The occasional pun in the dialogue doesn’t make up for the oddly sincere tone and lack of series trademark bombast in which it’s delivered. The massage mini-games are variations of ridiculous, but they’re always backed up with breathlessly earnest professions of love and adoration by the girl. There’s every possibility that the ease of which it is to win the “love” of your preferred girl, and the pointlessness of that process, is some kind of meta-humour on the genre, but as mentioned, we just don’t have the body of games in English for genre self-reflection to really work. There’s no sense of humour about this particular game, at least as far as it stands here in the west.
She’ll tell you she loves you within the first act, and from there you’re just repeating the massage minigames over and over again to get various variations of how you’re her soulmate out of her. You’ll be told how much you mean to whatever girl is your favourite within the first act of each “campaign”. The relationship development side of Senran Kagura Reflexions is woefully inadequate, and the developers don’t even care. If you succeed at that then the girl will have a moment of ecstasy (okay, being less subtle, she’ll clearly orgasm), and bam, your relationship with her will be deeper. Find the right spots there and you’ll then do a special massage, which might involve using a roller, brush, or other implement. Do that well and you’ll next be tasked with doing the same thing to her whole body.
Your job is to find the parts of your girl’s hands where she’s tense and then apply pressure to release the tension. With Senran Kagura Reflexions, you build your relationship with the Senran Kagura girl of your choice (Asuka is available in the base package, and others available via DLC) by massaging her. With Love Plus that relationship would be built by picking the right dialogue choices for the girl. Basically, the more time you spend with a girl, doing things right by her, the more she’ll fall in love with you, and then you “win” the game. In principle Reflexions is a dating simulator, in the vein of Love Plus or Summer Lesson (which isn’t a dating game, but follows the same structure, and is one of the rare other examples of this genre actually being localised into English). The closest to clever Reflexions ever gets is its name, which is a play on “reflexology” (the form of massage that the game simulates), and “reflections” because the “narrative” – such as it is – is heavily dominated by a series of reflective memories. And this one is much harder to defend, since it doesn’t seem to be self-aware at all. Our full reviewīut with Senran Kagura Reflexions, the developers have only given those critics more ammunition. Related reading: Senran Kagura Peach Beach Splash is an example of this franchise at its best.
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