Features

When I heard the game’s title the first thing that popped into my mind was that Sushi Tycoon was a Japanese Restaurant Business Simulation however the Tycoon part of the title can be pretty deceptive as I found out when the game loaded up on my mobile phone. Sushi Tycoon is a game that’s all about making Sushi and nothing more. Sure there’s the make revenue part and please the customer part as well as the extra bit of serving sake drinks to them but in the end Sushi Tycoon boils down to being a Sushi Master Chef. I guess Sushi Master Chef is too long a title too use but basically that’s what this game is all about. You see, your character in the game has one simple objective in mind, to marry the beautiful daughter of the Sushi Master Chef but for him to be accepted in the family he has to prove that he is worthy of being part of the family, in other words he needs to become a Sushi Master Chef which entails making Sushi.

The game starts off with a delight short ditty and a good looking splash page showing the main characters of the game inside a Sushi bar. Afterwards you get to the menu screen, with the usual options like; New Game, Continue, Help, About, Exit and Options.

Afterwards picking the New Game option takes you to screen asking if you want to see the tutorial which takes you to a hands on approach on making sushi. To make a sushi you have to specify which main topping it has and you get to choose by either moving the d-pad and pressing the fire button or selecting the number of the said sushi topping, there are 10 sushi toppings available like Odori and Tako and they correspond to the number keys in an increasing level of difficulty to make. ‘1’ being the easiest followed by ‘2’ and so forth until the most difficult which is ‘0’ which I believe corresponds to Unagi Sushi Topping.
After having selected what type of sushi your gonna make, the game takes a more interactive turn as half of your screen is taken over by a roll of rice spreaded over your table followed by a lump of wasabi. Now each Sushi Type needs a specified amount of rice and depending on how good you are on getting that amount of rice correct determines the quality of the sushi you’ve just made. But not to worry a flashing arrow will appear on specific areas of that spreaded rice to help in making excellent quality sushi. You just have to press the fire button when your hand meets the arrow. Right afterward the rice amount and depending on the type of sushi your making, you have to put the wasabi if necessary, an arrow will also flash to tell you to press the fire button to put the wasabi.

After all that your sushi is graded with a ranking from around 100 below in increments of 10 with 100 being the highest (60 was the lowest I got). Now ends the sushi making part and begins the tycoon part which is fairly easy, you see all the time you were making the sushi you were in the sushi bar and when you’ve made a sushi the sushi type you’ve made will count as 1 unit of sushi for that sushi type in your stock. Of course as a restaurant/sushi bar you need revenues to keep operating and to make revenues you have to serve your food to customers.
To serve them you actually just press the d-pad up to get out of the sushi bar and another press upwards to serve the sushi that the customer ordered. However you will be having multiple customers so your also going to be using the d-pad’s left and right buttons to switch customers as well as the down button to go back to the bar and make their orders. Also each customer may order several units and type of sushi so before you serve them you better have the sushi types and units they want in your stock already. And that concludes our tutorial.

Next after the tutorial the game asks you to choose what gender you’re going to be playing as, choosing the boy gets you the aforementioned story line. However choosing the girl allows you to be the daughter of the Sushi Master Chef and following in the footsteps of your father you are trained by your mother. The girl’s story closely parallels the guy’s as she slowly falls in love with the guy. This is a nice touch put in by the developers as there are no loose ends and players can choose the correct gender of their gaming world avatars.

At the start of the game you have to meet simple objectives like making a specific amount of money, getting a specific number of patron-customers for your Sushi-Bar and with each level the storyline of your character is explored more and the difficulty increases. More sushi types are introduced to you, customers gets more picky and their tastes gets more sensitive and sometimes you even have to do the additional step of serving sake. At the final level, your final test on the road to becoming a Sushi Master the ever helpful flashing arrow whenever you make sushi disappears and you now have to make sushi on the fly without knowing how much rice is needed for each type. Hopefully by this time you’d have that knowledge ingrained or else you’ll be sinking in poor quality sushi and go bankrupt. Succeed at this test and you become a Sushi Master and get to marry your true love at the end. Whichever it goes the game will record your name on a high score list to show just how good you really are at making digital sushi.

So what can I say about Sushi Tycoon? Well all in all it’s a great … mini game. Yup, that rights, Sushi Tycoon is short game and with simple mechanics it really feels like a mini game of what was seems to be a larger more complete game but alas as I said before the game’s title is very misleading. However misleading the title of the game though, I cannot deny that the game is still well made from the music to the graphics -which could be much more detailed anyway- and even to the controls of the game. I had a lot of fun playing this game, it was very addictive and satisfying once you get started on serving those digital sushi to the customers and getting some tips in return for the good service, and since the game was short enough you could finish it in one sitting as long as you have a good enough memory and not get saturated from it. While the guys at Paladin might not have made a tycoon game they sure did make a noteworthy game in my book.