime to be bigger, and flesh out material to give us an even more nuanced and charming picture of these girls.
Instead, every change they made to the story was either just a factor of restructuring it and neither good nor bad, or else something that worked against the show. I’ve gone in depth into Hibari and Asuka’s problems, but similar stuff is all over the place. For instance, in the game, the Hebijo girls get their backstories out, at once or slowly, over a span of time. Here’ they’re pretty much jammed right into the end when we should already care about these characters.
Let’s take Homura for example. In the game, we hear her past at about the midpoint: she was the child of a good ninja family, developed a crush on a teacher who was really nice to her, and was then betrayed when it turned out that he was an evil ninja sent to assassinate her. She maimed him good getting out of that situation, but good ninjas have strict rules so even though her actions were entirely self-defense, she could no longer be considered one of them. She then was discovered by Hebijo, who welcomed her despite her having shredded one of their faction, and developed the sentiment that she would be comfortable with being an evil ninja both because it would breathe meaning back into her life and because ‘evil’ didn’t turn anyone away, in contrast with ‘good’ having strict rules and no redemption. It doesn’t take a lot of time to show us this, and she quite naturally thinks of it when Hibari is being inducted into Hebijo, and it gives us a window onto our main character’s rival and her friends and life.
Here, we’re briefly told at a similar point in the story (though it’s a bit deeper in compared to the whole) that she was from a good ninja family but got a criminal record because she stabbed someone, and once or twice there’s a line about evil being accepting that has no context, and not until the very end do we get any of the circumstances or an understanding of what Homura’s past means to her. We don’t really know who she is or what she believes in or why she fights in the show. She’s just an evil ninja girl student with high skill and maybe a kind of affable demeanor.
Some of the characters suffer this less than others. Katsuragi and Ikaruga are pretty close to par with their other versions, as is Yomi on Team Hebijo. Kiriya gets more screen time in the present, even if the new version of his backstory with Rin is less poignant despite her also getting more face time than in the main hero story of the game. But it’s a baffling shame that any of the characters should have to suffer downgrades. When you take the gameplay out of a game and leave only the story, you think you’d have the resources to make the story better if anything.
On its own, Senran Kagura: Ninja Flash is a C-. Like, bottom edge of C-. The characters, being based on fairly decent ones, aren’t annoying. The nonsensical plot is basic enough to follow and doesn’t make the show harder to watch. The fighting is alright, mediocre at best unless you put a lot of stock in the fact that the show gets the characters to brawl in their underwear for all the most dramatic battles, but I can’t say it’s actually bad action. I really, really didn’t want to give this one a passing grade, but if I’m being honest than that’s what it did earn.
However, if you’re the least bit interested in anything Senran Kagura… just play the game. Not only to you get a game that way, but the story and characters are better in just about every way. Or watch a Let’s Play, I guess, and once again get the better version of the story. Don’t bother with the show, it’s the cheap knockoff of everything that was surprisingly alright about the game.