Looking back, Senran Kagura isn’t exactly one of my best reviews although I do consider it to be one of my funniest as the jokes and comments I came up with throughout the review do get a laugh out of people and even me. It’s always good to give yourself self-praise. Based off the 3-D beat-em up action game where you play as busty female ninjas this was an anime you knew not to take seriously. Just from watching the first episode you clearly got the idea that this anime wasn’t going to be deep or thought provoking and was just going to be a fanservice anime. The anime centers around these 5 high school ninjas in training who become confronted by dark ninjas who want to steal the scroll of light and combine it with their scroll of dark in order to control the world of something. Rather than give us a cool setup where we see these ninjas go on missions or battle against other ninjas we instead just get high school hijinks and a few fights here and there that aren’t really that impressive. Even the fanservice is a letdown. Yeah, in a series that’s literally nothing but fanservice and the one thing you would expect to go all out on doesn’t occur and it’s a real letdown for me at least.
The characters aren’t much to gawk over either. Yeah they have sexy bodies but they’re really not all that interesting. We got Asuka the happy go-lucky girl who always brings everyone together, Ikaruga the hard worker as well as big sister of the group, the brash one Katsu, the prodigy Yagyuu the prodigy, and finally Hibari the annoying one you wish would die in a blazing fire. While they’re not bad characters, we get a chance to know their backstories and everything they just aren’t interesting characters you want to follow around. Truth be told, I found the dark ninjas more interesting than these girls as they had more personality and development. When I first reviewed this anime I gave a 3/10 which I still stand by to this day and many people have wondered why I didn’t give it a lower score since it’s a pretty bad anime. Well for that is because it didn’t really do anything to piss me off. Don’t get wrong, the anime is by no means a good anime. It’s bad but that’s just it, it’s just bad. It doesn’t insult our intelligence, betray the source material, or belittle us in anyway it’s just a bad anime. It’s basically on the low specter of bad. It’s bad but it’s harmless nonetheless. On another note I went into this anime not expecting much from it to begin with. Seriously, when you watched the first episode and read the overview did you really think you were going to watch something along the lines of Cowboy Bebop and FMA? I sure as hell didn’t and I think that’s why people are way harder on this series than they needed to be. We like animes like Cowboy Bebop and FMA so much that we expect all animes to be something along the same lines as these animes but that’s just impossible. No two animes are the same and we sometimes forget that. Each anime is different and whenever I do a review I approach each anime differently. I don’t expect every anime to have the total package (excellent characters, good development, great story, action, etc.) I do expect it however to be entertaining and grab my interest which is something this anime unfortunately didn’t do all that well but at the same time I was able to make a lot of great jokes from watching it and like I said before it was pretty much harmless. Nothing ticks me off except for Hibari but other than that you either watch the anime or skip it and you would be just fine either way. Bad anime? Yes. God awful anime? I don’t really think so.