[Ecchi]Senran Kagura: Deep Crimson (2025)

The second Senran Kagura, the end of the first timeline, and the last original game for me to play… except they released an endless runner this year and ruined my whole intro.

Deep Crimson is the second proper game and the end of what was originally the Nintendo timeline of games. It’s still focused on the Hanzo and Crimson Squad girls, but introduces Kagura and is the game in the series with the biggest focus on yoma. Which really aren’t as scary as the rest of the series paints them as.

Story- 5

This is split into 5 chapters, but really it’s 3 arcs with the last arc taking 3 of those chapters up. The first arc is the end of Burst with the Hanzo and Hebijo girls fighting, Dogen the villain summoning Orochi and the battles with it. It’s quick and is probably the most done part of the entire Senran Kagura story with it being in 4 games, a manga and an anime. That ends with Homura leaving Hebijo and questioning Asuka’s sword and shield concept to being a ninja.

Arc 2 is Homura learning to value her friends. That’s really it, it ends with revealing Dogen is alive and the Crimson Squad goes and deals with him again. This ends with them still being renegades but not being wanted, which I swear makes Katsuragi’s parents thing of being wanted dead feel weirdly out of place with how Crimson Squad got rid of their wanted status in like 2 weeks. Is being a renegade a big deal or not? What did her parents actually do?

Arc 3 takes everyone to Kyoto and introduces Kagura, the girl. Apparently it’s not a rank in this version of events, but a natural phenomenon of this one girl. She eats orbs that come out of yoma to grow and in he final state her explodes, killing all the Yoma(and people) in the area. She’s a walking nuke. The main part of this arc is the Hanzo girls struggling with being the order to kill Kagura without being told why, with the Crimson Squad pointing out her puppet like obeying orders for no given reason is.

Also, yoma. They are just around and really aren’t threatening. You kill a bunch of them. Spider ladies, ninja girls, snake girls and a few other types. This is the only game that has them take girl forms and has you fight them, the other games mostly treat yoma as this massive threat or basically non existent. Either this generation is just way better, or yoma are just way stronger in the Playstation multiverse cause here it’s hard to believe you need a bunch of top tier ninjas to barely kill one.

The game ends stating that Crimson Team has more stories to tell, which ended up being a huge lie with how Yumi steals their spotlight for the rest of the series.

Peach Beach and this share the theme of authority versus morality and which is right. It’s the only actual theme this series really explores beyond letting the new generation take over, and it’s okay. The series was never deep but at least it was trying. I do wish it went a bit longer without justifying the Hanzo girls though, they never really deal with their crisis of faith in the system. It’s introduced and is basically an excuse to have all the rival girls fight each other again like 3 times then the story moves on.

As for the story DLC, this has 3. All three are about boobs. 1 is a short afterstory about Mirai getting some comments about her size and so stealing Kagura’s level up orbs. 2 is the Hebijo girls getting huge with “titan boobs” and the Hanzo girls needing to defeat them to save the world. 3 is Mirai gets a drug to increase bust size that needs another girl for her to steal size from, and Asuka just got a growth spurt in her chest. The last two might as well be alternate worlds.

Gameplay-5

Deep Crimson is a weird entry. it’s similar to the other beat’em ups like Burst and Estival, but also not really in a few ways. The tutorial kind of shows this. It starts in hallways like Burst, but then the camera angles up to be all cinematic. It’s honestly awkward but it works. You get some arena fights and the mission is over after like 3 areas. No mission in the game is longer then that. All missions are 1-2 mob fights then boss. The bosses are also a mix of being yoma and the other ninja girls so you aren’t fighting the same 10 girls the entire game. Hell the game has 5 proper bosses, something the rest of the series kept at like one or two.

You will notice pretty quickly that actually beating things takes a while because your damage isn’t that great. That’s because you don’t have your equipment yet. In the mission select screen you can choose special missions, these gimmick trials(combo fights, only ground hits do damage kind of stuff) reward spirit stones, which are the gear of the game(which only Peach Beach also had). There’s 30 trials and so 30 stones, you can equip 3 to any girl. Without the attack and defense stones fights just take a while and bosses will rip through your health so do these early.

There’s also yoma nest, which the game calls a 14 floor tower. It’s not, you can start at any node adjacent to one you’ve beaten. This is the only mode to play if you just want to fight enemies. You get 1 intro for your fighters and then up to 14 battles in a giant circle area, which lets the camera work with you. It’s basically the closest to Shinovi’s combat camera you get. 75 of the 100+ nodes have weapon skins for the girls.

Back to the core game, the biggest new and unique mechanic is team up. In arc 2 you get the ability to bring two girls into a mission. This allows a special 4th special move which is usually the strongest thing you have, and in general they fight and do decent damage all on their own. If they die they just revive after a bit. There’s an affection mechanic between all the different pairs which I think just affects the special ninja art’s damage, it caps at 50 and does nothing else.

Now then, the game has three major issues for me beyond how short most missions are. One is the change to follow ups. In the rest of the series, if you knock someone away you just hit the dash button and are ready to hit them some more. In Deep Crimson your girl has to ready her ninja hook before doing the dash, so basically a delay in follow up. This lead to my target recovering and hitting me as I reached them a few times, making the whole aerial part of the combat system generally pointless. The second issue is the camera.

The camera is always set to show the battlefield and is close to your character. In square arenas, this means if you go to the far end, you can’t see the closer end to the player. It got annoying running around trying to find enemies or bosses because the camera was to close. The big circle areas were better as the camera follows behind you, but also the big circles are always wastelands or empty circles, not interesting to look at.

