Sports! Fashion! Color! Music! Splatoon has it all. I got pulled into Splatoon in 2015. A youtuber group by the moniker of SuperBestFriendsPlay was showing off nintendo's newest property, a colorful shooter with adorable squid children that shot vibrant ink as part of a cultural sport called Turf Wars. It was a fun first look, so i decided to give it a shot, even goths need to see a color once in a while, I figured. Swimmybird was my next stop on the youtube train. Than I saw a splatfest. I saw the colors, the happiness of a huge online event and I wanted in. Luckily, and sadly, the Wii U wasn't super popular, so I got one at a pawn shop and grabed a copy of Splatoon.
I got in just before the Car Ride vs Airplane Trip splatfest and it was all money well spent. Ever since I've been inkbrushing. Splatoon was the most colorful game on the market when it released. Every shooter was drab olives with the same boring camo and dusty Middle-Eastern town settings. In other words they were deadly serious murder simulations and militaristic wanking. Splatoon was and remains dedicated to having fun. Death is nothing more than an inconvenience. Sometimes you howl with laughter even if you're getting creamed. Every single pun you could think of was settled nicely into a welcoming environment. Nothing was too absurd. This is the perfect environment to breed fun.
When Splatoon 2, lovingly called Spla2n for the pun, released a trailer and I did not see our beloved duo after the saddening loss of the Final Fest, I was not convinced. I didn't enjoy how revealing Marina's outfit seemed, but Like everyone else I grew to love her sweet personality. That's not even getting into Octo Expansion. She's a tech nerd who loves the sounds of machinery as well as an immigrant DJ. Pearl is a ultra rich squid rapper who saw Marina's first steps into town as a migrant and welcomed her into her own home with a smile and a keyboard. Together they form Tentacool, called Off The Hook in english, russian and hungarian translations. The two brought a very different sound to the pop sensation, groovy colors of Splatoon. Marina's cheerful love of heavy machinery and sass and Pearl's confident attitude play off of each other in interesting ways that go beyong the funnyman/straightman comedy duo set up that Sp1atoon employed for the Squid Sisters.
Attention employees! Splatoon 2 introduced a new mode! Salmon run is the 4PVE mode where you fight against salmonids, fish folk who are invading. They swarm en masse every couple of years and cause untold amounts of prperty damage. But, not everything is bad. They carry with them power eggs much like the kind seen in the single player modes and Golden Eggs, shiny little fertilized packets of energy that help power Inkolopois Square and day to day life. So, who is undertaking this life and limb endeavour to battle this swarm? A bunch of teenagers wearing slapped together slop suits that don't meet OSHA requirements, aka YOU! You and three other kids are assigned equiptment by one Mr. Grizz and paid bottom of the barrel wages to fight for your hometown! Just make sure to meet your Golden Egg quota or you'll be demoted and your pay slashed. Don't all die at once either, rescue crafts cost the company money. Apply while they're open for workers and you could make a tidy profit and catch some sweet clothing rewards. This mode is fun on a bun, but notorious for having bad weapon load outs quite often or only being open at certain times.
Octo Expansion is the first DLC for the series and it is amazing. Octo expansion changed up the tone of the game plots dramatically. The first two story modes follow the Squid Beak Platoon and their quest to be sea creature homeland security, stopping DJ Octavio from stealing Inkopolis' main power source. Octo Expansion makes this a lot more personal. Octo Expansion follows your octoling on a quest to traverse the Deep Sea Metro, a literal underground rail road, to escape to Inkopolis, leaving behind your underground Octoling residency bubbles which are implied to be losing power. The levels range from do-able to difficult to notorious. The final boss exemplifies the best of Splatoon 2. An interesting design containing a dash of ridiculousness, a scorching hot soundtrack, mechanically fun to play and a reasonable amount of challenge top off Octo Expansion and makes it shine. Once you've helped your Octoling escape to Inkopolis you can play as them, as well. The game even rewards you with a different waving animation if you look at them through the window when you play as an Octoling. But if a reasonable challenge for a good reward is too easy you can try Nintendo's specialty, a super-boss that rewards you something borderline boring to act as a trophy. Like most of those sorts of bosses it's as much about the comraderie surrounding the struggle as it is the reward.
Catch you later!!
Splatoon 3 is fun, as much as Splatoon was ever fun, but the magic is under fire! There's a huge competitive scene and it has the first two games to live up to. The problem with having a fanbase is that you can't please everyone, When that fanbase grows, so too does the pile of haters and upset people. Some weapons are getting all the love, but others are being left behind in the dust. The music and weapons are being released on a quarterly schedule. Not all people prefer to wait to get all their weapons and outfits and tunes at once instead of having it spread out with a little bit every couple weeks. Some of the fashion is losing color and going monochrome, replacing the child-like vibrancy of Splatoon 1's endless wave of hues with the highly modern Toni Kensa Brand's growing prevalence. Don't let that fool you, though! Splatoon 3's modernity is balanced by a love of the past that lives in present day. Splatsville is a lower income community to the point that everyone has GalaKei, short for Galapoagos Keitai, AKA Flip phones, which are currently considered granny phones or phones for those who can't shell out for a smartphone. You can see clothes lines hanging between apartment buildings, a garishly cred post box and colors pepping out of nooks and crannies between the slabs of concrete and weeds.
