DAVE THE DIVER Let's Play: Living the Double Life of Sushi Bar and Diving All the Way to the End

The protagonist, Dave, is enjoying his vacation when he gets a call from his acquaintance Cobra. Hearing there's a good sushi bar, he heads over right away. The narrator remarks that this "light-footedness" may be exactly what makes him a protagonist.

Where Cobra lives, there is a huge blue hole. Cobra has a business idea, and Dave puts on a diving suit for the first time in a while and dives into the sea. After being handed a harpoon and catching some fish, he visits a sushi bar that is preparing to open. The plan is to have Dave, with his diving experience, catch the fish, and have the restaurant's chef, Bancho, make the sushi. The narrator takes this as "a pretty fun-sounding business idea."

But then a big earthquake hits, and the restaurant they had been getting ready collapses into a mess. Still, since they need to earn money for repairs, they force the restaurant open that very night.

Contrary to the expectation that no customers would come, they pour in right after opening. Before he knows it, Dave is in charge of the floor. There's a lot to do: pouring tea well, rushing dishes out, refilling the wasabi when it runs low, and cleaning up after customers leave. The restaurant's reputation is shared every day on social media, and the narrator jokes, "Honestly, it's scary—if I do a bad job, I feel like even customers who don't normally post would bash me in reviews." Since the player also decides which sushi toppings to serve, the narrator comments at the end of the first day that it seems like it'll be fun as a management sim too.

The next day, Dave encounters a shark and takes it down, and that night he uses points to research a new menu item and serves a shark dish. The customer who comes in is Yoshie, Bancho's former coworker. The dish looked a bit questionable, but she was satisfied with it. The backstory is revealed that Bancho once worked at a top-class hotel but left after angering a customer with a certain dish, and Yoshie was a coworker of his from that time.

Here, John Watson, the leader of "Sea Blue," an environmental group that claims to protect the ocean, appears and issues a warning. The narrator reacts, "There really are people like this in every world, huh."

The next expedition isn't about catching fish. At the request of their ally, the otaku, Dave goes to search for a figure that was aboard a cargo ship that went missing. A giant squid is sleeping nearby, and a fight breaks out. The narrator explains the reasoning: if it were just a figure, it could be ignored, but this otaku is skilled at making weapons and will likely be helping them from now on, so it seems wise to put him in their debt now.

The giant squid fight works like this: every time you land a hit, you're knocked back, and you have to dodge the tentacles to get close again. The narrator calls it "a pretty troublesome opponent." Once the tentacles start spreading out faster, the narrator proceeds carefully, taking breaks along the way, and succeeds in defeating it. From inside the defeated giant squid, a creature like a fish-person emerges, but it runs away upon seeing Dave.

On another day, John Watson shows up again and fires a grenade launcher. Any fish hit by the shells are turned into fillets. The narrator describes him as someone who falls silent when confronted with inconvenient facts, interprets things in his own favor, and in the end tries to solve everything with violence, adding that there was a character like that in FF7, which they played before.

In this fight, the gun the otaku prepared as thanks for bringing back the figure comes in handy, and the narrator feels it's doing a decent amount of damage. There's also a system where, in addition to searching for the day's sushi toppings, if you bring back weapon materials lying on the seafloor, the otaku will upgrade your weapons, so you end up moving around surprisingly busily underwater. Watson gets away, but a path to deeper parts of the sea opens up, expanding the area to explore.

On day 4 of fishing life, Dave visits the sushi bar while it's prepping and has Bancho make a dish in a hurry. This is to deliver it to the deep sea. Before that, to prepare for the dangerous deep-sea area, he asks the otaku to finish the "Underwater Rifle 2."

The dish was for the fish-person that came out of the giant squid. Dave found it weakened by injuries, so he prepared some food for it. When they talk, it turns out to be a surprisingly cute fish-person, apparently the princess of a nearby Sea People village. Dave is half-forcibly asked to escort her to the village, but just short of arriving, they encounter a giant wolf eel. It's introduced as a fish whose powerful jaws let it eat shellfish shell and all.

