Mikan Orange Pretz | Ramen Pretz | Ghana Black Chocolate Shrimp Chips

I've got lots of Japanese snacks to review - both things left over from my vacation there last year, and new things I've ordered for myself in the interim. I'm a glutton for snacks, especially ones which are different. Therefore, I'm an unstoppable force when it comes to ordering foreign (to me, that is) snacks. Japanese ones are definitely the most accessible, as they are highly regarded the world over. I'll be trying to tackle multiple at once so I can clear the load a bit, to make room for more sundry snacks later on. Today is an odd mix - salty, sweet, and shrimpy.

The following two Pretz were promotional packs for regional mascots to promote their region's best known product. I'm not sure what the other variants were off the top of my head, but the two I tried here were Tochigi Ramen and Mikan Orange.

The ramen Pretz have an adorable dog with an upended ramen bowl on his head. Super cute! They tasted almost exactly like Chicken in a Biskits to me, maybe just ever so slightly sweeter.

 If you've never had one of those crackers, they taste a bit like well, funny enough, the chicken flavor seasoning in an instant ramen, but slightly more herbaceous & sweet. They were very moreish, and we quickly polished off the box. I'd get these again.

The mikan orange Pretz are sponsored by a strange little duck, done in a sweet Kawaii Pet Megu kinda style.  They were also tasty! Sweet & mellow - more like an orange cream soda from the USA than anything tart & orange. Just sweet &  creamy, perhaps this is the way a mikan orange tastes?

It was a simple flavor, and there was no salty or savory aspects to it, but I thought there might've been since it's a pretzel cracker base. There was also an awful lot of the flavor powder on the sticks themselves, which wasn't a bad thing to me, but might perturb others who are more fussy about getting mucky while they snack. They're just like sort of graham sticks with a creamy orange flavor - I'd eat them again if someone handed me a pack, but probably wouldn't purchase. They reminded me a lot of the sweet version of Goldfish crackers that have came out in recent years.

The Ghana Black Chocolate Shrimp Crackers...well, they weren't kiddin' folks! These crackers taste like dried shrimp, or more accurately, prawn crackers - covered in a semi-sweet dark chocolate. The texture is puffy & light, sort of melt-in-your-mouth, and the coating is shiny and attractive...they're super weird, but not disgusting.

 Worth a try, but would I get another bag? absolutely not. It did however encourage me to seek out Ghana dark chocolate & shrimp crackers...separately. Smart marketing if you ask me, in a country where new things come out with such frequency as in Japan, making something this distinct will drive attention to your products. I'm sure Ghana's dark chocolate & those shrimp chips both experienced a boost in sales afterwards.