Neptunia X Senran Kagura: Ninja Wars Review – Pretty Ninja Cross-Over Time

When two beloved franchises with different mechanics cross over into a single game, one can’t help but wonder how it’ll work, yet combining the magical transforming warrior goddesses of Neptunia with the flashy, costume-swapping shinobi of Senran Kagura kinda makes sense when you think about it.

Introduction

Neptunia x Senran Kagura: Ninja Wars was initially announced at Dengeki Game Festival 2019 as ‘Game e-Ninja Neptune’ before being finalised as a crossover game featuring Senran Kagura. It’s an all female cast of beautiful ladies who are happy to show off plenty of skin while brandishing their weapons of choice to settle their respective rivalries using as many super-powered moves as they can deliver.

Being very much an action-JRPG, Ninja Wars handles more like a Senran Kagura game or Neptunia action Vita spin-off than a mainline Neptunia JRPG game and features its own Neptunia alternative dimension storyline, much like Hyperdevotion Noire or Megatagmension Blanc + Nep Vs Zombies, keeping the game semi-canon within Neptunia’s ever-expanding multiverse.

It’s clear that Ninja Wars was created with a very tight budget from the way it cuts corners, with its surprisingly limited cast of playable characters which contain only the four central Neptunia goddesses and not their CPU sisters or friends, and only the four main rival school figureheads from Senran Kagura without their eclectic assortment of classmates.

The new characters created for the game are pretty fun but bring your playable roster up to only ten girls. To counter this, the Neptunia characters have brand new costumes created solely for this game which you won’t find elsewhere, though this isn’t much of a trade-off.

Story

Gamninjustri is an unusual land where all manner of ninjas gather. As the struggle for control increased between the Daimyos of the nations, tensions rose between the two great nations, each of which was home to one of the major schools of martial arts. The Compa Style has mastered the Ninja Arts based on the ‘Command Technique’, while the Honeypa Style has mastered the Ninja Arts rooted in the ‘Action Technique’.

The two camps were stuck in a ruthless competition of skill in order to achieve hegemony,
but as they fought on, a mysterious army of mechanical ninjas made their assault. The mechanical ninja army overran the smaller nations in an instant, and its leader, Yoh Gamer, made an announcement to the world, “The Super Ninja War to decide the world’s strongest school is about to begin.”

The plot parodies a united front of game consoles (the Neptunia ninja goddesses) competing with Steam (the Steeme legion) in another familiar take on this chapter of the console war, this time supported by rival ninjas from an alternate Senran Kagura.

Gameplay

The gameplay contains some elements of the previous Senran Kagura games, only that the gameplay is a touch slower, highlighting the force of strikes more so, and there is no Aerial Rave mechanic this time. However, players can perform Ninja Arts just like in the previous games, but they cost stamina rather than Ninja Art Scrolls. All characters can now use ranged attacks with either kunais or shurikens, which is a rarity in a Senran Kagura game.

The gameplay also includes a pairing system, just like in Deep Crimson and Action Unleashed, where the player can switch between two characters at anytime during missions. The game doesn’t allow the player to play as only one character per mission, but completing them with two characters gives beneficial rewards for both.

A mini-game is also present in Neptunia x Senran Kagura: Ninja Wars that focuses on balancing on a peach using the controller’s motion controls. Completing this mini-game will power-up the character that was used in said mini-game temporarily during the next mission. Upping the difficulty will make these power-ups more powerful, but makes balancing on the peach much more difficult.

Graphics/Sound

The game’s graphical detail and frame-rate have never looked better. Everything looks deliciously crisp now. Textures are smoother than ever, colours are varied and contrasting rather than simply bright throughout, and the light and shade has a brilliant next-gen quality to it. Unfortunately, you won’t find many characters or levels to really flaunt this graphical overhaul.

The quality of these regular spin-offs varies from title to title, usually with the more favourable games in the Neptunia franchise earning a top-notch English dub. Sadly, it’s a dub that Ninja Wars didn’t receive. Perhaps that’s an unfortunate sign of things to come, for both series.

Replayability/Trophies

Being a short story of just a dozen stages means the game is padded out with a huge number of side-quests to give you the necessary experience to survive the boss battles; side-quests which you’ll need to finish in their entirety if you want that platinum trophy. It’s a varied assortment of trophies which sadly required a bit too much patience, skill and research for my liking.

Conclusion

The girls are certainly stylish in their movements with skills that pack a satisfying punch, yet it’s hard to get too attached to characters which aren’t dubbed in English. It’s this missing dub that makes you work harder to find that classic Neptunia fourth-wall-breaking humour which, whilst still there, doesn’t do much to liven up this short story.

There are certainly fun moments of flashy ninja gameplay here, yet it’s easy to overlook them when you’re playing the same dozen levels over and over again to complete side-missions, grind levels and skill-based kills, and farm money and items to unlock every last trophy. It’s missing Neptunia’s huge, ever-expanding world and the assortment of characters and classic fan-service from both series.

Curiously, in one of the dialogs of the game, Vert mentions the following sentence; “People may at times feel writing strong men and beautiful women is sexist, or showing the preciousness of life and the misery of war is violent and savage. What I cannot stand are prejudices spoken by those who have only played a few of the titles, lies said by those who have never beaten any. Restrictions born from being manipulated by those opinions, trying to chase popularity. That cannot possibly be justice! No, I shall say it, it is evil!” This is a clear reference to the current censorship that is happening today towards anime and video games.

There are pleasing moments here and there, yet Ninja Wars is a game that follows every step forward with an unfortunate step back. As such, Neptunia x Senran Kagura doesn’t highlight the best bits of either franchise and feels generously mediocre at best. As a Neptunia game, it’s tolerable, yet as a Senran Kagura game, it’s a disappointing ending to a franchise which now seems to have reached its unfulfilling climax.