Just saying, but I do have a curator page. If you like my remarks about games, you can find more of them here: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44130985-TDP%27s-Gaming-Escapades

Listen, this is Senran Kagura. The primary reason that makes one interested in this franchise is the appreciation for its infamous levels of fanservice. And that includes you, dear reader. Yes, YOU! Don't deny it; You would not have tried to read this review if you were not even slightly interested. But as all know, that is not everything that makes a game.
Senran Kagura: Bon Appétit tries to mix the series' famous fanservice with a rhythm-based gameplay. It does the fanservice part justice and delivers good stuff in spades. But when it comes to actually offering a good gameplay, it fails miserably. Let's go through the details, shall we?

This series has always been about the fanservice (and will be) and you have to start asking questions if you play one of these games and see it doesn't feature any kind of it.
Unsurprisingly, Senran Kagura: Bon Appétit's focus ultimately leans towards the fanservice and the game does it very well. Some of the characters are dressed in revealing clothes, the whole game has you stripping other characters bit by bit as you try to win, the jiggle physics are outrageous, the perfect victory scenes are unhinged and if you are in desperate need of some fresh grass, the dressing room feature allows you to play dress up with the clothing that you have unlocked by beating the levels, see character models up close and even perform "various actions" on them.
And this fanservice has leaked into the story mode of the game as well, with very entertaining results. Depending on the character you choose for the story mode, the events and endings would either be weird, or filled to the brim with various jokes. My favorite is Asuka's storyline, where the game constantly throws girth related jokes at you. So if you really like this part of the series, you're not going to be disappointed. The gameplay however...

Here's the thing: Just like Gal★Gun: Double Peace, a game I previously reviewed, having an entertaining story mode and good fanservice is not going to single handedly carry your game. Many players will simply not go through hours of staleness for a couple minutes of hilarity, as is evident from the low completion rates of this game's achievements.
Unfortunately, the game stumbles when it comes to anything that is not fanservice, offering an experience that gets utterly repetitive and boring within an hour or two. Taking the strong fanservice depictions aside, the game does not have much left to boast with its audiovisual presentation. Whatever background activity you see from the characters in the first match is what you're going to repeatedly see until the very end. The final judgment cutscenes (featuring Hanzo) are not entertaining, despite their very silly premise. Except for a few vocal music tracks, all of the other compositions are neither catchy nor memorable and usually feel completely out of place and out of character.
And then we have the gameplay which feels either boring AF or unnecessarily hard.

Senran Kagura: Bon Appétit is just another one of your usual rhythm games with some competitiveness seasoning. You have two lines at the bottom of the screen where patterns appear on, and you have to press or hold buttons (as instructed by the game itself) when they reach a specific area. Do this well, and you will fill up a bar at the top of the screen. Your goal is to keep your fill percentage over %50 to win a match. Seems simple enough, but the game has actually managed to make it feel bad; Starting with the input system.
In most rhythm games, the number of inputs are usually restricted to a minimum, with the difficulty coming from the complexity of the patterns. You have a small number of input methods needed to perform commands, with each of them usually getting color coded for better visibility. For example, Yakuza 0's karaoke minigame only utilizes the face buttons on a controller (e.g. ABXY buttons on an Xbox controller). Senran Kagura: Bon Appétit on the other hand, doubles the number of buttons needed to perform commands and keeps the rest intact.
This game requires you to use both the face buttons and the directional buttons (WASD and directional buttons on keyboard) at the same time, while they have similar color codes. For example, both the X and left directional buttons are signified with the blue color. This has increased the chance of the player getting utterly confused at many points in the game and especially in more chaotic moments, thus missing some inputs or mistakenly inputting something else. And the situation gets even worse when we take the difficulty into account.

