There’s a song from the 90’s Disney movie “The Little Mermaid” which goes something like this:

Under the sea
Under the sea
Everything’s better
Down where it’s wetter
Take it from me

Well, today our undersea world is just a little bit less happy. Sebastian the crab would probably be off in his shell sobbing away the sadness of the day, if not for the fact that he was probably one of the many main courses on offer at the Ocean King’s Sushi Buffet.

What am I talking about? Read on...

What I Am Talking About

The Ocean King has ruled over the seas of the world for countless centuries, keeping the deep blue safe from harm and protecting the aquatic creatures within his watery empire. Well, most of the time, that is.

You see, the King is prone to occasionally having some truly terrible ideas. Take Krakatoa, for example. That was going to be the “best underwater light show ever”, until it got a bit out of hand and his stoking of the undersea lava flows caused the main volcano to go critical and, well, we all know how it went from there.

Some have said that, since mankind has started throwing so much pollution into the ocean, these fits of madness have become worse, almost like the contaminants in the water have an intoxicating affect on the King. Whether or not this is true, intoxication of some sort definitely came into play in his latest scheme, which ranks among one of the worst.

The King invited some of his friends around for a party. “What friends could the Ocean King have?” I hear you ask. Other Ocean Kings, of course. Lots of other worlds have oceans and, hence, need kings to preside over them. It’s like a kind of universal law. Even if a world only had one tiny puddle on its surface, a king would come into existence to govern over it. He would probably just be very small and have a voice like an animated chipmunk. But I digress.

Now, a party in itself would be no bad thing, if not for the alcohol that was involved. One of the visiting Kings brought a large batch of his own special brew, fermented from the seaweed of his world. Of course, it takes a LOT of beer to have an intoxicating effect on an all-powerful lord of the waves, but being such powerful creatures, they also have the ability to drink a LOT of beer.

It is often the case that, even when on a drunken night out, most Ocean Kings wouldn’t cause a whole lot of damage. They are responsible types, after all. But, predictably, our own Ocean King had one of his terrible ideas, involving an all-you-can-eat sushi buffet. Somehow he managed to get his visitors to agree – hey, it wasn’t their ocean – and chaos ensued.

You see, being all powerful Ocean Kings, not only do they have the ability to drink a whole lot of beer, they also have they the ability to eat a whole lot of sushi. And they used that ability with great enthusiasm. Very great enthusiasm, in fact.

Imagine the scene the next morning. The Ocean King wakes up, an all-powerful headache commanding his all-powerful mind. Slowly, bit by bit, the events of the previous night fade back into view. The friends visiting drops back into his memory, and a smile drifts over his face. The immense amount of drinking, and a wry chuckle escapes him. Then he starts to wonder where all the fish that usually gather around him are this morning, and the memory of the Ocean King’s “All Night All You Can Eat Sushi Spectacular” creeps nervously back into his perception. Oh dear.

An All Powerful Solution

An Ocean King, when faced with the most dire of situations, is not beyond, panic, guilt, or anger. But when the waters at your command contain little more than a few rocks and copious quantities of silt and salt, making them swirl around furiously doesn’t really help very much. He sank a couple of big transport ships with giant whirlpools, which helped a bit more, but made sure the crews had abandoned ship before unleashing his fury and committing the wrecks to their watery doom.

After that, he sulked for a while at the bottom of one of the deepest ocean trenches, before finally coming up with a brilliant solution to his problem. Or at least, brilliant to his own mind. To most others it would probably have seemed questionable at best. He reasoned, since the other Ocean Kings had shown so little restraint in devouring his own sea life, and hadn’t tried to stop him from allowing the oceanic carnage, he had no compunctions about stealing ocean life from the other Ocean Kings’ worlds, and restocking his own domain with a mixture of life from many different worlds. Except for the life of the ocean world of Pyraxis, the Ocean Queen of which he had become quite attracted to. But every other world with an ocean, every single one, would supply the basis for the new wave of life to inhabit his oceans.

