I've been ruminating on a previous review for this game. the miasma around it contains a lot of current ambient thought patterns of the affectionately-named "nintendrone" crowd, specifically around topics that have arose in the Switch Era. I think for many of us zoomers in the age range for backloggd (and the broader sphere of gaming culture online in general), the beginning of the switch's life cycle was a special moment. for me personally, the switch released a week before my 18th birthday, and after eventaully snagging one during its inital availability drought, it was my first real console that I owned. not just a shoddily-maintained handheld or a hand-me-down sixth/seventh gen console for me to fiddle around with, but something with brand-new games releasing for it that I could hook up to a TV! the bounty was particularly rich that year too; botw day 1, rereleases of several standout wii u titles, a brand-new collectathon mario game, a long-awaited "true" sequel to xenoblade, and splatoon 2, a multiplayer shooter tuned specifically for the zoomer crowd. the original splatoon presaged our modern neon-color, trend-focused, "what's cool with the kids?" mass-culture shooter wave that awoke from the decline of the tacticool brown-and-grey military shooters of the late 00s and early 10s. it's only natural that nintendo would ride the wave onto their big launch for the switch, and at just the right time as well, lest we forget that fortnite released in early access within the same month that splatoon 2 hit shelves.

five years later, it's inarguable that our perceptions would have shifted. the pangburn who had not started college yet grinding out turf wars on the couch is now halfway through grad school. I've now seen the many ups and downs of the switch as nintendo has consistently reprised their role as the clueless corporate granddaddy of gaming, prone to making jarring business and PR decisions more often than they can spit out decent games. I've witnessed the internet at the same time fall out of the honeymoon period many of us had with nintendo during 2017. putting so many great titles in the launch window left 2018 particularly dry other than the excellent smash ultimate late in the year, and when the release train revved up again in 2019 the quality was much more uneven. wrapped up in 2017 specifically was a revitalization of japanese gaming that brought attention back to the kind of games I'm primarily interested in -- the aforementioned nintendo titles, yakuza 0, nier automata, persona 5, resident evil 7 -- but those good times weren't going to last, right?

hence my interest in the aforementioned review. its main thrust is that nintendo is leveraging FOMO in order to sell everyone on a new copy of splatoon; which is true in the sense that this is how every new game is sold at retail price. it's also an accusation that nintendo has been rightfully accused of exploiting for their limited-time mario 3DAS and shadow dragon rereleases, or their underproduced amiibo lines and retro plug-and-play consoles. there's also a significant portion of this review extolling nintendo's countercultural original splatoon aesthetic that has been dampened in subsequent releases. personally I don't find any of these games particularly against the grain unless we're discussing it through the lens of the prior onslaught of modern warfare-era titles, which is a shaky ground to stand on considering in that case splatoon set the new standard and now suffers the proliferation of its copycats. punk? maybe pop punk... lord knows I had a steady diet of blink 182, alkaline trio, jeff rosenstock, pup, and screeching weasel back when I was playing splatoon 2 regularly. and isn't it more punk to deface clean hotels and malls in the name of artistic anarchy?

meeting those points at face-value means I'm getting lost in the smokescreen though, I need to dig deeper. because there are multiple valid mentions of this new entry lacking innovation, but they're nonsubstantial and swallowed by the rest of the remarks. this is understandable: it's hard to elaborate on features that don't exist. these are buoyed with remembrances of the earlier titles and how fresh they felt at release, contrasted with the stale aura of this new title. there's a general sense that something is wrong with this new game, right? it must be something new... but there's so little here that's actually new that it's hard to pinpoint. could it be the locker cosmetics and their associated "catalog" score, which scans as a battlepass in a post-fortnite world, or the new gachapon machine set up in the lobby? the former is entirely passive and totally free, so its only sin is just being cribbed from contemporaries, and the similar daily gacha is just an extension of that pernicious old ability chunk grind. what could possibly be that missing piece, that absent little bit of soul that the game lost between splatoon 2 and 3?

to me that answer is nothing. I think that line of inquiry is a dead end. my actual opinion? splatoon 3 feel bleh because splatoon 2 (and probably by extension splatoon 1) felt bleh. they're the same game!! I have returned to the well of squid kid bliss and instead am left wondering how eight years into this franchise I am still left without a way to alter my loadout, or play on more than two maps in a given mode at a time, or properly choose which ranked mode I want to play without having to wait for the choices to rotate every two hours! there are reasons these restrictions were originally set up, such as a limited initial set of stages for splatoon 1 or the need to make sure that ranked has a short matchmaking time, but there are other avenues to pursuing these aims that don't come at the expense of player choice and freedom of expression. I just want to use aerospray without getting trapped with these goddamn fizzy bombs, these fucking things that not only need to be cooked to make any impact but even then stil pale in comparison to virtually every other subweapon. could I please get a special that isn't reefslider as well? could I perhaps at least get to avoid playing on a stage that doesn't have walls that make reefslider glitch out near them? or at least could I not have to play on mahi mahi resort like five times in a row?

which is not to say there aren't minor QoL additions that perhaps alone make splatoon 3 marginally more playable than splatoon 2. the addition of a physical lobby where you can practice between rounds feels more engaging than the menus of the prior games, and thank god that I can finally make a room for my friends rather than messing with the awkward drop-in system. at the same time however, nintendo seems to be floundering a bit in terms of actually making substantial improvements to the game. in their stead, many changes have been made that seem to exist purely to justify the sequel status. sheldon, for instance, takes tickets now for weapons instead of money, which more closely ties his selection to your level progression I suppose? at the same time you still cannot truly skip his obnoxious spiel every time you set foot in his shop, so it might as well not have not been a change at all. the way that ranks for ranked mode are maintained now consist of a universal rank instead of individual ranks for each mode with the tradeoff of individual losses counting much less. perhaps there was a calculated reason for this change, but it ultimately makes me favor avoiding ranked modes which I'm particularly bad at such as tower control due to retaining my overall rank from my preferred modes such as splat zones. these are all side-steps to existing mechanics without being solutions to issues, and they hurt my impression of the game.

