[Impressions] Sushi Striker: The Way of Sushido (Demo)

Sushi Striker: The Way of Sushido is a quirky little game on the Switch with a huge addiction for, guess what, sushi. The game is based on a weird story where sushi has become the most precious resource in the world and people actually fight wars over it. To be even more over the top, the gameplay itself is based around sushi.

One of the game's biggest selling points, the visuals, look quite appealing. Its anime-like cutscenes and artstyle are very good and the voice actors do an excellent of job of bringing the characters to life. The characters feel expressive and distinct, even if the main cast’s personalities are a bit cliché.

On the gameplay side of things, that’s fairly straightforward: your objective is to link as many plates of the same color as possible in the rotating rows of plates so that you can stock lots of them and throw them at your opponent. In short, it’s a 1v1 fight where both you and your opponent try to link as many sushi plates as quickly as possible to attack each other. A couple of variants are also thrown in the mix, which come in the form of skills from the characters’ partners, which are plushie-like creatures called Sushi Sprites. The Sprites’ skill gauges fill up as you successfully perform links and once they fill up you can use skills that can come in quite handy such as turning all the plates on the table into one single color.

There are also very simple RPG elements involved, namely a leveling system for both you and your Sushi Sprites, that gradually increase your characters’ stats, such as HP and attack and defense values.

While the gameplay is fun, I feel it’s a bit stressful in the heat of battle to be honest. I found it not as easy as it could be to distinguish the color of plates during battle and thus I’d mess a lot my plate linkage and consequently not deal as much damage as I could to my opponent, getting attacked instead while looking for the next plates to link. In my opinion, maybe the size of the sushi in the plates could be sized down slightly, so that the color of the plates could stand out somewhat better. To put it in other words, the colors of the sushi itself interfere with the colors of the plates, so it becomes harder to decide where to start your next chain of plates.

Overall, I found Sushi Striker to be fun and kept wanting to play more. The battles are short and the simple joy of trying to link as many sushi plates as possible was always fun. The characters and general laid-back vibe of the game made me want to keep going for another sushi linkage showdown. In the end, I found this to be a great demo that made me interested in the full game.

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