Sushi Cat (iOS)
Mobile platforms have always felt like a good fit for flash games ever since touch screens got involved. Browser games that focus on quick, non-committal playability and have simple mouse controls seem like easy ports to a system all about turning on the game for only a few minutes of play. The moment I saw Sushi Cat was available on iOS it felt all too obvious that it would be there, and after having played the flash game equivalent to completion many years ago, it felt like a good time to see how the conversion to a mobile game went.
Sushi Cat is a big, blue, ball shaped cat whose already rotund body never really seems to be big enough to get the job done. When a pink plush kitten in a store window catches his eye, he finds he doesn’t have the weight needed to trigger the automatic doors. When he tries to win that same plush at a carnival instead, he doesn’t have the weight needed to hit the bell on a Test Your Strength game. It seems no matter how he goes about trying to get this plush, he’s never big enough for it, so every time he hits a roadblock, he heads off to eat some sushi to increase his bulk. The cutscenes explaining the story are cute and fun for younger players, meaning they’re a pretty good fit for a game that really any age of player can get involved in. When you take a close look at Sushi Cat though, it plays pretty much just like a traditional pachinko video game with a few extra bells and whistles to give it some identity.
Levels in Sushi Cat are all focused on the singular goal of eating enough sushi to get your cat fat enough. To beat a level requires eating 30 pieces of sushi, with the amount of sushi total in a stage pretty close to that amount but always allowing you to get away with missing a few pieces, those extra sushi pieces going towards a secondary goal of getting a high score if you do manage to snatch them up. For the most part, your only real influence on the gameplay at all is how you drop Sushi Cat down into the play field, the player dragging the squishy blue cat around with a pair of chopsticks near the top until they find where they want to drop him in. From there, you just watch and hope things go your way, the level having plenty of sushi for the cat to slurp up if he touches them but always plenty of obstacles in the way to doing so. Since you no longer have any input on the cat though, it’s all down to how your bouncy cat moves around, and the more sushi he eats, the bigger he gets, his ability to squeeze through gaps and bounce around constantly changing in the span of a drop. When he hits the bottom and falls into one of the cups though, that round of sushi eating closes, the player getting back a small Sushi Cat to drop to try and get more food in the next round. Each level only gives you so many drops of the cat, but there are sometimes ways to earn an extra drop.
Surprisingly, that’s pretty much all there is to Sushi Cat. Sure, the exact obstacles in your way change around. Things like rollers that will move the cat around, spinning barriers that might bump him around, or different shaped or moving bumpers will influence his descent, but it’s very much out of your hands once you’ve put him in the play field. The growth of the cat prevents it from being plain old pachinko, and some of the obstacles likely wouldn’t work well on real world hardware, so it does have a few things to make it a bit more interesting than the basic form of its genre. However, there was certainly room for more creative obstacles and interactions, and Sushi Cat does briefly flirt with the idea of having some of these. Some stages feature special sushi you can snag that will impact how the sushi is collected. Some like the Maneki Neko just bolster your score or give an extra life, others like the Wasabi Quakes makes some air appear to blow your cat around some, but the ones that could have been really interesting like the Dragon Cannons where you pick where to fire your cat after it eats the right sushi piece or the sushi piece that lets the cat shoot its tongue out to grab a bunch of sushi don’t really appear often enough to leave a huge impact on play. These are certainly underutilized and gone before you’ve really seen them experimented with, levels not even trying to mix and match the powers to make for more interesting play fields.
Sushi Cat really is about the drop-and-watch style of play for the most part. The level backdrops and themes change enough so it’s visually decent and the obstacles in the levels do keep getting rearranged or tinkered with so it never feels like you’re doing the same thing, but whether you’re on a tropical island, at a carnival, or doing a sumo tournament, the areas inevitably play similarly despite their visual changes. Sushi Cat also lacks some of the punch you’d hope to see. A game like Peggle is similar in concept in that you just launch the first shot and hope for the best, but Peggle makes every obstacle something you can eliminate and really nails in your success with some deliberately overdramatic music. Sushi Cat stays pretty humble, with a good drop just making your cat really fat and the feedback for doing well being the same simple messages that aren’t quite as rewarding. It is definitely doing what it’s aiming to do well enough, but besides cute fat cats, it doesn’t have the style pachinko games usually aim for to make things more satisfying.