Obviously, though, if a great and powerful Ocean King turned up on the doorstep of another world and started to pilfer the fish, the resident Ocean King would notice straight away, and events could get very nasty in a very short space of time. That’s where you come in.

Prince of All You Survey

You are the Ocean Prince, underling and most favoured of the Ocean King of our world. Being beneath the King, you are a lot smaller (only a couple of feet tall actually), and a lot less powerful. However, this means that it would take another Ocean King much longer to realise that you were up to no good than if your superior were at work.

Knowing this, the Ocean King has tasked you with the job of retrieving new forms of life to inhabit his empty oceans, and has given you a magical net to aid you in your task. Thus begins the game.

‘We Love Kalamari’ takes place over fifteen ocean worlds, each filled with wide and varying arrays of plant and animal life, and all ripe for pilfering. The basic format of the game involves controlling the Ocean Prince as he is dropped into each ocean, swimming around and catching various life, and other associated objects, in his magic net, which trails behind him.

It’s All About Scale

The special thing about this game is the sense of scale. At first, when first entering the oceans, the magic net is sensibly scaled to the Ocean Prince’s size – about a foot or so across, and only able to catch the smallest fish. But as the volume of captured aquatic life increases, so does the size of the bag. This, in turn, enables much larger life forms to be snared, but the scope of the game goes far beyond just capturing larger fish.

Imagine, starting from a small size, swimming around the ocean with the magic net. Capture a few fish, and the bag is big enough to capture, say, a shark. Capture a few fish and you can capture an octopus. Capture a few octopi and you can capture a shark. A few of those will allow you to catch a whale. A few whales, and suddenly a whole coral reef can be scooped up. Each time the scale of the bag increases, the scale of the ocean available to explore increases too, from struggling across a few small stretches of coastal water to crossing entire oceans in seconds.

The graphics engine in the game copes very well with the constantly changing sense of scale, displaying the vibrantly coloured worlds in ever increasing size, handling the smallest pebbles at the smallest scales with the same grace as the largest reefs and undersea volcanoes at the largest. You can even grab a few of those volcanoes in the magic net, although it’s best not to think too hard about how a volcano could just be scooped up inside a net.

The challenges on each world are generally fairly simplistic, and occur repeatedly in slightly changed forms across the various worlds. “Capture X fish in X minutes”, “capture a whale”, “grow your bag to a mile across”, these are all fairly common goals. However, one absolute constant is the final and hardest challenge within each world, which is “capture the Ocean King”. This involves growing the magic bag to such an awesome scale that the Ocean King of that world can even be captured within. Of course, he won’t be too happy about it, and will try to collide with your bag, knocking the fish out of it and threatening to shrink you back to a less dangerous size.

So Many Worlds, So Little Time

After each challenge is completed, the Ocean King of Earth will make some cryptic statement about your performance, usually not making a whole lot of sense. Perhaps his mind is still somewhat affected by the large hangover he must be suffering. Or perhaps it’s because this game was made in Japan, where the typical sense of humour is somewhat unique. To be honest, it’s probably a combination of both.

What does make sense, however, is that each completed challenge opens up one, or more, more advanced challenges, each of which waits to be completed. Complete all the challenges in one world, and some more will open up, ready to be explored and drained of all aquatic life. Only when they are all complete with Earth have its ecosystem restored, and the Ocean King can rest comfortably at night. Until he cooks up his next disastrous scheme, at least, or the ‘victim’ Ocean Kings decide to pay him a visit.

Overall, this game is delight to pick up and play. Even though it may lack any real developing story line, and the concept in itself may not make much sense, the fact remains that this is a wonderfully fun piece of entertainment, ideal for randomly picking up and playing when you feel like a quick half an hour of fun. This is yet another reason why the powers that be in the games publishing world should cast their eye to far eastern shores (Japan, that is) more often, and consider more of their games for translation. If they can come up with this gem, it begs the question of what else they may be hiding.

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