SENRAN KAGURA Peach Beach Splash is the fifth SK game I’ve worked on as a localizer, the sixth to hit North American shores, and marks the fifth anniversary of the series as a whole. As the guy whose job it is to bring out the characters’ voices, working on a long-running series like this one makes me think about how to keep those voices fresh and interesting from game to game.
By now, the main characters’ quirks and personalities are all well established. Katsuragi likes boobs, Ryōna likes pain, Asuka and Homura like fighting each other, and so on. Knowing the girls’ mannerisms, likes, and dislikes gives us a pretty good idea of how they’ll respond in most situations, and if we get to know them toowell, they run the risk of becoming predictable.
Partly for that reason, the series likes to shake up the formula now and again. No two games in the franchise play quite the same way, and Peach Beach Splash is the biggest departure from the norm, gameplay-wise, since Bon Appétit. The game emphasizes projectiles (specifically water projectiles) over melee attacks, takes Secret Ninja Arts off the table (replacing them with customizable cards), and gives the girls more maneuverability, thanks to their new hydro-jetpacks, than any past game in the series. Players of the already-released Japanese version have compared the game to Armored Core, albeit a much more lighthearted Armored Core.
Those changes to the gameplay also carry over into the story. The girls, after returning home from the serious training, ominous warnings, and emotional hardships of Estival Versus, find themselves reeled into what they think is a pointless (and questionably raunchy) water gun tournament. Each character reacts to that in a different way, and that’s one way to keep their personalities interesting — by showing how they respond to unexpected and unusual circumstances.
Those reactions also push the girls’ relationships in unexpected ways, and that’s another way to keep things fresh — the girls’ core personalities might not change much, but their relationships with others can. Over the course of the series, we’ve seen Hibari grow more independent from Yagyū, Hikage more comfortable around her squadmates, Yumi less rigid with both her team and her ideology, and Murasaki just a bit less timid about speaking up to her sister and her team leader. In Peach Beach Splash, that growth sometimes leads to conflict, which develops the characters’ relationships even further.
One of the themes in Peach Beach Splash is about how each of the girls has her own independent life in addition to being a member of the team. With graduation approaching (and approaching, and approaching) for several of the girls, major life choices are bearing down on them, some of which could keep them away from everyone they’ve come to love. Other prominent subplots in Peach Beach Splash illustrate how hard it can be to manage a team full of strong-willed, divergent personalities, as Miyabi struggles to keep the peace between two sets of bickering siblings.
There is a more central conflict to the story of Peach Beach Splash, and the true purpose of the tournament does come to light eventually, but the general tone of the game is much lighter than Burst, Deep Crimson, or even Estival Versus. That said, the game shapes itself up to be the girls’ last lighthearted adventure (spinoffs aside) before everything hits the fan in the next canonical volume, and there’s no telling how each girl will deal with what’s coming.
Until then, we hope everyone enjoys a wet, wild romp through a summer playground with the girls of SENRAN KAGURA.
The Way of the Waifu By Ryan Graff, with contributions from Brittany, Tom, Mai, Liz, Junpei, Billy, Jason, Ken, Alyssa, and Nathan
XSEED was quite a change of pace and style from my last job, which was working QA for the usually T-rated Square-Enix. A few weeks before my first day here, Ken and Jess sent me some reference materials for my first XSEED project, wrapping up the European version of Valhalla Knights 3. I remember reading through the game’s text files, reading descriptions for items called “Survibrator” and “Congratulotion,” and wondering exactly what I’d signed on for.
It wasn’t long after VK3went gold that I started my second major project here, co-localizing the main script for SENRAN KAGURA Shinovi Versus. Since I hadn’t played Burstbefore coming to the office, I took a crash course, reading up on the characters’ histories, relationships, and personalities.
SENRAN KAGURA has always gone out of its way to make each of its many characters as distinctive as possible in every way. Each girl has her own personality, visual style, fighting style, vocabulary, and personal history, and their stories grow and develop from game to game.
It’s not always easy for storytellers to juggle ensemble casts. Audiences need time, screen time, to bond with your characters, and it can be tough to balance the audience’s attention and affection amongst a large cast while also keeping the story moving forward. But when a storyteller pulls it off, the payoff is that each audience member, no matter who they are, gets at least one favorite character, someone they can personally relate to and root for.
With that in mind, one of the most frequently asked questions about SENRAN KAGURA is, “Who’s your favorite?” Since we write for the English version of the game, that question sometimes comes in different flavors, like “Who do you enjoy writing for the most?” or “Who would you most want to hang out with?” In short, which girl is XSEED’s waifu?