The battlefield is littered with plenty of oxygen capsules and weapon boxes, and from this the narrator guesses that "it might be a pretty tough enemy." Just when it seems to be attacking from deep in the background, it appears from the side, and its body is longer than expected. Dave's observation reveals that its tail is its weak point, and the narrator attacks the tail with the Underwater Rifle 2. Dave avoids its suction attack by holding onto an anchor, but the suction seems to have a range limit, and there was a moment where Dave, positioned right at the boundary, just wobbled in place. Repeating the same actions to whittle down its health, the narrator defeats it.

After being guided to the Sea People village, Dave returns to the sushi bar. However, since staff have been hired as the restaurant has grown, there's hardly any real work left for him. All he has to do is watch the staff work and occasionally grate some wasabi to pretend he's working, and the narrator says, "I get paid for this, so it's a piece of cake." That day, they served a dish made from the wolf eel they defeated. Since labor costs are gradually rising due to hiring staff, the narrator lays out a plan to make money from now on with high-end deep-sea fish.

After that, the screen switches to the otaku's perspective, and a live concert begins in a dream. It's a rhythm game where you move your hands in time with the notes to rack up points, and it's the scene where the theme song "Shooting Star" plays.

While building a good relationship with the Sea People, Dave is asked to investigate something strange happening beneath the village. Along the way he's attacked by Sea People who have turned violent, but he manages to escape.

Just as he breathes a sigh of relief, John Watson reappears and picks a fight. This time he's equipped with more powerful weapons and clad in bulletproof armor. The narrator reads from the fact that there's no ammo lying around the field that guns won't work against him. Instead, what Dave gets is a baseball bat, and the fight becomes one of waiting for the bombs Watson fires to get close and then batting them back. There were moments of waiting because he wouldn't fire his next shot, but after a few bombs are knocked back, he starts using a new move that scatters bombs everywhere. By continuing to bat back the normal bombs among them, the narrator defeats him for the second time.

Investigating the glacial area spreading beneath the village, Dave finds glowing fruit. When he strikes the fruit to light up the surroundings, a giant, violent fish-person appears.

Since ancient times, there has been a tree in this land called the "Jianmu," and the Sea People prospered using its energy. However, when they began experiments in taking the Jianmu's fruit into their bodies, those who did so became violent, so they were sealed away beneath the village. This apparently happened about 800 years ago. The fish-person who absorbed the Jianmu is still alive, and its power is so tremendous that guns have no effect at all, so Dave just keeps running. The one who pulls him to safety in the nick of time is Swam, the princess's attendant, who was also there during the giant squid incident.

Continuing the investigation of the glacier with Swam, Dave encounters a fearsome-looking creature. It seems that something has recently gone wrong with the Jianmu, causing frequent earthquakes, and the glacier has started to melt, waking up ancient creatures. What appears is a shark straight out of a B-grade shark movie, and the narrator jokes that since living things aren't supposed to be able to have wheel-like organs, bringing this shark back could make them a fortune.

In this fight, you can control Swam with the right stick and Dave with the left stick. Swam manipulates the Jianmu fruit, which you combine with placeable bombs to stagger the shark, then attack while it's stunned. The narrator says that attacking normally might be easier, but they felt this method was more fun.

From here, the narrator shares thoughts on how to play games. While saying it's hard to put into words, they say that games can sometimes involve "a strange tug-of-war between experience and efficiency." To get a fun experience, you have to put in effort, but there's no guarantee that effort will pay off. So you need to venture out speculatively, to an extent that doesn't end up spoiling the experience—that's the feeling. On the other hand, they say that works that put a lot into hospitality are designed so you can enjoy them without thinking, but such works tend to have a narrow range of experience and settle into experiences that don't go beyond what you can imagine. The narrator describes this as "pretty tricky," and concludes that not slacking on the effort to entertain yourself might be the key to enjoying games. While they were talking, the shark has been sufficiently weakened, and the last shot finishes it off.

As the investigation continues, John Watson appears yet again. But just when it seems like a tedious fight is coming, a monster carries him off. The fight then turns into a battle with a Kronosaurus.

Watson's weapon is lying around, so the narrator makes use of it. Since it can't be used for a while after firing once, they focus on running away during that time. Regular guns seem to work somewhat too, but it's dangerous, so the plan is to play it safe and aim to take it down with missiles. The Kronosaurus also eats rocks. The narrator cautions that since Dave doesn't have anything like an invincible dash, it's surprisingly dangerous if you mess up your escape, and succeeds in defeating it.

