Kurusu Natsume Spends Tournament Eve in More Than 10 Hours of Splatoon 3 Practice

NIJISANJI — Kurusu Natsume of Nijisanji spent more than ten hours on Friday practicing Splatoon 3 for the #にじイカ祭り2026 (Niji Ika Matsuri 2026) tournament, which was set for the next day. The broadcast ran as two streams: an afternoon of practice matches with Nijisanji colleagues and stage scouting, then an evening of team practice with her team, All Green.

She opened by joining a private lobby of colleagues, who played Splat Zones and Tower Control on rotating stages with teams drawn up by the host. Natsume asked to swap weapons as the session went on and tried one for the first time, admitting she had done poorly with it. When the lobby closed, she wondered aloud whether she should play further forward.

“I like unglamorous pestering better than flashy play. Is that the worst?” — Kurusu Natsume, scouting stages on her own

She then walked the stages alone with chat’s help. Her lesson from study sessions, she said, was to stay one step behind the front line while spreading ink as widely as possible, and she admitted that a habit of jumping while firing nearly sent her off the tower. She tried to hop to a far ledge and failed, then learned from chat a command for returning to the spawn point that she said she had not known. Viewers also advised placing sprinklers as high as possible, since short-range weapons struggle to destroy them. “Thanks, I’ll remember that,” she said. She also floated riding the tower herself and playing as a dodger, and said that when allies were struggling she would pull back rather than try to carry a fight alone. She finished by hurrying through the stages she had not yet seen, confirmed she had covered them all, and left to start the next stream.

In the evening stream, with all four All Green members present, including a teammate back after being unwell, Natsume said the team had lined up four free-agent players to scrimmage for at least an hour. The team set three wins as its target for the tournament. A heavy loss to an opposing team with a charger left the group talking through ways to counter chargers with sprinklers and bombs. After a comeback and another hard-fought win about 4:20 into the broadcast, teammates joked that it felt like a championship. Free agents swapped in as others dropped out, and the scrimmages carried on for hours.

Later the team worked through stages it had been losing on, including Manta Maria and Barnacle & Dime, trading weapon ideas and positions, and Natsume settled on a high back spot from which she could see the whole map and call out flanks. At the close she said the most important thing left to do was sleep, and that she would read Super Chats after the tournament; eight had come in during the broadcast.