My Sushi Story

I opened My Sushi Story expecting a quick restaurant tapper, and the first thing it showed me was a ruin. A waiter in a purple bandana named Ryota Ono greeted me as the new manager, said the place hadn't been cleaned for ages, and asked me to help him clear out the broken planks and cobwebs.

The moment that made me stop came after my second batch of customers. Ryota told me the menu was too thin and the guests were unhappy about it, and that's when I found out that new dishes don't come from the shop at all. They come from a merge board.

Two thousand gold and a dining room full of junk

You start with 2,000 gold and no diamonds, which is just enough for the basics. The first table cost me 500 gold to unlock, and the kitchen worktop took the other 1,500, so for a minute I owned a restaurant with exactly one table and an empty wallet.

Then the doors open. A customer sits down, a little menu bubble pops up, and you tap it to take the order. In my first service the kitchen cooked by itself, so all I did was tap the bell when a dish was ready and it got carried out to the table.

When the customer finishes, a receipt slides in. My very first one listed Gomoku Soba, Oyakodon, a Rice Ball and Radish Pork Bone Soup for 183 gold, plus a 5% income bonus that brought it to 192.

After that you clean the table, because a clean dining room is what pulls in the next guests. Before the doors opened, the game also asked me to hang a signboard out front, with the name already filled in as Sushi Bar.

Ryota wants his wages

The staff system has more personality than I expected. Ryota helps you for free during the tutorial, then points out that you still haven't paid him and asks to be hired from the Staff list. His card describes him as a hard-working waiter who always makes clumsy mistakes, and hiring him costs 300 gold.

The same list already shows other waiters with better ratings, like Yoshimaru at 45 and Imai Mito at 70, against Ryota's 30. Ryota's card adds 1% to movement and cleaning speed, and the list has separate tabs for cashiers and chefs too.

There's a Business Objectives book as well, which gives you one small goal at a time. My first goal was simply to clean up the lobby, and it paid 200 gold, or 400 if you claim it with a video ad.

Five kinds of inspiration and 165 dishes

The merge board is where the menu grows. Each tap on your chef costs one point of energy, out of 30, and drops an ingredient called an Inspiration onto a grid. Two of the same kind merge into the next level, so two eggs became a Grill skewer, and two of those climbed until I had a level 4 Grill.

To create a dish, you need a level 5 Inspiration of all five kinds, which are fire, hand, pot, knife and bowl. You then drop them into a big pot and tap Create, and my first try produced a Fried Mackerel that went straight onto the menu.

The menu book shows how far this goes. After that first dish, my collection read 4 out of 165, and every dish can be upgraded on its own. One upgrade raised the Fried Mackerel's profit from 22 to 26, while the next one waits until the restaurant reaches a later chapter.

The restaurant itself grows in chapters too, which is why the next upgrade waits. The Build menu splits the place into Outside, Lobby, Kitchen and Private room tabs, and every slot already shows a better version, like a nicer table for 800 gold next to the one in use.

Where the gold and the diamonds go

Gold pays for almost everything you build, while diamonds are the premium currency. The shop trades 10 diamonds for 2,000 gold or for 20 points of energy, and it has a free 10-diamond claim sitting right next to those trades.

Real money buys diamonds in packs from 50 for $0.99 up to 2,000 for $19.99. Right after my first task, the game also popped a Beginner Pack with 300,000 gold and 80 diamonds for $0.99, marked half off with a 24-hour countdown.

The Privileges tab sells a Weekly Pass for $3.99 and a Monthly Pass for $18.99. Both remove pop-up and banner ads, and the monthly one adds a button that merges every Inspiration on the board at once, which tells you how much tapping the board takes later on.

The other pressure point is the ad button on every receipt. When three customers paid 331 gold for one table, the same receipt offered 1,655 more in tips, but only behind a video ad.

Three switches, and the money they saved

The VipMod version adds a red VIP badge in the top-left corner, and tapping it opens the MOD menu with three switches. In my session, each switch worked the moment I flipped it, without restarting the game.

I started with the ad switch and went back to that cleaning goal. Double Claim took my gold from 192 to 592 on the spot, with no video at all. Later, the AD tips button on a receipt paid the bill and the 1,655 tips together, 1,986 gold in one tap.

The free pack switch was next. I tapped the $0.99 Beginner Pack, and instead of a payment screen I got 300,000 gold and 80 diamonds. A second test on the 50-diamond pack took my diamonds from 80 to 130.

The third switch stops purchases from taking anything away. With it on, I unlocked a second table for 450 gold and my balance stayed at 300,592. Trading 10 diamonds for 2,000 gold left my diamonds at 80 while the gold went up. A few things to know up front:

• The spending switch's help text says you still need enough gold or diamonds on hand for the game to let you buy something.
• Gold from customers keeps adding up as usual while the spending switch is on.
• The free pack switch skips the weekly and monthly passes, according to its own help text.
• All three switches belong to VipMod plans, with the ad switch in VIP1 and the other two in VIP2.

How it played over a long lunch break

The best thing here is how cozy the routine feels. Customers wander in, the little receipts are fun to read, and the merge board gives your thumbs something to do while the kitchen works. The art is warm and tidy, and the dining room fills up fast once you add a second table.

The weaker part is the steady stream of nudges. Tips, double rewards and passes all sit behind ads or prices, and the energy bar caps how many ingredients you can make before you have to wait or spend diamonds.

My Sushi Story holds 4.5 stars from about 234,000 ratings on Google Play in the US, with more than 10 million downloads, and it's rated Everyone. The language list includes English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Indonesian, Vietnamese and both forms of Chinese.

So who should open this restaurant

If you like gentle management games where the numbers go up while you watch, this one is easy to recommend. The mix of serving customers, hiring staff and merging ingredients into new dishes keeps a session from feeling like the same three taps over and over.

If you tried it before and slowed down once every upgrade needed more gold or another ad, the mod is a good reason to come back. The ad switch alone turns every doubled reward into a single tap, and the two VIP2 switches let you build the restaurant you want right away.