You ever go into something, expecting a simple little experience, and instead get hit over the head in the first 20 seconds? I’m not really a Splatoon fan, but on the very first load in during the demo, I knew there was something here. It’s.. that main hub. I joined during the free demo, and was shocked by the fine details of this East Asian-Brazilian inspired festival. I immediately started wandering around, seeing these little youth hangouts strung across these storefronts and rooftops. Just looking up for the first time is staggering; the train passes by you on a monorail, with graffiti, lanterns, and signposts dangling down endlessly from walls that touch the sky. During the splatfest, I went into the back alleyway, and the music faded down into a bass-booming timbre, with the clattering of plates laying at food vendors chiming away - yet you could still see a few people jamming away to the distant music regardless… It really felt like I had just stumbled onto a unified community that had generations worth of history. Splatoon games have always messed with user created content, but with such an incredibly dense amount of visuals overflowing on top of each other, the way they stick out is shockingly immersing. Lines of billboards branded with enough logos to make you dizzy with crude art of the among us crewmate and “i love men” sharply piercing out of their depths; it genuinely adds to the atmosphere of a sort of permanent youthfulness to this place.
Luckily enough, this genuine endearment for the game’s aesthetics wouldn’t fall off in the campaign. Looking back, Splatoon 1’s approach to being a lore game wasn’t the best. Learning everything through off-path collectible logs, with the ultimate reveal of its lore being some “it’s actually a post apocalypse people DIED” - it was derivative in more ways than one. Splatoon 3 however, really turned this around; this story mode’s backstory is embedded into its aesthetics in a way that kept me hooked. We explore the rubble of a last near-extinct sector of humanity’s attempts to escape isolation through the rubble of a space center. We learn that this island’s very sky and ground was formed off of the desires of these remaining humans - the longing nostalgia for a bygone era. As a result, the style of these levels feels like a time capsule, attempting to show what we’d remember now. These levels formed out of wonky, nonsensical electronic architecture; fighting your way through floating wires, cars, and PC error messages. It really gives an extra edge to the traditional video game-y architecture that Nintendo’s 3D games have been doing for years - like a Super Mario Sunshine gone weirdcore.
The game design here is pretty rock solid, Splatoon’s story mode has really embraced this identity of being a genre mish-mash game - constantly testing your skills at individual mechanics of the game through little montages. From bullet dodging challenges to run-and-gun gauntlets, these levels can range from 20 seconds long to 5 minutes. Weapons are used as difficulty options, with the more technical weapons being harder, yet all 3 weapon’s central mechanics feel implemented equally. There’s still a lot of room for improvement here: the invisible collectibles in the overworld are bad, and the boss fights still don’t feel interactive enough, but this is definitely the best thing to ever come out of Splatoon.
Despite all this high praise, I’m still not exactly sure where I land in terms of enjoyment of Splatoon as a multiplayer game. This is a very large improvement from Splatoon 2 for me, which I didn’t really like. The new level design feels more arena-like, with levels being wider, and having big points of interest that gravitate you to them, verticality sitting around them. Specials being revamped is also doing a lot of legwork - rather than cleanly falling into offense or defense, these specials have a lot more to do with siphoning your team into a push. My favourite of which so far is Tacticooler: a big can dispenser that your teammates can take from in order to get instant respawning, letting you get unsafe with your pushes. And despite all these changes to make specials more role-specific, the game doesn’t fall into the faults of the modern class shooter. Your respawns are always 4 seconds or less, and it really does feel like you can WIPE OUT a whole team by yourself if you want to. Even the PvE mode, Salmon Run, got a huge change in the form of letting you toss around the eggs you need to bring to your score. When too many eggs were at the corner of a map, my team would form a human conveyor belt, passing it between each other to the container. This is the most tug of war Splatoon has ever felt to me, which seems to be the point of the whole game.