Unfortunately, Senran Kagura: Bon Appétit's difficulty is not well-adjusted. And this is because the game mainly decides how hard your experience should be based on the music that is playing, with energetic/vocal tracks having faster and more complex patterns. This happens regardless of the chosen difficulty setting. So for example, if you decide to play on the easy mode and then run into one of those energetic tracks, the game will not respect your choice and increases the challenge anyway. And if you play the game on hard and run into a chiller track, the difficulty decreases despite your preferences.
Because of this, you can see lots of difficulty spikes throughout the game and some of the battles are either much easier or much harder than the ones that came before them. The worst offenders are the battles against Daidoji and especially Rin, where the difficulty takes a gigantic hike regardless of the chosen setting. At this point, even the slightest mistakes leave you with almost no chance to recover and win, as missing a note takes out a rather big chunk of the top bar. If you're on easy mode, you're gonna have a bad time and any higher difficulty is going to make you cry during those battles.

And what you have read about so far is what that you're going to get for the entirety of the game as in terms of content, nothing has been changed or added to this version compared to the original PS Vita release (which this port is directly based on), except for a few graphics settings.
Aside from story mode, you only have access to arcade and freeplay modes which are the exact same thing. The only difference is that the former has no story and the latter acts as a practice mode, so both are practically worthless. The playable characters also don't change anything gameplay-wise. So you will be doing the exact same gameplay style but with different dialogues, every time you decide to do a story route.
This game could have really used some new stuff while transitioning from handheld to main platforms. For example, there could have been a local multiplayer mode to utilize the bigger displays of non-handheld platforms. But supposedly, the costs and time needed to add new things to the game were not deemed beneficial and such thing has not happened. This Ultimately leaves us with a game that you play once, and you have seen everything it has to offer.


Delivers in spades when it comes to the fanservice, but offers one of the blandest gameplay experiences marred with extremely inconsistent difficulty scaling, making it utterly repetitive and not fun.

