Back in 2018, Splatoon 2’s Octo Expansion was one of my favourite releases of that year. It turned Splatoon’s core singleplayer gameplay and weapon system on its head, in a way the campaigns only vaguely hinted at - providing ingenious puzzle rooms and a surprisingly steep difficulty curve that finally demonstrated that Nintendo understood & could capitalise on the series’ potential. Leaned into the strengths of Splatoon’s setting too, exploring its bizarre underbelly and fugged vibes. One for the fans of the ‘Rock Bottom’ episode of Spongebob. Seeing Agent 8 in the trailers for this had me a little excited, as Splatoon 3’s campaign was solid but didn’t feel as if it pushed the envelope much, I’ve come to see Agent 8 as Splatoon’s Harbinger of Difficulty and it turns out I wasn’t wrong.

Side Order is cool!! I love the setting (even if it’s basically just something of a play on the Copied City). I found it pretty easy to be excited by the prospect of delving into whatever Nintendo’s idea of a roguelite would be, and it’s a solid foundation but there’s so little variety here I can’t help but find the tower loop a little dry. There are only four mission types, FEELS LIKE there’s only enough individual level layouts for you to see every available one in a single run, and the upgrades you collect as you ascend the floors are merely statistical buffs; “+15% shot speed” type beat. It’s very hard, I like the risk:reward option of choosing harder rooms for better upgrades on top of other chaotic modifiers that can shoehorn you into making rough decisions. As with all roguelites with vertical character progression though, it’s only hard for a while until you power creep your way over roadblocks with permanent character upgrades and such. Numerically overcoming odds always feels cheap to me and I knew my completing the DLC would only be a matter of time investment. Eventually you get the option to retract your upgrades for a prestige reward boost, but I’ll be one hundred percent with you, I don’t like the majority of the weapons in this game and I can not bring myself to be a completionist about this if it means I have to suffer the fucking umbrella. It's all a little undercooked and doesn't have enough to really justify playing over and over for.

Anyway the story is great lol, albeit that there's not a lot of it. The lengths they go to show how much Marina loves Pearl is endlessly cute. She made the currency in her gamedev project “Prlz” maan 🙏🥹. Recalling who won the FinalFest of Splatoon 2 gave me something of a pop-off moment and I’m dying to see how this DLC would have looked if Order won. Endgame is the strongest finale of all of these games yet and that’s honestly a ridiculously high bar. Remix Ebb & Flow forever I will cry every time. Personal favourite soundtrack in the series, too! I love how heavily it leans into its dark ethereal sleep paralysis ambiance. LOVE how the hub/training areas have little environmental tells for the instrumentation in the bgm.

Bit of an easier roguelite, but was still fun and felt well balanced! Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe Nintendo has developed a game in this genre before. I really enjoyed the grind while it lasted, but there are tons of unlockables to keep players coming back.

Also, you could reduce the roguelite parts of Side Order if you wanted. There are options to buy lives and continues. It's nice to see accessibility for players who may not play roguelites /likes, but I chose not to use these options. Side Order is plenty do-able on one life with good luck!

After 10 years I'm starting to think the fact that a serial abuser, four groomers/pedos, an e-beggar, an alt-right chud, and two actual sociopaths in my life all loved osu! might not be a coincidence.

Also when I watched some official osu! tournament in like 2013-2014 on Twitch, the presenter accidentally went to their desktop and the background was some loli in a bikini so there's that. I guess that's not very surprising though since every other map has scantily-clad lolis as the background.

At least I had fun for the thousands of hours I put into this oh wait no I didn't, good riddance, give me back 250GB+ of hard drive space on your way out

Ay! (This is the worst one.)

I cannot comprehend adding all of the trappings of free-to-play always-online microtransaction bullshit and not even having microtransactions. Don't get me wrong, I hate microtransactions! (I think they should be illegal, if defining them in an enforceable way was at all possible!) But do not mistake that as praise for Splatoon 3 having the trappings without a connection to the real-world economy. The design philosophy is still there, and it sucks.

And it sucks because it dovetails as an extension of a bad design decision of the very first game, born out of the insecurity of a new IP. In the Splatoon series, you wear three pieces of clothing, each with a main ability and three sub abilities. Main abilities are locked, sub abilities are malleable. Splatoon 1, being light on launch content and not having much incentive for people to play, made unlocking sub abilities completely random. Don't like the three sub-abilities on your favorite pair of shoes? Pay in-game currency for the opportunity to grind out another chance to re-roll for something better. The in-game currency cost for doing so was expensive enough this took hours, and the chances of getting three desired abilities hovered at around 2.7%, creating an amateurish pretense of a grind.

Then Splatoon became wildly successful, earning a sequel. In Splatoon 2, this system should have been thrown out. The demand was out there for this gameplay, with fans pouring hundreds of hours into these titles beyond the point where there was anything for them to conceivably be earning except the thrill of another match.

And yet it stayed. In Splatoon 2, they added a mechanic where earned, undesired sub-abilities could be banked. Banked abilities could be intentionally put on other pieces of clothing later, at a terrible rate of return. Compared to the complete, uncontrollable randomness of Splatoon 1, fans loved this change. And yes, it was better. But the underlying concept was still pointless, time-wasting garbage.

Splatoon 2 was iterative enough that it felt like what could have been a massive update patch on a non-Nintendo platform. It refined gameplay mechanics, added new game modes, and had an art direction both fresh and marketable. For what it was and accomplished, I absolutely loved it upon release. However, Splatoon 3 reveals the poison that is repetition creating tradition.