For a long time I held this cynical view that Splatoon was a series that was both unaware of the shooter landscape, and disinterested in learning more about it. Part of me thinks that I might’ve taken that for granted, now that this game has embraced dailies and (free) battle passes, but it certainly does feel like the pretension has been cut down a lot. It is a little terrifying that it took 7 years for this series to finally get team matchmaking, but it seems the floodgates of QoL have finally been smashed open entirely this time around. Splatoon has come a long way since itself - no longer does combat devolve into killing interactivity with invincibility shields, all the while some corporate showman’s idea of what metal sounds like blares in your headphones. Splatoon has grown into something beyond just being a gimmick, or just being the pastiche of punk-y squids in Tokyo. And at this point in time, I think I like it!
Luckily enough, this genuine endearment for the game’s aesthetics wouldn’t fall off in the campaign. Looking back, Splatoon 1’s approach to being a lore game wasn’t the best. Learning everything through off-path collectible logs, with the ultimate reveal of its lore being some “it’s actually a post apocalypse people DIED” - it was derivative in more ways than one. Splatoon 3 however, really turned this around; this story mode’s backstory is embedded into its aesthetics in a way that kept me hooked. We explore the rubble of a last near-extinct sector of humanity’s attempts to escape isolation through the rubble of a space center. We learn that this island’s very sky and ground was formed off of the desires of these remaining humans - the longing nostalgia for a bygone era. As a result, the style of these levels feels like a time capsule, attempting to show what we’d remember now. These levels formed out of wonky, nonsensical electronic architecture; fighting your way through floating wires, cars, and PC error messages. It really gives an extra edge to the traditional video game-y architecture that Nintendo’s 3D games have been doing for years - like a Super Mario Sunshine gone weirdcore.
The game design here is pretty rock solid, Splatoon’s story mode has really embraced this identity of being a genre mish-mash game - constantly testing your skills at individual mechanics of the game through little montages. From bullet dodging challenges to run-and-gun gauntlets, these levels can range from 20 seconds long to 5 minutes. Weapons are used as difficulty options, with the more technical weapons being harder, yet all 3 weapon’s central mechanics feel implemented equally. There’s still a lot of room for improvement here: the invisible collectibles in the overworld are bad, and the boss fights still don’t feel interactive enough, but this is definitely the best thing to ever come out of Splatoon.
Despite all this high praise, I’m still not exactly sure where I land in terms of enjoyment of Splatoon as a multiplayer game. This is a very large improvement from Splatoon 2 for me, which I didn’t really like. The new level design feels more arena-like, with levels being wider, and having big points of interest that gravitate you to them, verticality sitting around them. Specials being revamped is also doing a lot of legwork - rather than cleanly falling into offense or defense, these specials have a lot more to do with siphoning your team into a push. My favourite of which so far is Tacticooler: a big can dispenser that your teammates can take from in order to get instant respawning, letting you get unsafe with your pushes. And despite all these changes to make specials more role-specific, the game doesn’t fall into the faults of the modern class shooter. Your respawns are always 4 seconds or less, and it really does feel like you can WIPE OUT a whole team by yourself if you want to. Even the PvE mode, Salmon Run, got a huge change in the form of letting you toss around the eggs you need to bring to your score. When too many eggs were at the corner of a map, my team would form a human conveyor belt, passing it between each other to the container. This is the most tug of war Splatoon has ever felt to me, which seems to be the point of the whole game.
For a long time I held this cynical view that Splatoon was a series that was both unaware of the shooter landscape, and disinterested in learning more about it. Part of me thinks that I might’ve taken that for granted, now that this game has embraced dailies and (free) battle passes, but it certainly does feel like the pretension has been cut down a lot. It is a little terrifying that it took 7 years for this series to finally get team matchmaking, but it seems the floodgates of QoL have finally been smashed open entirely this time around. Splatoon has come a long way since itself - no longer does combat devolve into killing interactivity with invincibility shields, all the while some corporate showman’s idea of what metal sounds like blares in your headphones. Splatoon has grown into something beyond just being a gimmick, or just being the pastiche of punk-y squids in Tokyo. And at this point in time, I think I like it!