Me personally, I like writing for Haruka most, because I enjoy writing “eloquent, haughty young lady”-type characters (writing for Nero in Fate/EXTELLAwas fun for the same reason), and because she’s so crafty and unpredictable. In terms of who I’d most want to hang out with, I think Mirai would make a fun writing buddy, Homura would make a kickass personal trainer, Shiki reminds me of my first crush, and Murasaki could always use a hug.
(We also occasionally get asked who our least favorite character is, but I like them all too much to really say, other than to note that I hope Minori gets more onscreen character development in future titles.)
But I’m not the only one who works on SENRAN KAGURA — credit goes out to everyone who proofs, tests, helps market, and otherwise contributes to the games (especially by playing them at home and spreading the good word!) — so let’s go around the office and see who’s down with who: Brittany: Haruka. She’s a true queen and I’d thank her if she stepped on me.
Billy: I would say my SK waifu is Asuka. She is the first character I used. I also like her fighting style and her clumsy personality. But Rin is cool too.
Tom: Hard to pick only one, but I’d have to go with Hikage, whose struggle with emotionality makes her extremely endearing, but is more than made up for with awesome moves and general kickassness. Honorable mentions go to Mirai for the amazing outfit, Ayame for having the cutest face in the series (seriously, how is she so cute?!), and Imu for her admirable devotion to the one she loves (which makes her less viable as “waifu” material, but more awesome as a character IMHO).
Liz: Hikage, all day. - has no emotions - is sometimes a berserk snake -licks uses knives - chill af I was into masochistic gun ballerina for a while but she too hyphy. Mai: Naraku ❤ - super loyal - love the way she call herself (I believe it’s “I” in English but in Japanese, she calls herself “Jibun” instead of “watashi”) - fashionista (her hoodie and arm warmer thing) - bubble gum❤ - not so emotional
Junpei: My SK waifu is Yozakura. - She speaks the Okayama dialect, which sounds super cute when girls speak it. - She has giant fists. - She’s good at cooking.
Jason: I’m a nice guy and like all girls (except Minori and Hibari). But my top 3 would be Homura, Kagura, and Renka. Homura: She’s Wolverine and voiced by Eri Kitamura. Kagura: She’s god and fights by ripping holes in dimensions. Renka: She drums like no other.
Ken: Homura. Tan lines. ‘Nuff said.
Alyssa: Rin definitely stole my heart (I’ll fight you for her, Billy!). Purple hair and glasses? Sign me up! But I also love her weapon and fighting style, as well as her friendship with Daidoji. ❤
Nathan: Shiki. Something to be said about a multilingual witch.
As I wrap this up, SENRAN KAGURA Estival Versus has just gone up on Steam, and the Ikki Tousen DLC characters are finally available on PS4, Vita, and PC, after a long struggle to bring them overseas. (Thanks again, Takaki-san!) We hope everyone enjoys reconnecting with the girls (or meeting them, if it’s your first time), and keep your eye out — you never know what might come next!
Over the course of the SENRAN KAGURA series so far, we’ve seen the characters grow in meaningful ways. They’ve become more self-confident, gained greater respect for both friends and foes, and made progress in working through their troubles. So what’s it like going back to the beginning of all that?
To answer that, first we need to go back to the development of the original Burst. We’ve talked about this a few times before, but the original game was written as a standalone story, without any sequels in mind. In terms of back story and basic worldbuilding, Burst is perhaps the most in-depth out of any game in the series. But in terms of the characters’ arcs, it’s a bit out of sync with the later games; at one point, for example, Yagyū tells Hibari that she’s perfectly capable and just needs more confidence, while other games, particularly in the early series, have Yagyū doubting Hibari’s capabilities until circumstances force Hibari to prove herself…
The SENRAN KAGURA series’ fan service has always been plain to see. Usually, when we talk about the series here on this blog, we like to highlight what else it has to offer: the storytelling, the character development, the way the characters’ relationships grow and change from game to game.
So, to get it out of the way right off the bat, Reflexions is not about those things at all. It’s unapologetic fan service through and through, and we wanted to write this to give everyone an idea of what to expect from it.
Peach Beach Splash, being what looks like the girls’ last lighthearted adventure before the looming events of the next big game in the series, is a good place to stop and look back at the series as a whole. For me, that means looking back at my own experiences in working on the series, and what I’ve learned along the way.
I started at XSEED a few weeks before SENRAN KAGURA Burst launched in North America. Despite being only a T-rated game (no, really, Burstwas rated T!), it was easily the raunchiest title we’d ever published, and none of us knew how Western audiences would react. We had an office betting pool over how many copies would sell in its opening week, and I bet on the highest number and won lunch at Yogurtland. (Come to think of it, I don’t think I ever cashed that in. I’ll have to talk to Ken about that later.)
Fans of series creator Takaki-san might know that he didn’t originally plan on Bursthaving a sequel — in fact, while developing the original story, he considered killing all the characters off. Thankfully, the final draft let the Hanzō and Hebijo girls live to fight another day, and before long, he and his team started work on SENRAN KAGURA Shinovi Versus.
