The Senran Kagura video game series is poised to bounce onto Nintendo’s system the only way it know how: breasts-first.

In all the excitement over the Nintendo Switch’s hybrid console/portable gameplay and secret messages hidden on the hardware, many people have overlooked what the Kyoto-based game company calls its “HD Rumble” feature. While video game controllers have had vibration functions for years, Nintendo boasts that the HD Rumble is much more sophisticated than just a crude system that shakes the player’s hands to punctuate onscreen explosions and haymakers.

For example, Yoshiaki Koizumi, who’s serving as producer for the upcoming Super Mario Odyssey, said during a demonstration that the minute changes in vibration location and placement could produce a sensation that felt just like shaking a glass with an ice cube in it. Further adjustments can even mimic the added mass of adding even more ice cubes to the glass.

However, this description didn’t exactly have developers rushing to green-light bartending simulators. There is one video game industry visionary, though, who thinks he’s found the perfect application of this new technology: simulating boobs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zs_qbf4Nnzw

Those of you with overlapping interests in video games, anime, and boobs may already be familiar with the name Kenichiro Takaki. Takai is best-known for his busomy brainchild, the Senran Kagura game/anime franchise.

▼ Takaki and Asuka, Senran Kagura’s protagonist

Senran Kagura follows a group of busty ninja schoolgirls, as they battle each other for honor, revenge, or other excuses to get their clothing alluringly torn in hand-to-hand combat. Sometimes they also cook or have water gun fights. Really, the activity options are wide-open, as long as there are boobs bouncing about.

And that brings us back to the Switch. Much like how the 3-D capibilities of Nintendo’s 3DS inspired the first Senran Kagura, Takaki feels the HD Rumble function will help him provide tactile titillation to go with Senran Kagura’s stimulating visuals. After all, if it can recreate the feelings of ice cubes in a glass, why not breasts in a bra?

To that end, Takaki says he and his team have thrown themselves into experimenting with the HD Rumble feature, in order to make gamers feel like they’re jiggling a breast when shaking the controller, with water balloons being one of the benchmarks. The knowledge gleaned from this will be applied to the development of the franchise’s first Switch game, to be titled Senran Kagura Refle (with Refle likely a truncated version of “reflection”).

But water balloons aren’t the only motion/feedback model the team is looking at, as the video also shows them intensely observing the jiggle dynamics of Japanese-style purin pudding.

Takaki says that if everything goes well, Senran Kagura Refle should be ready for release sometime in 2017. But though he’s serious about the game being in development, it’s unclear whether the “research” shown in the video is part of the actual research process, or just another example of tongue-in-cheek, face-in-boobs marketing from the industry’s most unabashed breast enthusiast.

Sources: Jin, Engadget
Images: YouTube/Nintendo 公式チャンネル

Follow Casey on Twitter, where he recalls that Senran Kagura was one of the very first things he ever wrote about for RocketNews24.