Man, c'mon.

Pokémon is the most profitable video game series of all time, and if I had to count the number of times they cut corners with this game I would run out of fingers and toes.

There are plenty of great ideas floating around in this one in comparison to other Pokémon games, and I truly am looking forward to the possibility of an actually good and fun Pokémon game in the future. Catching Pokémon in real-time is an absolute joy, but as I played this the less it felt like a big freeing adventure and the more it felt like a checklist of chores.

The payoff was finally telling my friends that I finished the game so that I can play something else.

Best part of the game was throwing bean bags at boss Pokémon. The icing on the cake was waiting for the game to tell me to send out a Pokémon, ignoring it completely, and pelting the boss with more bean bags. If I'm being truly honest with myself, it was the only part of the game that I wasn't dozing off for.

If Game Freak releases Bean Bag Blitzer 5000 I'll buy ten copies.

When I was little I went fishing in a boat on a lake with my grandpa and I ended up catching 7 or 8 fish or something like that and he didn't catch a single one.

This review will probably outlast me.

I love my grandpa.

I'm not very good at these kinds of games. There's a lot of problem-solving, and the answers are usually too obscure for me to figure out on my own.

That said, if you like point-and-click games, please play this. There was clearly so much love and care put into making sure the art style and game feel accurately reflect old-school point-and-click adventure games from back in the day.

More than anything, it's an incredibly kind game.

I wish more games were like this one.

Simple objective, easy and intuitive controls, great art direction, challenging-but-fair(ish) difficulty, an incredibly rewarding ending, and the title tells you everything you need to know about the whole game.

Ape. Out.

I finally logged 1000 hours in this piece of shit, so I'm reviewing this again.

To quote videogamedunkey from classic YouTube channel videogamedunkey, "Splatoon 2 is a fucking stupid game." The difference however is that Dunkey didn't like it because it's "a shooter with bad aiming" and I fucking hate it because I learned how to play it and it's actually just the most annoying game on the planet. The aiming is fine.

At its core, I love Splatoon. The ink gimmick works incredibly well and makes for an engaging third-person movement-based shooter that I wasn't expecting to enjoy as much as I do. The art direction is fun and colorful. The outfits and customization options are awesome. The single-player campaign is both a great way to learn how the game mechanics actually work and a generally fun experience all-around. The new co-op PvE mode Salmon Run is probably my favorite part of the game. However, the "main game" is the online multiplayer.

"The connection is unstable."

I'm becoming unstable.

The amount of drops and disconnects I experienced in an average play session drove me up the fucking wall, and if I'm lucky enough to catch a friend while they're in the middle of a game, I can almost guarantee we won't be teamed up together. Given that the room isn't full.

And that's ignoring when the game actually works.

Going from Splatoon 1 to Splatoon 2, I greatly appreciate Nintendo's attempt to re-balance the specials around team-support, but they should've just focused on supporting the fucking garbage online experience instead.

Unlike in Splatoon 1, the specials are the most broken, passive, unengaging, anti-fun bullshit I have experienced in a video game. Splatoon 1's specials were designed like being given a small super-power that you can use for a moment. They were broken too (I'm looking at you, kraken), but at least they were an incredible amount of fun to actually use.

Splatoon 2's specials on-paper were designed for "team support." They had the right idea for some of them. Inkjet and Ultra Stamp get a pass. Fuck every other special. They might as well be called "fuck you moves." Moves that essentially block off an entire area from smooth navigation of any kind and induce panic over and over in the span of a few minutes all while aggressive fiddle music plays in the background.

Fun.

Unironically can't wait to pick up Splatoon 3 when I wake up tomorrow so I can experience another thousand hours of exactly this.