This review contains spoilers
Back on Splatoon 2's FinalFest, I was in Team Order. Not only did it strike me as the preferable moral choice, it also seemed like the less hacky threat to theme the next game around. I don't think there's a Nintendo baddie who wouldn't align themselves with Team Chaos, and it seemed easy to picture how that would pair with Splatoon's colourful, forever teenage aesthetic. I wanted to know what an orderly Splatoon would be. It seems the developers were fairly inspired by the curious prompt, too, as they pretty much ignored the divine authority of SplatFest results to deliver this vision as a bit of DLC.
Side Order has a pretty conservative approach to random elements, and that's both a good and bad thing. While I was pretty cold to the idea of Nintendo's new generation of developers handing over the game design tools to an algorithm, the levels here are all tailored with the same care they've traditionally put into the series' single-player content. There just isn't all that much of it. This is billed as a mode that you can play endlessly. One run through Side Order takes roughly half an hour, and the bulk of any two runs will be spent on the same stages. The variables are meaningful, and help to build skills you can carry over to the main multiplayer content, but I don't know if it'll have much meaningful impact outside of Splatoon's active playerbase.
Each run through Side Order asks you to select a pre-made weapon loadout and presents you with 30 floors of a tower to beat. Each one presents you with a random selection of three levels to pick from, each marked with their own difficulty rating and completion rewards. Levels each come with one of five objectives, and all involve either chasing or defending a target while fighting off oncoming enemies. It's fun, but it doesn't really offer the variety or complexity of a typical single-player campaign. I don't think anybody outside of the most hardcore fans will play through it with every loadout.
The thing is, Splatoon gets to use its characters, aesthetic and themes as a crutch. For the most engaged fans who lap up this stuff, this side of the DLC makes up for the relatively shallow pool of content. There's a lot of direct callbacks and narrative ties to previous games and a good amount of Splatoon deeplore stuff. It just seems to repeat a lot of the same beats we've already seen, and the only people who will care about this aspect of the content are the same people who will be bothered by those things.
It's a big showcase for Splatoon 2's pop duo, Off the Hook, with Pearl acting as a Bowser's Fury-style drone partner, taking out swarming enemies and shouting out words of encouragement as you play. She's a pretty good fit for it, really. It was kind of funny to see Marie take a similar role in Splatoon 2, trying to inspire action without losing her cool, but if Splatoon wasn't so committed to its characterisation, she'd have been hooting and hollering like Pearl throughout it. Dialogue and unlockable written content relentlessly reinstate how much Marina and Pearl love each other, though despite the burgeoning enthusiasm from a significant segment of the fanbase, it appears we're not going to see explicit confirmation of a gay relationship in a game from the publishers of Tomodachi Life anytime soon.
Playing through Side Order with different weapon loadouts (each one themed around a familiar Splatoon character, of course) will unlock further weapons, in-game cash to spend on upgrades, and entries from Marina's diary. These act like the Squid Sister Stories did in the runup to Splatoon 2, offering us a little insight on Marina's perspective following Team Chaos's victory, but it's relatively perfunctory. Marina's a fairly pristine character, uniquely talented in a range of interests, and full of love for everyone. It's hard to imagine her doing something maliciously. The developers have far less conviction in pinning her as a villain as they did for Callie in Splatoon 2, putting a lid on the possibility before you even see Side Order's opening titles. It's a little underwhelming, but I respect the team's commitment to established characterisation before everything else. We might get less exciting stories for it, but when the fans watch the concerts, they fully believe in those dancing fish people. You don't want to mess with that.