Perhaps the biggest letdown though has to be the amount of content. Pachinko really isn’t a hard style to make last as long as you like, and since Sushi Cat isn’t getting really ambitious with its level ideas or visuals, it feels like it could go on quite a while. Instead, it has 15 basic levels, 3 bonus levels you get for beating those, and the Honeymoon campaign with 12 more stages. Beating a level on your first try isn’t too rare and doesn’t take too long to do, and while dropping your cat in at the right places and during the right rotations of moving objects is certainly important, there isn’t any layer of complexity keeping you from breezing through stages with a bit of luck. They do fill their role well despite being small in number, and if you want a hands off game like this they do give you that small joy of seeing the cat drop down and gather more and more of what you’re shooting for, but the Honeymoon levels do have a small issue.
Sushi Cat’s size growth can be an issue at times as he can end up squished into a spot he can’t really get out of. Normal levels he will get stalled for a while but eventually squeeze himself free due to his malleable shape. However, a few Honeymoon levels have obstacles near the edge of the screen like turning barriers that the fat cat’s body doesn’t really agree with. Rather than being a ball that compresses from their pressure like in other stages, here Sushi Cat will become distorted and get completely glitched out, his body becoming a mess of jagged angles as it tries to maneuver out of a spot but can’t. He can get twisted into all sorts of shapes here, but when the game finally calls it quits on freeing his body it will just immediately end the drop for you to prevent it from being unwinnable. Of course, this denies you the spoils of a drop when it happens, so the Honeymoon levels with these issues are lesser for this problem.
Once you’ve completed the game’s brisk 30 levels, all you can really do is return to levels and try for a high score, but the pachinko layouts are really about luck save for the very minor gimmicks. For a mobile port of a flash game it really didn’t try to take advantage of the platform, the game content to be pretty basic and hope what worked in the browser works on the phone. The browser game was decent though so carrying it over with hardly anything new or changed means it will be pretty decent too, but it is a game that feels too small because of how short and simple the pachinko levels prove to be.
THE VERDICT: Sushi Cat’s big fat cat is the draw of playing the game, the cute rotund feline growing in size, squishing through gaps, and bouncing around the pachinko-inspired levels in his quest to gobble up sushi. There is some variety in the looks and layouts of levels but nothing particularly imaginative, with the same being true of the rare power-ups that are gone before you really had the time to embrace their small shakeups to a mostly uninteractive experience. There is still a small thrill in dropping the cat right and seeing your choice pay off with a lot of growth and points, but despite the cute trappings, Sushi Cat is mostly on par with the same basic level of enjoyment regular old pachinko provides, meaning it’s decent but unfortunately unexceptional.
And so, I give Sushi Cat for iOS…
An OKAY rating. Sushi Cat, despite the looks and despite the few moments it throws in a sushi piece that adds a brief touch of new gameplay, really just comes down to the simple question of whether or not a player likes pachinko. It doesn’t have the interactivity that would make it more appealing to people looking for more of a video game experience, but it also hits the basics of its gameplay style well enough that it can’t be faulted as a pachinko experience. The expanding of the cat as it eats is mildly entertaining in the same way getting a good drop and collecting the sushi would be without it, and besides a few flubs like the Honeymoon level glitches, it’s mostly just a small batch of acceptably designed pachinko layouts without any major frills to them. It’s unambitious but not unenjoyable, but it’s hard to sink your teeth into it when there’s not much going on besides a level of variety that doesn’t really impact your gameplay approach too much.
Having more flair to the affair, more gimmickry, or a more liberal distribution of the special sushi could have given Sushi Cat more gameplay identity, but as it is, it’s a perfectly fine collection of pachinko levels with a cute cat slapped on it to make them a bit less basic. You aren’t getting much with Sushi Cat, but it’s mostly competent and isn’t failing at its slight alteration to its genre’s formula, but that lack of ambition means it goes by too quickly without leaving an impression. The funny thing is, this game about making a cat grow in size just feels too small, both in its amount of content and in how diverse that content feels.