Konbini Kinyoubi: Tears of the Kingdom Chicken Bites

Welcome to Konbini Kinyoubi, where every Friday (Kinyoubi) we visit our local convenience store (Konbini) and buy something delicious. This post contains affiliate links. For more information, please read our affiliate disclosure.

During the pandemic, my wife and I decided to buy a new Switch game. We’d gotten 100% on Paper Mario: The Origami King, and though Super Mario Maker 2 was still fun, we wanted something fresh. I gave her a choice: Mario Kart 8 Deluxe or The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild?

I’d assumed she’d pick Mario Kart because that way we could both play, but she surprised me by picking Breath of the Wild. Her reasoning was that Zelda would give us much more game for our buck, and boy was she right. We’ve since bought Mario Kart 8 and had a lot of fun with it, but Zelda gave us YEARS of fun. We’ve beaten the game twice, including the DLC (once on Master Mode) and spent days, weeks, months, centuries, lifetimes looking for koroks. We love Breath of the Wild. I wish I’d played more video games so I could call it the greatest game ever and it would actually mean something. I’m forcing myself to limit how much I’m talking about BOTW here but if you’ve never played it, you should.

You can imagine we’re pretty pumped for Tears of the Kingdom, which comes out (and arrives at our house) the day this blog is posted. Japanese convenience store Lawson is also apparently excited, because they’ve released a special edition of their legendary Karaage-kun to coincide with the game’s release.

Tears of the Kingdom Karaage-kun

Lawson Station’s Karaage-kun are little chicken bites that come in packages of five that look like a chicken and come with a handy toothpick to eat them with. They come in many flavors, though the undisputed best are the red spicy ones, and rival Family Mart’s Famichiki for the title of best konbini chicken in Japan. I discovered these upon first living in Japan back in 2007, and I still love treating myself to a tasty processed snack from the front counter.

The Zelda version is spicy like the red ones, so that alone would sell me, and they also come in a little Zelda box. We happened to be at a Lawson yesterday, so we went ahead and tried them.

How do Zelda Karaage-kun taste?

Here’s where we ran into some trouble. The bites themselves weren’t too hot, easy to pick up and pop in your mouth. The inside was white meat smattered with red spicy stuff, which also seemed good. The box was greasy as hell, so you know these are healthy. Everything great so far.

The problem was that we’d just had a lunch of spicy Chinese food at China Doll and my mouth was still completely on fire from that. The result was that I honestly couldn’t tell if these were spicy or not, because compared to what we’d just had, this was nothing. Eriko said they were spicy, but she’s not the expert on fried chicken. I think they tasted different from the normal red ones, but it was tough to tell.

The verdict: are Zelda chicken bites worth getting?

This particular promotion didn’t have much to offer. The box looks nice, but was far too greasy to keep as a souvenir. The bites tasted, to me, like a lesser version of the red spicy ones (though again I couldn’t taste spicy because my tastebuds had been destroyed). I’d say this deal isn’t really worth making a special effort to find.

However, if you find yourself passing by a Lawson and you’ve already had the regular red ones so many times it’s shortened your life expectancy by several years, forking over two bucks for a limited-edition tasty treat is still a pretty good deal. So in that respect, I suppose I would recommend trying these. 15/10 you can do no wrong konbini.