I'm a little anxious that the politics have taken a bit of a backseat in Splatoon now. Pikmin 4 was guilty of the same, and I really don't want it to be something Nintendo shies away from. Octo Expansion took a really big swing on this stuff. Not only did it deliver a fairly earnest anti-racist message in a way that really complemented the established characters and setting, I was fucking thrilled with how it put the game's ecological message into stark view. Implying that there's something to be learned from the energy and passion of the youth movement of the late sixties, by homaging Planet of the Apes' post-apocalyptic revelation with its sunken Statue of Liberty, but also presenting it in the most Splatoon way possible, with you grinding around it on midair ink rails to a thumping soundtrack and rapidfiring at Lady Liberty's pulsing weak spots. It's difficult for me to think of any part of a videogame that I love more than Octo Expansion's final hours. I was with Splatoon since Day One, and this was the perfect way to tell me that my good will had paid off. Presenting the oncoming climate emergency and subsequent extinction of the human race, not only as a solid fact, but a rollercoaster with popstars and dualwielded uzis. There's nothing like that in Side Order. Just a loose implication that dogmatic authoritarianism is a flawed attitude. It feels pretty lame by contrast. I don't know if anybody else gets as much out of this side of Splatoon, and I don't think they can repeat that high. I just feel obliged to keep prodding the developers to get radical again.
That's not to say that Side Order makes no meaningful progress on the story. Following up on the liberation of the Octoling army, we're given some insight into who those people were and how their lives have changed since. It's significant to our understanding of Marina, and shows commitment to the continuity. It didn't stir me too much, personally, but if there had been so much as a comment from a Squid Sister, I know I'd have been far more invested.
Completing Side Order gives players the ability to set Splatoon 2's Inkopolis Square as their main hub. It's kind of weird to be seeing nostalgia for a game on the same console, but with all the signs that the Switch may be wrapping things up, there is a bit of ennui in going back to the 2017 stuff right now. As a big fan of Zelda, Mario and Splatoon, that year was a complete thrill ride for me. Not only was there excitement for this new console, we were giddy for a version of Nintendo that put all its focus on a single platform. There seemed to be a massive new title every month, for a while. As remarkable a system as it became, I think it's fair to say it didn't really carry on that same trajectory for long. With Tears of the Kingdom, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and the Mario Kart 8 DLC, it feels like Nintendo have just been trying to repeat those 2017 successes, rather than continue on that journey of invention. Splatoon 2 is good, Splatoon 3 is good, and Side Order is good, but Octo Expansion had me thinking the series would change and get far more ambitious. I don't think that's happened. It's like we've seen everything it can be, and all we can expect now are minor tweaks. I still want Portal 2/Resident Evil 4 structure in single-player Splatoon. I just have far less faith it's going to happen, now.
I'm the kind of fan who paid for this as soon as possible to get access to the Splatoon 1 hub. Of course this is what my criticism is going to look like.
Side Order has a pretty conservative approach to random elements, and that's both a good and bad thing. While I was pretty cold to the idea of Nintendo's new generation of developers handing over the game design tools to an algorithm, the levels here are all tailored with the same care they've traditionally put into the series' single-player content. There just isn't all that much of it. This is billed as a mode that you can play endlessly. One run through Side Order takes roughly half an hour, and the bulk of any two runs will be spent on the same stages. The variables are meaningful, and help to build skills you can carry over to the main multiplayer content, but I don't know if it'll have much meaningful impact outside of Splatoon's active playerbase.
Each run through Side Order asks you to select a pre-made weapon loadout and presents you with 30 floors of a tower to beat. Each one presents you with a random selection of three levels to pick from, each marked with their own difficulty rating and completion rewards. Levels each come with one of five objectives, and all involve either chasing or defending a target while fighting off oncoming enemies. It's fun, but it doesn't really offer the variety or complexity of a typical single-player campaign. I don't think anybody outside of the most hardcore fans will play through it with every loadout.
The thing is, Splatoon gets to use its characters, aesthetic and themes as a crutch. For the most engaged fans who lap up this stuff, this side of the DLC makes up for the relatively shallow pool of content. There's a lot of direct callbacks and narrative ties to previous games and a good amount of Splatoon deeplore stuff. It just seems to repeat a lot of the same beats we've already seen, and the only people who will care about this aspect of the content are the same people who will be bothered by those things.
