Senran Kagura Bon Appétit! is a Rhythm game that stops beating around the bush like Project Diva or THE iDOLM@STER and shoves anime girl ass in your face throughout the entire game. This is absolutely the most important aspect to this game because regardless of the mechanics or music, if this prevents you from enjoying the game, the prevalence of it will make you regret your purchase. The level of sexualization could be labeled as extreme or excessively gross but at the same time is so beyond expectations it blurs down to around to the same level that Newgrounds circa 1990s had with violence. Over the parts of the screen you don’t care about (because it’s not where the music notes are) there are jiggly anime girls jumping around cooking. During the song there are two checkpoints and whomever is losing at the time has their clothes ripped off and at the end of the song the other questionably aged girl will be completely disrobed except for chibi pasties of the girls face and a bright light bar over the lower torso. If you happen to do well enough you are then “treated” to that same girl wearing nothing but whipped cream, fruit, and syrup laying in a dish with full camera control. Rewards for progressing in the game consists of different clothing and lingerie to then dress up the characters, then promptly rip off when using. I believe people will swing wildly in one direction or the other where I only have my opinions and this aspect only plays a minor role in my overall view of the game
Bon Appetit! is about a cooking competition with these different shinobi girls competing head to head with each other. How well you tap along with the music determines how large and tasty your dish is. There are 2 checkpoints where the losing girl has her clothing ripped off. These checkpoints are only for that aspect because clearing the song is only dependent on who is ahead at the very end of the 3-4 minute song. Clearing songs will unlock costumes, lingerie, music, (To listen to separately) and art.
Brass tacks there are three main modes in the game, Story, Arcade, and Free. Arcade and Story are almost identical except in the Story mode you get anime style cutscenes where two characters will stand on each side of the screen, not look at each other, and have dialog. This is mostly frivolous as it consists of innuendo and cheesy jokes while lacking any sort of motivation or character building dialog that can’t be found in the tone of the voice actors. Also at the end of each battle the judge will go on a taste buds voyage by literally being taken to a world consisting of giant versions of the dish created. These are hit or miss with if they are funny or not but they are amusing to watch the first time and easily skippable for your other playthroughs. You also seem to unlock more collectibles via Story then in Arcade but other than that it’s identical. The songs you play aren’t selected from a menu but instead decided by who your opponent is. There are ten characters and ten songs but if you want to purchase DLC you can upgrade to 22 characters/songs. To say that the game is lacking in music is an understatement and the songs themselves aren’t particularly good. You can play against the DLC characters in Story mode where there is a constructed playlist but in other modes they don’t come up and it’s only two or three songs bringing the total number of songs you get in the base game to 13. I’m not well versed in Japanese music so the songs are hard to describe but I think they would be classified as upbeat modern Kayōkyoku. From everything I've seen there’s no stereotypical Japanese Dance or J-Pop and while that can be a good thing, there aren't any songs that really clicked with me and got me into the music. The entire time playing I was only listening to the music and never felt a part of it. Some of that has to do with me not enjoying the music and partly due to the mechanics that will come up later. If you happen to have DLC for the other Sakura Kagura game on the Vita, the DLC will transfer over including characters and costumes.
Playing the game consists of tapping the directional pad and face buttons in time to music notes that travel from right to left. There are two lanes they travel down but any button or direction can be in either lane at any time. There is also a meter that fills up that you then press L or R to activate that will multiply note value higher and higher until you miss a note in which you have to restart it. The main reason for the dislike of the game stems from the way the notes are so poorly conveyed to the player. The choice to have either the d-pad or buttons appear on either lane is solely responsible for the difficulty of the game and when playing on the harder difficulties with faster songs, the notes blend together too easily making it difficult to read. The notes for the d-pad and buttons are the same for the direction. Triangle and up are green, circle and right are red, X and down are blue, and square and right are pink. So problems arise where the notes come speeding along and I would get confused between the Pink and Red notes or the Triangle and up notes (you know, since they are both triangles pointing up.) This causes a cardinal sin of video games where a mistake doesn't feel like it was due to the player but instead due to the game and it’s inability to convey the information properly. This is further exaggerated due to the difficulty of the songs. There are 3 levels of difficulty of the songs, Easy, Medium, and Hard. After adjusting to the game for two songs I was able to all clear (100% combo with no misses) nearly all medium songs but there was a huge difficulty spike up to hard with the convoluted note chart. With seemingly no way to speed up the note chart it’s too easy to misinterpret the notes. Sticking with it to acclimate yourself to the notecharts doesn’t open up other options than just playing the same 13 songs in a more infuriating manner.
I will say that the game only costing $15 on the US PSN store is pretty great. The only real redeeming factor is the price being so low for a music game that technically works completely as advertised. You get a decent amount of content for that $15 but there’s no actual progression in the game other than bullying through to play the game on hard. There’s much better music games on the store like Project Diva or the DJ Max games. I can’t recommend this to anyone other than someone looking for fan-service. Save your money and watch this which is better in every possible way. That should satiate any sort of Japanese cooking/music entertainment one would have.