Despite the lack of a live stage presentation, it could still be said that Nintendo’s showing at the recent E3 2017 was still remarkably strong. All they needed were displays or demos available of their upcoming titles for the Switch, and they’ve guaranteed visitor interest.
A lot of Nintendo’s offerings soon to arrive for their hybrid console, which only came out last March, were some eagerly anticipated latest installments of their first-party games like “Super Mario Odyssey” and “Metroid Prime 4”. But they’ve got some attention-grabbing original titles too.
One of them, “Sushi Striker: The Way of Sushido” for the still-active 3Ds portable system, has built up a sudden surge of hyping thanks to its unusual premise of – wait for it – eating sushi.
Martial eating
“Sushi Striker: The Way of Sushido” is a game that lives up to its name, sort of. Its genre and description is summed up by Nintendo themselves as of the “Conveyor belt sushi puzzle action,” meaning a puzzle-solving game with action styling based around sushi on conveyor belts, just like what you might see in a modernized sushi restaurant in Japan. Players take on the roles of characters engaged in “sushi-do,” that is the weirdly awesome martial art of eating sushi from conveyor belts and then throwing the empty plates at one’s opponent with until they’re knocked out.
The result is “Sushi Striker,” a cute-themed yet visually explosive competitive game that sees ridiculous-looking character avatars facing off with multiple conveyor belts between them carrying sushi in different-colored plates. Under player control, the “combatants” swipe multiple similar-type plates of sushi (on the 3DS touch-screen) to “eat” and then stacking the plates.
With a large enough stack of plates, they can hurl these at each other (accompanied by special effects like lightning strikes and the usual Japanese anime trappings) in an attempt to lower the opponent’s life bar to zero.
Weird games
It definitely sounds like a game from out of the food-obsessed minds at indies zero Corp. Ltd., which once released a cooking-themed game-slash-digital cookbook on the called “Personal Trainer: Cooking” in the US, which amazing became the top 12th best-selling title for the Nintendo DS in North America for 2008.
This time around, however, “Sushi Striker: The Way of Sushido” is less about learning to cook and more having puzzle-solving action fun. The fact that the game seems to come with an entirely beat-worthy soundtrack only makes the (virtual) sushi-gobbling even more exciting.
Aside from “Sushi Striker,” indieszero has also released some off-the-wall titles such as the Wii U’s “NES Remix” retro compilation game, and the musical-themed “Theatrhythm Final Fantasy” on the 3DS. “Sushi Striker: The Way of Sushido” will be released on the Nintendo 3DS next year.