It's a big showcase for Splatoon 2's pop duo, Off the Hook, with Pearl acting as a Bowser's Fury-style drone partner, taking out swarming enemies and shouting out words of encouragement as you play. She's a pretty good fit for it, really. It was kind of funny to see Marie take a similar role in Splatoon 2, trying to inspire action without losing her cool, but if Splatoon wasn't so committed to its characterisation, she'd have been hooting and hollering like Pearl throughout it. Dialogue and unlockable written content relentlessly reinstate how much Marina and Pearl love each other, though despite the burgeoning enthusiasm from a significant segment of the fanbase, it appears we're not going to see explicit confirmation of a gay relationship in a game from the publishers of Tomodachi Life anytime soon.
Playing through Side Order with different weapon loadouts (each one themed around a familiar Splatoon character, of course) will unlock further weapons, in-game cash to spend on upgrades, and entries from Marina's diary. These act like the Squid Sister Stories did in the runup to Splatoon 2, offering us a little insight on Marina's perspective following Team Chaos's victory, but it's relatively perfunctory. Marina's a fairly pristine character, uniquely talented in a range of interests, and full of love for everyone. It's hard to imagine her doing something maliciously. The developers have far less conviction in pinning her as a villain as they did for Callie in Splatoon 2, putting a lid on the possibility before you even see Side Order's opening titles. It's a little underwhelming, but I respect the team's commitment to established characterisation before everything else. We might get less exciting stories for it, but when the fans watch the concerts, they fully believe in those dancing fish people. You don't want to mess with that.
I'm a little anxious that the politics have taken a bit of a backseat in Splatoon now. Pikmin 4 was guilty of the same, and I really don't want it to be something Nintendo shies away from. Octo Expansion took a really big swing on this stuff. Not only did it deliver a fairly earnest anti-racist message in a way that really complemented the established characters and setting, I was fucking thrilled with how it put the game's ecological message into stark view. Implying that there's something to be learned from the energy and passion of the youth movement of the late sixties, by homaging Planet of the Apes' post-apocalyptic revelation with its sunken Statue of Liberty, but also presenting it in the most Splatoon way possible, with you grinding around it on midair ink rails to a thumping soundtrack and rapidfiring at Lady Liberty's pulsing weak spots. It's difficult for me to think of any part of a videogame that I love more than Octo Expansion's final hours. I was with Splatoon since Day One, and this was the perfect way to tell me that my good will had paid off. Presenting the oncoming climate emergency and subsequent extinction of the human race, not only as a solid fact, but a rollercoaster with popstars and dualwielded uzis. There's nothing like that in Side Order. Just a loose implication that dogmatic authoritarianism is a flawed attitude. It feels pretty lame by contrast. I don't know if anybody else gets as much out of this side of Splatoon, and I don't think they can repeat that high. I just feel obliged to keep prodding the developers to get radical again.
That's not to say that Side Order makes no meaningful progress on the story. Following up on the liberation of the Octoling army, we're given some insight into who those people were and how their lives have changed since. It's significant to our understanding of Marina, and shows commitment to the continuity. It didn't stir me too much, personally, but if there had been so much as a comment from a Squid Sister, I know I'd have been far more invested.
Completing Side Order gives players the ability to set Splatoon 2's Inkopolis Square as their main hub. It's kind of weird to be seeing nostalgia for a game on the same console, but with all the signs that the Switch may be wrapping things up, there is a bit of ennui in going back to the 2017 stuff right now. As a big fan of Zelda, Mario and Splatoon, that year was a complete thrill ride for me. Not only was there excitement for this new console, we were giddy for a version of Nintendo that put all its focus on a single platform. There seemed to be a massive new title every month, for a while. As remarkable a system as it became, I think it's fair to say it didn't really carry on that same trajectory for long. With Tears of the Kingdom, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and the Mario Kart 8 DLC, it feels like Nintendo have just been trying to repeat those 2017 successes, rather than continue on that journey of invention. Splatoon 2 is good, Splatoon 3 is good, and Side Order is good, but Octo Expansion had me thinking the series would change and get far more ambitious. I don't think that's happened. It's like we've seen everything it can be, and all we can expect now are minor tweaks. I still want Portal 2/Resident Evil 4 structure in single-player Splatoon. I just have far less faith it's going to happen, now.
I'm the kind of fan who paid for this as soon as possible to get access to the Splatoon 1 hub. Of course this is what my criticism is going to look like.
JimTheSchoolGirl
2 months ago