Splatoon3 has a lot of neat additions that help add new levels of investment into the game. The Locker alone is a great idea and goes a long way to showing where all the staff's effort is going. It's a way to show your style, creativity and sense of what's cool in an easily digestible form. This really works in combination with another new feature: Splashtags. Semi customizable banners displaying your name, giving you a title and displaying various badges you earn as you play. You can select your win poses and are no longer forced to see the same pose forever if you main one weapon type.
Splatoon3 differentiates itself from its predecessors with the introduction of Seasons. New clothes, stickers, decorations, weapons and badges are introduced every season in one big chunk through a catalog, as opposed to drip feeding over year. The catalog levels up separately from your battle experience level. Each level fishnets you sweet new reward, many of which are catalog exclusive and change with the seasons. That's right! There are limited time only clothes and items. The Limited Edition, Sold Out feeling that occurs when you didn't know something was going on sale, or weren't active in a fanbase before hand can now be replicated in-game! We are all sort of guessing the exclusives will be available once the game stops actively updating in around September/October 2025. In the meantime, some season exclusive items are showing up in catalogs, whole sets as one catalog reward to help you catch up if you weren't here for the first run. It feels a lot like when a clothing brand does a re-release but doesn't have the whole line re-released.
Challenges
Challenges are fun, limited time events. It has the feeling of Salmon Run back in spla2n, where it wasn't always available. I didn't like that, then, and i don't like this now. The challenges are great! But they often happen at odd hours and if you can't play because you have a job or obligations, then you are shit out of luck. The actual challenges are great fun when you can get to them,though. Often times it erases secondary abilities on your gear and assigns you some ability in unusual levels.
SIDE ORDER
Let's be real. After the introduction and great success of Octo Expansion, everyone was drooling over Side Order and its protaganist, an older Agent 8. Somehow, the actual reception was lukewarm. Pearl, who is currently in the form of a drone, and a seemingly Sanitized octling calling themselves Acht help Agent 8 through the Tower of Order, a high tech tower replacing the lobby in a bleached version of Inkopolis Square. The actual game play is rouge-lite with an option to turn off your permanent upgrades for more of a Rouge-Like feeling. Like many other Rouge-likes, once you clear the tenth level of the tower for the first time, you are joined by Marina and the 'plot' is resolved through multiple runs through the Tower, which now goes up to level thirty.
With the set up out of the way, let's talk about the aesthetics. Where Splatoon is All Color, All the Time, and OctoExpansion was black with neons in a very 80s look, SideOrder is lo-fi pale. The colors are washed out and pastel at their strongest. What is not pastel looks like an Apple store when it isn't covered in black enemy goop that looks like oil. The music follows suit. The song titles look a little like 133t-speak with numbers replacing letters in word like '0ct0pticon', 'j3sting' and 'echo onslaught'. Agent 8 wears a single earring like a tracking tag from catch and release programs, a white bodysuit with short legs and no sleeves and white boots. Where OctoExpansion was dark, SideOrder is bright. Don't mistake white for sterile,though. The enemies spawn right out of the enviornment and rapidly fill it with oil, drawing lines across the space. It feels sort of lackluster compared to the knockout smash hit that was OE. Might have soemthing to do with the main musical composer leaving Nintendo in 2023.
Speaking of the music, Acht aka DJ dedf1sh is here and that's a whole can of worms. In Splatoon communities there was an uproar about Acht's gender. Let's start back at the start of S3; We had three idols for the first time and one of them was male. Some people, not being accustomed to Japanese cultural bits, saw Shiver's chest wrap and said, do we have three genders for the third game, is shiver Non-binary? They got very excited and then bitterly dissapointed when Nintendo said no. No one ever wants to take a loss lying down,though and there was much low level in-fighting. Move forward to SideOrder showing us Acht in an elevator. Once again certain communities lost their minds and there was a tiny war about Acht's gender. Funnily enough, the game refers to Acht as 'they' and not he or she. Congrats on your NB rep, cephalopods. Can we calm our non-mammalian tits now?
One of my concerns aurrounding SideOrder is that Nintendo woudl go out of the way to disprove the pet theory that Pearl and Marina were together. Quite the opposite! Marina keeps gushing about Pearl every second. Acht even mentions they've never seen Marina act like this. It's never stated 'hey we're lesbians' but it is as close as we are going to get, realisticlly. I'm quite happy, even a little exasperated with how much Marina won't stop talking about Pearl. Pearl is lovey-dovey too but much more subdued about it. Oh well, at least they're happy together.
