Sushi Striker: The Way of Sushido Review – “Sushi belongs to everyone!”

Let’s get one thing clear: this game will leave you craving sushi.

In a world that’s been ravaged by a war called the Sushi Struggles, the evil Empire has forbidden the common folk from eating their beloved sushi. You play as Musashi, a boy or girl who fights for the rights of sushi for all. The way to do that? Why, by eating sushi, of course! Travelling the land, you’ll encounter soldiers of the Empire and defeat each of them by way of a sushi battle – a fast paced, link-3-or-higher puzzle game. Inspired by the sushi train style of  restaurant, the aim is to deplete your opponent’s HP by flinging your empty plates at them. The strength of your attack will depend on the plate’s colour and a few other variables, making it a surprisingly complex system. It’s absolutely the best part of Sushi Striker. That might seem like an odd statement, since you’d expect the gameplay to be the majority of the game. However, a large portion of the play time is taken up by the story.

In most puzzle games, plot is just an excuse for the characters shown on the front of the box to battle each other. Generally, these games understand that players didn’t buy the game for a story and probably don’t care all that much about plot.  They therefore don’t spend much time and effort on it, and instead let the player get on with racking up those combos. Not so for Sushi Striker.

So convinced of its story is Sushi Striker that it’s locked away game modes such as puzzle trials and even multiplayer until 19 stages into the campaign.

It’s incredibly hard to get the hang of all this at once, but don’t worry. You can ignore the more advanced methods for the first world of the game and just focus on linking a high number of plates, which can be tricky on its own. While I breezed through the early stages of the game, it wasn’t long before I had to up my game and get the hang of the more complex combos. I got a little frustrated with the controls, however. The joystick can be quite unwieldy on the fast-moving sushi lanes, so I switched to touch controls. Even then I sometimes felt like the game wasn’t responding to my finger correctly. This is probably just a precision issue,  but it still lowered my enjoyment.

The colour and type of sushi on your lanes will depend on your sushi sprites – the cute companions you can collect on your adventure. They each send out sushi in a different order, and have special abilities which adds a layer of customisation that is fun to play with.

All told, Sushi Striker is a bit of a mixed bag. There’s a lot to recommend, and the silly story can be largely ignored. If there’s one thing that makes the game hard to recommend, it’s the asking price of $69.95 (retail Australia).

Sushi Striker is one of those games that make me lament the rigid pricing practices that plague Nintendo’s systems. How can they expect this game to sell when it’s only slightly less expensive than Nintendo’s most prized IPs? The answer is already in: it can’t. The game has launched terribly in Japan, and I’d bet that it has a lot to do with the price. It ultimately does the game a disservice, as the alienating asking price has gamers locking away their wallets for bigger and better things.