The Senran Kagura series has truly made some wild games. We’ve seen action, heavy hack and slash titles, and even third person shooters with water guns. Even with the gameplay changing from action to cooking to something entirely different, Senran Kagura has never lost its main focus…hot looking shinobi who are truly well endowed. Our latest outing for this nosebleed inducing series comes in the form of Senran Kagura: Peach Ball which isn’t about swimsuits or volleyball. Instead, we get a pinball themed title and we won’t lie, we were surprised by our time with it. You can find out if Senran Kagura: Peach Ball is worth your time—or not—in our full review down below!

Senran Kagura: Peach Ball removes the battle out of shinobi and has them playing in a giant pinball game! Players will use the almighty Peach Ball and bounce around our lovely ladies to try and cure them of a strange affliction. Make combos and earn high scores to activate various events to “help” our various girls by throwing ice cream on them or making them fall over in laughter. Play through several story modes or enjoy free play to just test your pinball mastery as you slam the Peach Ball against various parts of our lovely cast. Utilize the Nintendo Switch Joy Con controls to feel every bounce, hit and movement of these animal themed shinobi!

Inside a local arcade, our ninja girls are enjoying a brutal gaming tournament! When one of the girls has to use the bathroom during the brutal battle, Haruka—who has been working in the arcade—finds out that her hidden experiments have been used as a soap by accident! Now the ninja ladies are being transformed into animal girls and Haruka only has one solution to fix this problem—use the powerful Peach Ball! Loading it up into a pinball machine, you must use the Peach Ball to cure the girls before the affliction makes them 100% animal. Time to test your pinball skills in Senran Kagura: Peach Ball!

If you’ve played most of the Senran Kagura games then you know only a handful of them are styled the same. While the brunt of the Senran Kagura franchise has focused on hack and slash elements with action themes, other titles have seen more mini-game like approaches or even changed the action to shooting. XSEED Games should be proud that they have constantly been able to make different Senran Kagura games and usually do an adequate job. Senran Kagura: Peach Ball is their latest outing with publisher Marvelous once again lending their hands, but this title is far different than all the others mentioned above. Are you ready to experience an ecchi themed pinball game? Find out how that ends up fairing in our review of Senran Kagura: Peach Ball for the Nintendo Switch!

Senran Kagura: Peach Ball isn’t a hard game to explain. Legit, the brunt of this title is focused on pinball and that’s it. Players take our shinobi girls like Asuka, Yumi, Ryna and plenty more and throw a giant Peach Ball at them for points. Like all pinball games, you hit the Peach Ball—aka the pinball itself—with flippers and try to nab combos by making the ball slam against various objects on the board. Our various girls are smack dab in the middle of each board and your objective is usually to make them do “things” by earning high scores and completing in game objectives. When you complete the objectives, usually random things happen to our girls like them falling into wet solutions or having cream fall upon them…you know…usual shinobi things. It is indeed ridiculous, but Senran Kagura: Peach Ball works at presenting itself as a solid pinball title.

The pinball gameplay itself is actually done quite nicely in Senran Kagura: Peach Ball. Responses from the Joy Cons—which is the way you should play for optimal feel—makes each hit and tilt feel truly like a pinball machine experience. Equally, each girl you choose has their own boards with different styles mimicking how pinball machines all are different in some random way. You can expect all the usual pinball mechanics like multi ball and such while playing Senran Kagura: Peach Ball and that is a real treat for those who love the usually underused genre. Senran Kagura: Peach Ball works quite well with what it offers and that was a true surprise to us here at Honey’s Anime.

In term of gameplay modes, Senran Kagura: Peach Ball offers a few different play styles. You can choose from the lengthy story mode which has you picking various girls and seeing how they experience this odd incident brought upon by Haruka’s weird concoction. There’s also a free play mode, which just has you playing pinball and trying to survive as long as you can for bragging rights. Another few returning themes of Senran Kagura games come in the form of dressing up our shinobi girls in even more revealing outfits and getting personal with them by spraying water on each girl as well as touching them. We’ve always found these extra modes just that—extra, but they work in giving players a nice amount of immersion if they love our buxom girls.

Another surprise to Senran Kagura: Peach Ball came in the form of the graphics. We were quite surprised by how nice Senran Kagura: Peach Ball looked in handheld mode and in docked mode. The ladies all have strong features and there are dozens of CG scenes to enjoy and stare at for hours. The music is also quite solid sounding like most Senran Kagura games, but it also offers some wicked tunes for a good pinball time. As always, too, our cast of girls is once more reprised by the voice actresses that do them justice which is always a bonus in our minds.

Now if we had to nitpick Senran Kagura: Peach Ball a bit, we’d have to say the obvious issue is what will make most gamers not want to buy this title. The fact that Senran Kagura: Peach Ball is pinball oriented means most won’t even care about it. That’s a shame since most will miss out on a fun pinball title, but we can also understand that in comparison to the action titles, Senran Kagura: Peach Ball feels a bit unnecessary. Die-hard Senran Kagura fans though probably won’t care as many played—and bought—the cooking title which shows the fandom this franchise has.

Every Senran Kagura game seems to just get more and more wild and we can’t complain about that when the games are usually quite fun. Senran Kagura: Peach Ball is just that, fun and it helps what could have been a mindlessly silly ecchi fest. While oppai will go flying in Senran Kagura: Peach Ball—again we’re not complaining—this pinball themed title has a lot of heart and has some solid gameplay mechanics that make it a truly engaging title. We found little to complain about while playing Senran Kagura: Peach Ball other then the fact that this definitely won’t appeal to all Senran Kagura fans or gamers in general. With little to no action and a focus on pinball gameplay, Senran Kagura: Peach Ball won’t win over all the other titles of the franchise and many will just pass this by. However, if you love pinball, love Senran Kagura and like just fun/mindless titles, then by all means pick up Senran Kagura: Peach Ball as it works pretty darn well for what it delivers.

Senran Kagura: Peach Ball isn’t the best Senran Kagura game and the fact that it’s pinball is quite strange. Despite that though, Senran Kagura: Peach Ball works in what it delivers and we enjoyed our time with it even if it wasn’t a hack and slash like most of the franchise has been. Pinball themed games have failed quite often in the past, but Senran Kagura: Peach Ball works and it works quite well making it an easy title to recommend to all those who love ecchi and love pinball. Are you eagerly awaiting to get your pinball action on in Senran Kagura: Peach Ball? Tell us your thoughts using the comments below! For more game reviews and articles, keep stuck to our hive here at Honey’s Anime!