[quote]Just saying, but I do have a curator page. If you like my remarks about games, you can find more of them here: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44130985-TDP%27s-Gaming-Escapades [/quote] Listen, this is Senran Kagura. The primary reason that makes one interested in this franchise is the appreciation for its infamous levels of fanservice. And that includes you, dear reader. Yes, YOU! Don't deny it; You would not have tried to read this review if you were not even slightly interested. But as all know, that is not everything that makes a game. Senran Kagura: Bon Appétit tries to mix the series' famous fanservice with a rhythm-based gameplay. It does the fanservice part justice and delivers good stuff in spades. But when it comes to actually offering a good gameplay, it fails miserably. Let's go through the details, shall we? [h2]What if Dame Da Ne guy was an anime girl with big badonkers?[/h2] This series has always been about the fanservice (and will be) and you have to start asking questions if you play one of these games and see it doesn't feature any kind of it. Unsurprisingly, Senran Kagura: Bon Appétit's focus ultimately leans towards the fanservice and the game does it very well. Some of the characters are dressed in revealing clothes, the whole game has you stripping other characters bit by bit as you try to win, the jiggle physics are outrageous, the perfect victory scenes are unhinged and if you are in desperate need of some fresh grass, the dressing room feature allows you to play dress up with the clothing that you have unlocked by beating the levels, see character models up close and even perform "various actions" on them. And this fanservice has leaked into the story mode of the game as well, with very entertaining results. Depending on the character you choose for the story mode, the events and endings would either be weird, or filled to the brim with various jokes. My favorite is Asuka's storyline, where the game constantly throws girth related jokes at you. So if you really like this part of the series, you're not going to be disappointed. The gameplay however... [h2]One good part cannot compensate for everything else[/h2] Here's the thing: Just like Gal★Gun: Double Peace, [url=https://steamcommunity.com/id/TDP-X/recommended/511740/]a game I previously reviewed[/url], having an entertaining story mode and good fanservice is not going to single handedly carry your game. Many players will simply not go through hours of staleness for a couple minutes of hilarity, as is evident from the low completion rates of this game's achievements. Unfortunately, the game stumbles when it comes to anything that is not fanservice, offering an experience that gets utterly repetitive and boring within an hour or two. Taking the strong fanservice depictions aside, the game does not have much left to boast with its audiovisual presentation. Whatever background activity you see from the characters in the first match is what you're going to repeatedly see until the very end. The final judgment cutscenes (featuring Hanzo) are not entertaining, despite their very silly premise. Except for a few vocal music tracks, all of the other compositions are neither catchy nor memorable and usually feel completely out of place and out of character. And then we have the gameplay which feels either boring AF or unnecessarily hard. [h2]Brain.exe has stopped responding[/h2] Senran Kagura: Bon Appétit is just another one of your usual rhythm games with some competitiveness seasoning. You have two lines at the bottom of the screen where patterns appear on, and you have to press or hold buttons (as instructed by the game itself) when they reach a specific area. Do this well, and you will fill up a bar at the top of the screen. Your goal is to keep your fill percentage over %50 to win a match. Seems simple enough, but the game has actually managed to make it feel bad; Starting with the input system. In most rhythm games, the number of inputs are usually restricted to a minimum, with the difficulty coming from the complexity of the patterns. You have a small number of input methods needed to perform commands, with each of them usually getting color coded for better visibility. For example, Yakuza 0's karaoke minigame only utilizes the face buttons on a controller (e.g. ABXY buttons on an Xbox controller). Senran Kagura: Bon Appétit on the other hand, doubles the number of buttons needed to perform commands and keeps the rest intact. This game requires you to use both the face buttons and the directional buttons (WASD and directional buttons on keyboard) at the same time, while they have similar color codes. For example, both the X and left directional buttons are signified with the blue color. This has increased the chance of the player getting utterly confused at many points in the game and especially in more chaotic moments, thus missing some inputs or mistakenly inputting something else. And the situation gets even worse when we take the difficulty into account. [h2][b]What do you mean the difficulty is determined by the music?![/b][/h2] Unfortunately, Senran Kagura: Bon Appétit's difficulty is not well-adjusted. And this is because the game mainly decides how hard your experience should be based on the music that is playing, with energetic/vocal tracks having faster and more complex patterns. This happens regardless of the chosen difficulty setting. So for example, if you decide to play on the easy mode and then run into one of those energetic tracks, the game will not respect your choice and increases the challenge anyway. And if you play the game on hard and run into a chiller track, the difficulty decreases despite your preferences. Because of this, you can see lots of difficulty spikes throughout the game and some of the battles are either much easier or much harder than the ones that came before them. The worst offenders are the battles against Daidoji and especially Rin, where the difficulty takes a gigantic hike regardless of the chosen setting. At this point, even the slightest mistakes leave you with almost no chance to recover and win, as missing a note takes out a rather big chunk of the top bar. If you're on easy mode, you're gonna have a bad time and any higher difficulty is going to make you cry during those battles. [h2]That's all folks![/h2] And what you have read about so far is what that you're going to get for the entirety of the game as in terms of content, nothing has been changed or added to this version compared to the original PS Vita release (which this port is directly based on), except for a few graphics settings. Aside from story mode, you only have access to arcade and freeplay modes which are the exact same thing. The only difference is that the former has no story and the latter acts as a practice mode, so both are practically worthless. The playable characters also don't change anything gameplay-wise. So you will be doing the exact same gameplay style but with different dialogues, every time you decide to do a story route. This game could have really used some new stuff while transitioning from handheld to main platforms. For example, there could have been a local multiplayer mode to utilize the bigger displays of non-handheld platforms. But supposedly, the costs and time needed to add new things to the game were not deemed beneficial and such thing has not happened. This Ultimately leaves us with a game that you play once, and you have seen everything it has to offer. [h2]TL;DR[/h2] Delivers in spades when it comes to the fanservice, but offers one of the blandest gameplay experiences marred with extremely inconsistent difficulty scaling, making it utterly repetitive and not fun.