Senran Kagura is getting a new anime. I figured I’d post some random thoughts on this, as well as an attempt to answer the big question: will there be nudity?
Senran Kagura has taken a unique path. The series was presumably pitched in a boardroom at Marvelous Entertainment, then officially began as a manga, then an anime, then a game, in that order. Now it’s not uncommon at all to see video games based on anime, but Senran Kagura was a bit unique in that the manga and subsequent anime were created not for the sake of themselves but for the expressed purpose of launching a game franchise.
The 2013 anime Senran Kagura: Ninja Flash! probably didn’t sell enough BD/DVD to make a profit on its own, but the ultimate goal of forging a long running game franchise was a massive success. There have now been six Senran Kagura games released in just four years, with each successive game becoming more and more popular. And now, there’s about to be a seventh.
Hinted at in March of this year and announced officially this week, the next Senran Kagura project will be called 7EVEN and will be accompanied by a new TV anime, only the second TV anime in the series and the first since 2013. As we all know, there was an awesome OVA that accompanied Senran Kagura: Estival Versus in 2015 as well.
I’m actually a little surprised by this news. After all, anime are expensive to make and the games had been doing very well with almost no anime or manga brand reinforcement since 2013. Maybe they feel that the series needs an anime every few years to help keep the mojo going. The Estival Versus OVA sold over 4,000 BD/DVD, and the game was a hit, so perhaps Marvelous feels so confident in the Senran Kagura brand that they no longer view a full TV series as a financial albatross.
As far as the TV series itself, we know very little. Here is what we do know:
- It’s a TV series, not an OVA. It may possibly be a short episode series, but given that the first anime was a full TV series and given how much money the games are making, I would bet on a 23 minute format anime with 10-12 episodes.
- It almost certainly won’t be animated by the same studio that did season one. RIP Artland.
- The teaser trailer from March (see video above) uses a small amount of animation that is presumably from the upcoming game. It’s interesting that the art style and art quality of the clips shown are virtually identical to the work Hoods did with the 2015 OVA (which had nudity). That’s not a guarantee of anything, but it’s not a bad sign either.
- The game is slated for “Autumn 2018”. The original Senran Kagura anime aired a month before the original Senran Kagura game back in 2013, so we can probably assume that the 7EVEN anime will air in the Fall 2018 season. Additionally, TV anime take as long as a full year to produce so its typical for a series to be announced about a year before it airs.
The 2013 TV anime did not show nipples, and as best as I can remember, none of the five Senran Kagura manga projects from 2011-2013 showed nipples either. However, there’s a couple of reasons why I am cautiously optimistic that the second TV anime will have nudity.
The first reason is because the Senran Kagura: Estival Versus OVA already broke the nipple barrier for the series back in 2015. Now maybe that was just a one off thing to please some long suffering perv fans, but my hunch is that this is more of a trend than a one off. And this hunch comes from a second reason:
Series creator/producer Kenichiro Takaki was also the man behind the Valkyrie Drive series (with Hiraku Kaneko coming in as a hired gun to direct). A project that was basically a repeat of the Senran Kagura marketing experiment: creating a manga and anime specifically to hype an upcoming game franchise. While the anime was a critical flop and commercially mediocre, the game was a considerable success commercially. And while the anime likely lost money, it sold roughly the same, if not a little more, than the Senran Kagura anime did in 2013.
In other words, Takaki has had three total anime projects to hype up his games, and two of the three, the two most recent, had nudity.
Hopefully we get an amazing anime.
I don’t play the games and have had to piece this information together off of google searches. If you guys know any information that’s relevant to add here, please mention it in the comments.
Update: Apparently there was also a game released in 2011.
