Honest to God, I didn’t know it was a hentai game before I played it.

Hentai doesn’t always mean an octopus is looming nearby, patiently waiting for unprotected orifices. Literally translating to “pervert” in Japanese, hentai spans the gamut from weird to just plain wtf. It can be an unassumingly naked woman or a man with Godzilla-sized gonads shooting lasers at sexy witch girls. I don’t even know. It’s just...all I can say is “thanks, Japan”. We didn’t ask for it, yet hentai is here to stay.

Enter Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus. The third installment in the Senran Kagura series, this was actually released for the PS Vita in the States back in 2014 and in Japan waaaaay back in 2013. It now graces our PCs via Steam, and we couldn’t be happier aboob it. I mean about it. Titties.

If you’re not familiar with the series (as I wasn’t), you play as one of the three all-girls shinobi ninja training schools. I chose Gessen Girls’ Academy because I thought Yumi, the main girl, was beautiful. The story starts off innocently enough - Yumi and the girls are headed to see their ailing grandfather, bringing him his sole form of sustenance: strawberry daifuku. As if things couldn’t get more Japanese, a challenger appears and announces himself as the legendary Hanzo - the girls’ grandfather’s arch nemesis. Naturally, he takes this opportunity to molest each girl; ninja-like of course, which is to say he feels them all up and then disappears before they can do anything about it. That was tolerable at first - sure they were riled up about it - but they were seething with rage once they found out Hanzo had eaten all of poor grandfather’s strawberry daifuku. Yumi initiated a war, and a blood feud between the schools was now on.

This is about where the game shifts from on-screen text to actually being able to control a character. There are many options to choose from when in the school and it functions as a main menu of sorts. There’s really only one you need to know about, however, and that’s the dressing room, where you can choose your character’s outfits, hair, etc. Obviously an important touch, because there’s lots of boobage and we don’t have all day to wait for clothes to come off.

Oh, that’s right - the girls’ clothing comes off.

See, this isn’t so much of a fighting game but a really REALLY thinly-veiled soft-core porn with great mechanics, storyline, and gameplay. Okay, so it sure sounds like a fighting game, but we all know that’s not why we picked it up. Let’s not delude ourselves.

The fighting mechanics are decent - this appears to be partially controller-supported, but I opted to use the keyboard. WASD keys control movement, left and right mouse buttons attack, “K” jumps, and...well, I’ll let you all discover the rest. The one and only frustrating thing about the controls was that they didn’t actually explain them for the PC at all, instead keeping the original instructional text for what I assume is PS Vita. For the PC, “A” and “X” do not do what the text says they do. This left everything up to guess, and in the middle of an intense shinobi-ninja battle where my clothes are being ripped to shreds, that’s not a good thing. My advice is to head straight to the tutorial level first so you can figure out all the controls before having your tight, firm ass handed to you.

So about the “clothes being ripped to shreds” bit…

Basically, when a shinobi-ninja-girl starts losing, her clothes start magically bursting off her chest and derriere, because of course they do. The first stage is where the girls’ clothing is partially shredded, and the second stage is where the girls’ clothing is completely off and they’re in their bras and undies. Does it go any further than that? You’ll just have to play it and see! This goes for the enemy as well as the character you’ve chosen, so really, even if you’re losing, aren’t you still winning? Methinks so!

But enough about boobs. What about the music, graphics, and other non-boobs stuff?

Well, as always with JAPANESE Japanese imports, everything is stellar. The music is very well-done - that opening number really brought me back to the days when I religiously listened to JRock. The graphics are impeccable - I’ve never seen jigglier, bouncier boobs! And the character art is, of course, amazing. No homo, but I could look at these lovely ladies aaaaaaaaaaaaall day.

There’s a reason why Senran Kagura has made it to number three in the series - it’s unapologetically good on the hentai games scale. If you took out the nudie bits, this would really just be a run-of-the-mill fighting game that couldn’t hope to compete with Tekken, Street Fighter, and the like. Put the nudie bits back in (that’s what she said) and you have a really well-made hentai game that adds to the genre in a fun, flirty, and fappingly awesome kind of way.