By the time Burstlaunched, we were already looking forward to publishing Shinovi Versus in North America, especially after seeing the success of the first game. About half the office worked on localizing Shinovi Versus in one capacity or another, with Jason and Junpei on translation, Tom and myself taking care of the editing (Tom on the Crimson Squad storyline, me on most of the rest), and Brittany as our go-to continuity consultant.
Shinovi Versus wasn’t just my first XSEED localization project, but also my first project where every line of dialogue was voiced over in another language. That, among other factors, gradually changed the way I approached localization in general.
When I worked on my very first localization project overall, all the way back in 2005 for a different publisher, the general directive from up above was to be accurate to the story and the characterization (the localization test I took included the line, “Don’t add a reference to a giant ogre if there isn’t one in the original text”), but also to make the text as enjoyable to read in English as possible. Of course, since Japanese and English have markedly different styles and cadences, there often comes a point where accuracy and enjoyability diverge, and an editor has to bite the bullet and prioritize one over the other. At the time, the decisions more often came down on the side of enjoyability, as long as it didn’t outright contradict the original text.
For that project in particular, since there was a huge amount of text in the first several hours of gameplay, we were encouraged to add more humor in the early going (when possible, and when reasonably appropriate within the context of the scene). If a line flat-out didn’t make sense — which does happen sometimes, when a lengthy, sprawling script gets written long before the game gets made — we were more or less free to replace it with a line of our own invention (again, as long as it fit the context).
That sort of approach, where the Japanese text was considered more of a guideline than a baseline, was common at the time, and it stuck with me through many other projects over the next eight years. When writing for a wide audience, who usually just wanted to enjoy the game in English, that worked out fine most of the time. When writing for anyone who knew the Japanese…not so much.
For those who know the language, even a little bit, it’s immersion-breaking to hear one line and read another, and of course, if an editor takes too many liberties with a voiced-over script, that comes up all the time. The first draft of my work on Shinovi Versus was as compelling as I could make it, but didn’t always pay as much attention to the Japanese as it should have, and while the finished draft usually conveyed the same sentiment as the original, there were more than a few differences bilingual players would’ve found jarring. (The “Shiki speaking French” stuff is a whole other topic. She speaks English in PBS. Let’s leave it at that for now. :p)
A few weeks before turning in the final draft, we sat down as a team, discussed whether we wanted to prioritize accuracy or English flavor moving forward, settled on the side of accuracy, and gave the script a polish, paring down some of the excess liberties. While I missed some of the lines I’d come up with, I remembered that sometimes, writing collaboratively means letting go of your darlings for the overall good of the project. The resulting dialogue stuck much closer to the voiceovers than before, and since then, I’ve done the best I can to apply the lessons I’ve learned.
That’s not to say that writing “within the lines” can’t be fun, of course. We’ve mentioned this a few times before, but SENRAN KAGURA’S characters are all bursting with personality, and their lines are full of opportunities to bring those personalities out in distinctive and memorable ways — usually by taking what’s already there and, when appropriate for the scene, just runningwith it. Every time Mirai freaks out, Homura gets fired up, Ryōbi curses up a storm, or Shiki cuts loose, it feels a lot like cutting loose ourselves, and that’s one of the reasons I’ve loved working on the series, from Shinovi Versus toBon Appétit, Deep Crimson, Estival Versus, and now Peach Beach Splash.
If you’re as nostalgic about the series as I am (has it really been five years already?), you’ll like the retrospective Blu-Ray disc we’ve put together for the physical “No Shoes, No Shirt, All Service” limited edition of Peach Beach Splash. The disc features the animated intros from Skirting Shadows (the very first game, which was released by itself in Japan before later being expanded and rereleased as part of Burst),Burst, Shinovi Versus, and so on up to Peach Beach Splash. (For licensing reasons, we couldn’t get the original song from the Skirting Shadows intro, but there’s another track from Burst’sOST that ended up fitting with it well, so the disc version of the intro uses that track instead.) The game’s physical edition also includes an artbook — twice as long as the Japanese artbook, with many more pictures to enjoy — as well as a soundtrack CD. We also have a digital limited edition, the “Sexy Soaker” edition, up for pre-order now on the PS Store; no Blu-Ray with that one, but if you pre-order, there’re a couple of exclusive themes in it for you. Besides that, there’ll be a downloadable “First-Print Bonus” — a bundle including two “Clean-Up Maid” costumes and a pair of in-game skill cards — free for the first four weeks after launch.
And speaking of launch, you can check out our brand-new website at www.peachbeachsplash.com. Enjoy the site, look forward to the game, and in just a few weeks, we hope to see you in multiplayer. Till then, thanks as always for reading and being a fan!