It turns out the cause of the earthquakes seems to be a malfunction in the Jianmu's control room, but the control room's entrance is blocked by roots, so they'll have their ally's drone cut through them. The work will take several days.

The depiction of day 26 of fishing life shows just how much work Dave has in a day. He checks the restaurant's reputation on the social network "Cooksta" and likes everyone's posts, and checks on the farm he has a contract with. The part-timer he hired there seems to be doing well. At the fish farm, fish multiply on their own if you put them in, but stop multiplying once they exceed capacity, so he thins them out appropriately and sends them to the kitchen.

On this day, a TV station comes to the restaurant with an Italian cuisine pro, and a pasta cooking showdown begins. Bancho cuts the squid into the body and fins, removes the ink sac, and peels the shrimp. The narrator says that it's strange how shrimp are so widely accepted despite their peculiar appearance, and that sometimes they get the feeling of "If shrimp's fine, then bugs should be fine too!" Adding ingredients to the frying pan is done with rhythm-game-style controls: garlic, shrimp, squid, and squid ink in order, followed by freshly boiled pasta. A tangent about squid ink is also included: it has a strong image of being used as a smokescreen, but it's rich in umami, and apparently squid actually escape while the predator is eating the ink. Against the opponent's carbonara with thick-cut pancetta, their side serves squid ink pasta, and Bancho wins.

With the path to the control room about to open, the otaku makes a "Death Rifle" using materials obtained from the Sea People. It's said to be a gun that has a certain chance of sending the target to its death. When Dave reaches the heart of the control room, it's swarming with a huge number of shrimp, which seem to be the cause of the trouble. Just when it seems the problem has been solved by removing them, a giant ancient shrimp creature appears, and the final battle begins.

The narrator lands the drone's laser attack again and again to whittle down its health. Here, the narrator looks back on the story, summarizing it as a tale that began with diving into the sea for sushi toppings, by chance meeting the Sea People, being asked to investigate the cause of the earthquakes, and finally reaching the Jianmu.

As for the Jianmu, the narrator explains that while it's an unfamiliar concept to Japanese people, it's a great tree from Chinese legend that connects heaven and earth. Since it's a giant tree at the center of the world, they suggest it might be just right to think of it as a "World Tree," and say that World Trees appear in various cultures, though some theories hold that the concept originated in the East. They also mention that recently there are many major titles featuring the Jianmu motif, such as Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, so viewers may have at least heard of it. They introduce how in Honkai: Star Rail, the Jianmu was treated as the source of immortality, and the story involved beings who absorbed its power losing their reason and becoming violent; the narrator speculates that there may be a shared understanding about the "amazing tree that's dangerous to take into the human body" part.

The battle becomes an intense bullet hell, and midway through it changes into a side-scrolling shooter. The narrator says that suddenly switching to a side-scrolling shooter in the final battle is reminiscent of Kirby, and while many games turn into a different game during the final boss fight, they praise that this kind of presentation stands out precisely because this game contains so many different games within it.

Dave chases the weakened enemy as it starts to flee, but it's surprisingly still lively, and now he becomes the one being chased. He avoids the enemy's rampaging heat-ray attacks using the drone's time-stop function. There's also an aside that because he stuffed every fish he saw along the way into his bag, he was carrying about 80 kg. When he's cornered at a dead end in the passageway, everyone from the Sea People village appears and helps activate a weapon. They load the Jianmu fruit, fire it, and defeat the ancient creature.

The cause of the earthquakes was the abnormal activation of the Jianmu, and with the resulting rise in water temperature also stopping, the incident is resolved. Back on the surface, Dave and the others close the restaurant for the day and drink together, leading into the staff roll.

Looking back on the roughly one-month story since the fishing began, the narrator says that while they thought it would be a game about just diving and running a sushi bar, it turned out to be "a game packed with as much content as you could possibly ask for," including fish farming, farming, bamboo, running a branch restaurant, photography, and suddenly-starting rhythm games and cooking games. Saying they couldn't introduce everything in detail in the video, the narrator concludes that every character was appealing, and that including the interactions with them, it was a work with a great deal of depth.