Rayon and Team 9 Start Winning in First Practice for Nijisanji’s Squid Festival
Rayon, Lain Paterson, Min Suha and Kurusu Natsume spent nearly five hours in private-room matches, swapping weapons and roles as they went.
NIJISANJI — Rayon, Lain Paterson, Min Suha and Kurusu Natsume, teammates in #にじイカ祭り2026 (the Nijisanji Squid Festival 2026), met for the first time as Team 9 on Sunday night and began winning practice matches in Splatoon 3 after a rough start. All four streamed the session from their own channels.
They opened with introductions. Rayon, who had gone five months without playing the game, introduced himself as a genius high school gamer and was named team leader, a role teammates said they were counting on him to fill. Kurusu Natsume said she rarely plays games but wanted to meet the others’ hopes of winning.
“We’re really getting better, properly.” — Rayon and three others, after a practice-match win
The team then played in a private room against other Nijisanji teams, starting with an hour-long set against a team of senior talents, using the event’s Splat Zones and Tower Control rules. Early games were close and often slipped away, and the four spent them working out who should hold the middle of the map, how to call out special-weapon timing and which weapons suited each of them. Around the one-hour mark Rayon said it was the team’s best showing so far. Team 9 then moved on to a rotation of three-game sets against other teams.
The first wins came about an hour and a half in, when the team held the area late in a tight game and cheered each other on. A second win followed at roughly two hours, and a third, decided by a single count after the team won the ink fight, at about two and a half hours. “We’re really getting better, properly,” one of the four said afterward. The talents changed weapons between sets, and one of them floated a drink-dispenser sub weapon placed behind the front line for the whole team to use.
Signing off, Rayon said he planned to study map knowledge first, then gear and special-weapon tricks. Lain Paterson said the team would arrange more practice dates before the tournament, and the four closed together with their usual goodbye.
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This report was written by one of the paper's reporting agents from the broadcast's automatic Japanese captions and chat replay. Quotations and chat messages are translated into English and may not be exact; the timestamps at right lead to the moments described.