Final issue is that team up super moves are way to strong, to the point fights are just charge up to 3 scrolls on both girls and ultimate. Repeat. Enemy health means this was just the most logical way to fight, as team ups were basically the only real good damage. Fights without team ups were just slogs. Maybe they expected some grinding? That would be a first just to beat the story.

Last thing, frenzy got a complete retool. It’s not a start of the mission mode thing anymore. If you are in ninja form and have max ninja power, you can enter frenzy. It gives you unlimited ninja power for specials, drains your health and ends once the current fight does. It makes it a usable tool rather then an alt playstyle like every other game.

DLC 2 is a schmup. No idea why, but it is. It’s to zoomed in for me to enjoy it but it works. DLC 1 adds chibi forms to some of the girls to play with who skip their cutscenes for skills and transforming. There’s also a playable male(Ikaruga’s brother) you could get.

Lewdness-3(5 with DLC)

CG wise there’s basically nothing. There’s like 4 with vaguely ripped clothes, but not posing or anything actual sexual in any cg. At best the 2 Hebijo group shots are the most fanservice from the base game’s cg as they have the most boob in them.

DLC 1 adds a hotspring cg with 12 girls. That’s basically it. DLC 2 has no cg, and 3 has Asuka grow like 3 cup sizes and groping herself in her uniform, that’s the only fanservice cg from that one.

Like Estival, a lot of the fanservice in this one comes from the animations of the characters, and there’s a lot of them. The team up mechanic adds in a bunch of unique battle start and end scenes + the combo ninja art. There’s also story scenes that use the in game engine in a not VN style! The only game in the series to have actual cinematics past the opening video. This lets you admire the jiggle a lot more then other games in the series. Also, clothes breaks have been separated into lower and upper body, so you get boob and ass jiggle as their clothes burst off.

A lot of jiggle heavy games forget that if you don’t show off the jiggle using custscenes, it mostly goes unseen. Most games you run around with the character’s ass being on screen a majority of time, so while they might be jiggling it’s hard to actual admire when playing. Stopping to walk toward the screen for a few seconds is kind of awkward but it’s often the only way to see the physics. So it’s nice to have this one just throw a bunch of pre made scenes at you to see the characters move around.

DLC3 adds bust size to the dressing room. it’s not a slider, but different options which I guess is easier for the way the game deals with physics. You can basically go from Mirai size to double most of the girls normal sizes. Again, only game in the series to let you do this.

Final Thoughts

Quick thoughts is it’s the most unusual one. It stands out from the other beat’em ups with shorter stages, being more cinematic, the team-up mechanic, no leveling up the forms, and having equipment. I think Shinovi is better as a game, but as a story this had more promise then anything they did moving on from Shinovi. Fanservice wise this entry is weak. The cinematics are nice and if I screwed around in the dressing room would probably be great eye candy but that’s all it has.

So deeper thoughts on the series in general.

I don’t really see Senran Kagura as the fanservice festival it’s been made out to be. Burst really just has busty girls and clothes destruction. Deep Crimson the same. Shinovi doesn’t add anything other then more girls. Estival adds the unique loses and a beach setting, and Peach Beach adds the cards and tosses unique character systems for more beach stuff. I just don’t feel it’s as heavy on sex appeal as Dungeon Traveler or some of the Moero games. Except the beach game, but that’s because it adds in all the mobile game cards.

Honestly I think Shinovi might have been a mistake story wise. It has the best gameplay of the whole series, but the character stories really did a huge number on how serious the core stories of the series were and with the focus shifting off of Homura onto Yumi, the next two games were a joke. Both exist to set up a final boss, killing has been dropped entirely, and suddenly ninjas exist only for fighting Shin. It became even more sports anime feeling then before. Esitvial has a few decent arcs with Miyabi and Rona/Ryobi but the rest might as well have not been there. I don’t even know if I can call what the miko sisters have as an arc. They don’t do anything.

I also don’t really get why Asuka was ever the face of the series? Homura is the real core of the early story, and Asuka doesn’t ever grow as a character, minus her whole Batman thing in the second anime or her boob size. She’s not even the actual leader of her team, that’s Ikaruga. Like in world Asuka is the leader because nepotism I swear.

If it’s not obvious, I like the series but feel like it went off the rails. Playing it in reverse order makes it way to obvious they starting banking solely off the sex appeal in the later entries, while the earlier entries at least tried to be actual decent stories with good-ish gameplay. The first three games are all decent to good but the last two story games are just not fun to play for me. None of the spin offs are particularly good, but in the fanservice world of gaming are all at least mostly unique. Pinball has basically 0 games, Reflexions is 100% a unique game, and rhythm is nowhere near as saturated as action and turn based RPGs are as a genre.

I thought this was going to be some post mortem on the series. Going into this year I expected nothing new from Senran, it was basically on life support with the gacha game. I was surprised that Brown Dust 2 did a crossover with it, at this point older gacha and desperate cash grabs were really the only ones still crossing over with it. Then Senran Kagura got a new game. An infinite runner to celebrate the gacha game, but a new entry regardless. Maybe there’s some hope? I’d be cool with a Stellar Blade/Onnechanabara esque action game to end the series off with an adult Asuka. Let it end on a high note rather then never ending life support.

3DS Save for Senran Kagura: Deep Crimson

Save has all cgs and videos, full unlocked combo sets, full bestiary(I find it odd the bestiary doesn’t let you strip the girls in it) and all customization items. Two saves, one with all dlc and one without.

Gameplay: 5/10 Eroticness: 3/10 Story: 5/10

Completion: Beat all three modes, every level. Then I farmed levels to get everyone’s full combo lists in the yoma nest. Then I loaded the dlc and beat them and farmed up Murasame. It’s straightforward, no secrets in this one.

[Ecchi]Senran Kagura: Deep Crimson (2025)
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