Welcome to the Splatoon shrine!

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Splatoon is one of my favourite series! It's a third-person shooter set in a post-apocalyptic world, where you play as either an Inkling or an Octoling. Each game in the franchise has been primarily developed as an online multiplayer, but all of them still come with a few extra modes, such as the single player campaigns, Squid Beatz, and Tableturf.

The series began in 2015, with the launch of the first game for the Wii U, and has garnered an incredibly passionate playerbase since then. Despite being fairly new compared to many others by the company, Splatoon is already considered one of Nintendo's flagship franchises, so it'll be interesting to see how they continue to support it in the years to come.

The Core Gameplay

While there are a handful of specific modes to choose from when playing online, the gameplay itself remains the same. You shoot ink from a weapon of choice, which can damage opponents, and cover the floor. You can also turn into a "swim form", which allows you to swim across the ink-covered ground at a much faster pace than walking normally, as well as reload your ink tank.

The gameplay is built around transitoning from your humanoid form to your swim form, requiring constant strategic switching between the two for the most optimised gameplay. While it sounds (and looks) fairly simple on the surface, it adds a certain dynamic that I have yet to really encounter in any other online shooter, and really helps sets the game apart from the competition.

Favourite Stuff

In terms of the games themselves, I have a lot I could spend ages talking about, but to put my thought down succinctly, Splatoon 1 + Octo Expansion are my favourites out of everything the franchise has put out so far.

The first game, while lacking in a few areas that the next installments would make up for, still has my favourite gameplay and overall tone (though a large part of that could probably be attributed to nostalgia LOL). There's this indescribable thing that they seemed to nail on their first try here, and I don't think that magic was ever really recaptured again to the same extent we saw here.

And Octo Expansion!! This is what I consider the highest peak of the series. While lacking a lot of parts that we've come to expect from a conventional "story mode", OE delivers some really fun storytelling in a way that I really enjoyed. The mix of that, alongside the new style of challenges (as well as some actual difficulty for once) really pushes this DLC into the "Actually Worth The Money" category, which is something I don't typically say of extra content like this. Here's hoping Side Order can live up to its legacy.

Mechanics over the years

The gameplay of this series is weird. It (arguably) has this issue where no game is really the "best"; each has its own strengths in varying categories. For example:

- The first game has some of my favourite stages; each one feels very unique and provides players with so many places to get to and from; they're engaging!! That, plus the wildly unbalanced gameplay, made everything a genuinely super fun thing to mess around with.
- Splatoon 2 seems to nail the gameplay in a more general way, sort of a middle ground. Nothing bad, but there are times where the game struggles to really form a specific identity. Still fantastically solid, though.
- And Splat3 feels like almost the opposite of the first game; linear stages that feel very samey, but easily the best movement and controls we've had.

I dunno. In the future, I hope that any future installments focus on pulling the best from each game and just mixing them around until the devs can really cement the perfect blend of all these different elements. Splatoon 3 feels like its taken a few steps forward, but then tripped and ate shit with the stages and catalogue feature, among a few other things. Still enjoyable, but sometimes I do miss the 2016-esque days where things felt more like interesting and fresh (LOL).

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