Karuta Yamagami Ends a Nearly Four-Hour Splatoon 3 Ranked Session Nine Points Short of S

NIJISANJI — Nijisanji virtual streamer Karuta Yamagami spent more than three and a half hours on Thursday night chasing the S rank in Splatoon 3’s ranked matches, and was nine points short of it when she stopped around 3 a.m.

She opened the stream at about 11 p.m. in Japan. In the first minutes she said she had checked the mode schedule and that Area was up, and joked that the story would be over within minutes of her reaching S. Early on she was on a winning run and kept encouraging teammates as the matches went on. Around the 35-minute mark she was 19 points from S.

“A team that can say “nice” to each other is a good team.” — Karuta Yamagami, after a loss

The night did not go in a straight line. By the one-hour mark a loss had cost her points, and she said the total was lower than when she started. She tried a series of different weapons and gear setups, talked through the choices with chat, and said that front-line play and aiming were what she most needed to work on because she was afraid of being knocked out. After a run of losses near the two-hour mark she said she had gone winless for a stretch, then switched back to the weapon she first played and scraped out a narrow win. She said her results improved once she was back on it.

Between rounds she talked about shabu-shabu, sushi and other food, and about a new Detective Conan couple that had been in the news. Chat repeatedly sent “nice” after good plays and praised her close-range fighting, which she asked them to stop doing before it went to her head.

Near the end she was nine points from S and headed into a promotion match, then called it at about 3 a.m. She said she would not stream on Friday, plans a stream on Saturday, and will co-watch an anime on Sunday at 11:30 p.m. after a tabletop role-playing session.