Dagashi Kashi was one of the tastiest anime of the Winter 2016 season, but are the snacks featured any good? Let’s find out! For this final week, I got 7 more dagashi lined up, with some of my favorites of them all, and some I do not wish to see ever again. Want to try them out yourself? Luckily for you, you can buy these and many other awesome Japanese treats at J-List.
If you missed any, you can find them here!
Pokkin Ice
I was worried this was going to be another tube of jelly, but luckily for me, it was filled with a liquid instead. The shape of the packaging is kind of weird, but in the end, it’s the insides that matter. It’s clearly meant to be a sort of lemonade, with a strong citrusy flavour and mild sweetness. It’s pretty good, although not as nice as a cold bottle of Ramune. The portion size is quite small, though, which was disappointing.
2 Ramune out of 4.
Morinaga Caramel
I do love me some caramels, so I was quite excited to try these out. The caramels themselves have been manufactured since 1913, and the recipe and packaging have barely changed since then.
They are wrapped in a metal foil, something replaced by plastic in many other products. The caramels are slightly darker than your average milk caramels, which translate into the taste as being a bit more roasted. There is no real milk flavour, which other Japanese milk caramels I’ve tried had. These were amazing and were gone before I knew it.
12 bottles of caramel sauce out of 15.
Itohiki Ame
This dagashi looks like it was homemade to be completely honest. It’s a whole bunch of hard candy on some strings, in some non-defined shapes and sizes. I suppose the strings have some sort of function,
but I just found them to get in the way when trying to eat the candy. The flavour itself is one of pure sugar, which is too hard to bite through and forces you to slowly lick it until it’s gone. It’s really quite bad, and not worth your money if you ask me.
3 strings without candy attached out of 12.
Mini Cola
A miniature can of cola, with a pull tab and all. It’s a pretty decent looking can actually, even though it’s plastic. The candy itself is in the form of brown pellets, unsurprising but a bit boring.
Flavour wise, it tastes like cola (unsurprisingly), with a minor sensation of fizziness. The cola flavour is not extremely strong, though, and you’d only get the full experience when you dunk it all in your mouth at once.
8 store brand cans of cola out of 14.
Pineapple Ame
It’s really the week of hard candy it seems. As the name implies this is a pineapple flavoured candy, in the form of pineapple slices. They were rather similar to the Sakuranbo no Uta, and just as tasty.
The pineapple flavour was fairly mild, but still clearly there, with the smell being that of sweet, sweet pineapple. They lasted a little shorter than the Sakuranbo no Uta, but had more in the package, so it all balanced itself out.
9 pineapples out of 10.
Puchi Gum
Gum… yay… According to the internet this is supposed to be soda flavoured gum, and with the grapes on the packaging, it’s most likely grape soda flavoured. The flavour is definitely grape, but there is no hint of any soda references. No weird fizz or anything interesting like that. The flavour also disappears very quickly, which doesn’t help Puchi Gum’s case.
4 chewed upon pieces of gum out of 9.
Cheese Arare
And finally, Cheese Arare. Boy did I wish the final dagashi was any good. Sadly the cheese is a lie, as there was barely any cheese flavour.
The Arare bits are just mildly salty snacks made from something I couldn’t quite place, but probably wasn’t rice based like many of similar looking dagashi. Not impressed, not at all.
2 sad endings out of 5.
That’s it for the Dagashi reviews! It really was a joy and a pleasure to put my body on the line in the name of sweet, sweet science. There were so many great Dagashi, and so many horrible ones. But some of my favourites have got to be the Umai-bou and potato fry from part one, the Bontan Ame and Watapachi from part two, the Fugashi and Sakama-Shiki Drops from part three, and the Sakuranbo no Uta and Morinaga Caramel from the final two parts. I strongly recommend you try all of these out yourself if you have the opportunity to, as they are absolutely amazing. And even the weird ones I didn’t like at all were interesting. You certainly wouldn’t find fermented daikon radish or strips of seaweed in your local candy store. I thank you all from the bottom of my heart for sticking with me throughout these reviews. I hope you enjoyed reading about a part of the exciting and weird world of Dagashi candy.
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