So Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus may be the most-perverted game I've ever played, but damn if it isn't also a GOOD musou-style game. I would describe it as a fusion of Sengoku Basara Battle Heroes with Samurai Warriors 3- the main point of battles is your chosen character battling against another main character, but there's also squads of grunts on the field assisting the enemy character. The amount of characters on screen is much fewer in number than a typical musou, but this really isn't a problem since new enemy squads spawn the instant another squad is taken out.
The game has typical musou-style controls: two attacks, a jump button, block, a musou button, and a dash button, which allows you to do fast "ninja runs," dash through incoming attacks, or use it to extend combo chains both on the ground and in the air. Before you can do super attacks, you have to first power-up your character by pressing the musou button. Doing this will also refill your life bar (the same goes for your opponent), and also gives you a (perverted, of course!) "magical transformation" scene. You can then use the musou button with square, triangle, or circle to do one of three different super moves of varying damage. The third level super has to be unlocked. There's also an additional power-up mode where you hold R and use your fingers on the touch screen to rip-off your clothes and get a strength boost, but I haven't been able to do this and am assuming it needs to be unlocked as well.
The game's skill trees are also done musou style. It doesn't appear that weapons can be powered-up or that there are different weapons/armor/items available.
And yeah, again, it's perverted at hell. Totally
all the way. Damage an enemy enough (or get damaged) and you get a close up shot of the chest and/or rear area clothing getting ripped off until nothing is left but underwear. Get strong enough and when you defeat another main character, you will knock all of her clothes clean off...the game censors boobs with little angry faces. You can also, thankfully, choose to skip these in-game cut scenes, including the transformation scenes, completely by pressing X or O, because the novelty of seeing this happen over and over again gets old quick. You can also unlock and buy various clothing articles and parts to customize characters with. Similar to Soul Calibur V, you can put parts pretty much anywhere...and you can already imagine what people have come up with.
This game includes an online pass, so online play and DLC are only available on Japanese PSN accounts. You can play multiplayer locally or against the CPU if you want the trophies, so there's really not much reason to bother unless you want the DLC (outfits and two additional characters).
I'd recommend importing Senran Kagura if you like or can stand the absurd, ridiculous amount of
ecchi that is all over this game. It's doubtful this will ever be localized unless they censor the hell out of it.