Because let me be very clear: there is nothing about the concept of Splatoon that should have anything to do with random chance. I believe that for an online multiplayer game, having random chance at all tied to a player's competitive capabilities is downright immoral. There are a million ways to include a grind in a game with cosmetics without resorting to random chance. Using random chance for anything in a video game, (which is always a choice), is either a lazy solution to a complex problem, willfully ignorant, or outright malicious.

If it sounds like I'm going in hard, I am, because gambling is evil. I will rally against gambling anywhere being normalized in any form, because it is a purely human invention for the express purpose of hacking the brains of other vulnerable humans. If you think gambling is fun and harmless, you are the kind of person it does not pose a danger to. Bottom line, anyone's harmless fun is not worth the existence of this kind of evil becoming pervasive enough to reach the people it can harm.

This all comes to bear in Splatoon 3's religious obsession with cramming as much random-ass bullshit into every orifice possible, inventing new orifices for the occassion. The first two games already had clothing rotate daily through three different in-game stores, but now we also have gacha machines for:

+ Gamer tags, complete with titles and background cards!
+ A locker with pointless cosmetic trinkets and its own new rotating daily store!
+ An ENTIRE FUCKING CARD GAME???? WITH BLIND BOOSTER PACKS??????

This is on top of the Splatoon 3 app on your real world phone having rotating selections of gear with unique abilities not found in-game!

And don't worry, the terrible sub-ability system from Splatoon 2 returns, this time bolstered by the gacha machine, the random rewards from Salmon Run, and the real-world time-limited (but free!) seasonal battle pass (here branded as a ~Catalog~).

I pull my hair and gnash my teeth at how many work hours went into creating all of these stupid systems, the required graphics and coding and fine-tuning of probabilities, when as a concept, this makes Splatoon a worse game.

Splatoon has so many weapons catered to many playstyles that increase exponentially once abilities and sub-abilities are in the mix. But the cost to experimenting with ability and sub-ability combinations is far too high, because it is tied to chance. This means willingness to try new weapons and new approaches with existing weapons becomes dependent on one's existing equipment.

And there's no reason for it to be this way anymore! What purpose is it serving??? There are now two games proving that people will play this game longer than Mario Kart. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe had every character unlocked from the start! If you wanted to keep a grind, let me have multiple copies of my favorite shirt, and let me grind to put different abilities on them. Let me grind to give one blue trim or something.

I'm mad because the gameplay is still solid. Salmon Run is better. Overall, objectively, this is the fullest product any Splatoon game has launched in the series.

I'm mad because the underlying theme to all of my complaints can be summed up as: derivative.

Splatoon 1 had several elements I outright hated baked into many of its strengths. The single-player campaign showed how much potential the movement system had for other types of gameplay outside of multiplayer, populated with enemy character designs reminiscent of a trash-tier cancelled Nickelodeon cartoon circa 1997. Splatoon 2 was on such a tight turn-around time frame I could begrudingly forgive their reappearance. But now 3 Splatoons deep, they are part of the series's identity, ugly and permanent.

And now, with the rise of forces outside of Nintendo's sphere of influence, the Fortnite-ification of Splatoon has been baked into the series' identity as well. Grinding for gacha rolls is now the remembered Splatoon 1+2 experience. Adding more meters to fill, more trinkets to roll for, more opportunities to get tokens for currencies for collectibles - it just fits, doesn't it?

I can't play this! I just want to Salmon Run with my friends and get owned in ranked! But the mere existence of all this nonsense seeps into my play experience. There is so much external validation shoved in my face after every match, so much Excel spreadsheet-worthy trinket tracking to occupy my thinking between matches, that I can't hold onto why I would be playing this game for myself, for its own sake.

Which is the ironic tragedy of the series, because at the time of Splatoon 1's release, that was exactly why it felt fresh and subversive. It was tailor made to be baby's first online shooter, free from the decades of garbage that had amassed around the genre. Hell, can you believe that when Splatoon came out, having any color at all was subversive for a shooter? I haven't and will never play Fortnite, but even I know color is now beyond mainstream, it is the riverbed.

Splatoon 3 had a real chance to be something else. Because in the time between Splatoon and Splatoon 3, the online shooter evolved in crazy, unexpected ways, amassing new heaps of new types of garbage. And at its gameplay core, Splatoon is simple and compelling enough to ignore all of it. But instead of focusing on those strengths, Splatoon 3 let some of that garbage seep in.

I can't score this. What do I score?

The gameplay? It's Splatoon 2, but with a couple new shit weapons. It's good, bordering on excellent! Still plays well, still has Nintendo quality internet infrastructure.

The art? The music is already starting to wrap back around to nostalgic licks from the first game, becoming derivative in a corporation's view of rebellion. The visual theming has an identity without being enticing. And the new band of idols wouldn't have placed in a "design a new Splatoon band!" contest on deviantART. When I saw Big Man, I thought I was being punked.

My undying hatred for the dystopian dispassion of Nintendo blindly copying the form of other malicious actors in the video gaming sphere without understanding what the fuck they are doing? Normally that only knocks a game down a star or two, but this time, it feels different.

Outside of the stellar launch year of 2017, Nintendo's major Switch releases have been making me uneasy. Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Kirby and the Forgotten Land - they're chock-filled with video game nonsense without purpose in series that didn't used to be that way. But Splatoon is the first franchise in a genre that is not just adjacent to the worst parts of the game industry, it is the worst parts of the game industry. And Splatoon 3 shows that it is not above picking up what the industry is throwing down.

I can't say that it's fine. I also can't say that the game is 'bad'. But I cannot recommend it as a game that is "good." Because the only true test for a work of art's worth is how it makes you feel. And Splatoon 3 made me feel sad, tired, and exhausted, but like I was wrong for feeling so.

Except for Big Man. I fucking hate him so much.