I must stress that I do like the overall design of splatoon, regardless of the nitpicks above. the way that refilling ink encourages traversal and the way that turf war flips typical PvP interactions on their head (running is often a viable option!) makes the flow of each match visceral as you continually move from area to area in a mad dash for territory. this is why I sunk so many hours into splatoon 2 back when this concept was still so novel for me. however, this style of play also creates very momentum-heavy matches where the outcome of a match can feel certain only halfway through. walking through endless puddles of your opponents' ink, especially the closer it is to your home base, makes me feel dejected even if I manage to get a kill I'm happy with or make a substantial endgame push towards the opponents' lines. this is amplified by the meager rewards from a match loss; seeing those progression bars get a few sparing drops towards a new level after trying your hardest in a match makes me feel like I almost wasted my time playing. when not playing competitively and thrown in with random team members into a game that seems to tacitly encourage communication, I feel pushed away from participating for more than a few matches at a time, just like I did towards the end of splatoon 2's life.

this is something that really felt noticable for me after I recently tried out modern warfare 2's online beta on the advice of a friend. having not played CoD since middle school, I was shocked at how different the atmosphere was. unlike splatoon, modern CoD is enraptured by the current trends in shooters with its season-based structure and mountains of progression bars, but at the other end of it there's something still very personal and intimately fun waiting in store. getting a double or triple kill at all could keep me going through multiple fruitless deaths afterwards just from the giddiness of succeeding in a split-second interaction. overall team scores just didn't matter, as my personal performance and growth felt rewarded by the systems of the game. who has time to worry about teammate behavior when you're succeeding on your own terms? splatoon 3 makes efforts to rectify this issue with its per-match rewards to each player highlighting their strengths and weaknesses, but these seem to confer little outside of maybe influencing the rewards in an anarchy series. perhaps nintendo is trying to highlight competition and community, but in a game where you have absolutely no way to engage with your teammates before and after matches, the effort seems wasted. splatoon could potentially learn some tricks towards crafting a more efficient timewaster from its contemporaries instead of half-heartedly incorporating their progression systems.

this bears mentioning though: just how much of my enjoyment with CoD came with not engaging with the game for over a decade? has my critical perception been inadvertedly weighted towards the novelty of it in a way that I've lost with splatoon? and again, how much of my degredation of splatoon 3 comes from releasing after a shoddy couple of years for nintendo's public-facing wing? splatoon 3 sits in the middle of a pretty good lineup of switch titles, but in the time since the original hype has died down it's much easier to feel and hear the nervous whispers of those wondering what the hell is going on with tears of the kingdom's rollout rather than the basking in the glory of breath of the wild still fresh in everyone's minds. of course, even breath of the wild cribbed much from its open-world contemporaries, and even though I loved it at the time I can see the criticisms from those who weren't too dazzled to see through the brand recognition on top of it. so perhaps then, splatoon has just been another multiplayer shooter all along, and the light is just harsh enough now for us to call it what it is.

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there is something behind that $60 price tag, and it's.... tableturf battle. this might have been the case if nintendo had bothered rolling out online multiplayer for it, but leave it to them to surprise in the oddest of ways. instead we get a brand new single-player mode that seems to derive more from octo expansion (note: I have not played it) than its direct predecessors for better or for worse. I played about sixty total levels including the three mid-game bosses but not including the crater or rocket levels.

splatoon 3 opts for more focused, puzzle-like level design over its predecessors, which were built around every potential loadout being used in every level. this entry opts for bespoke loadouts for each stage to maximize the amount of encounters it can build around those particular weapons. in a few cases this results in some really clever stage design (I'm thinking of the curling bomb stage towards the end of the game that focuses on tightly-aimed ricochets) but in most cases falls surprisingly flat. much of this is due to carrying over many enemies from the prior games with few updates. these octopi foes generally have extremely poor mobility options compared to the protagonist and generally wield highly-telegraphed projectiles that can be easily evaded, and this game in particular really struggles to emphasize its intended stage routes with how useless most of these enemies are. this is particularly noticable with how many basic cover configurations you'll fight enemies from that seem almost copy-pasted throughout the game. splatoon 2 has its own foibles (overly long, unfocused level design) but generally designed more interesting arenas with better escalation of conflict than 3 does. splatoon 3 has a tendency to lock down level progression into very pre-defined, "solvable" encounters that do not surprise the player when completed "correctly" and feel broken when subverted by obvious means. this could still be elevated if that escalation of conflict was engaging, but splatoon 3 tends to favor overloading each level with rote expressions of the player's toolkit before hinting at more thoughtful level designing past the final checkpoint. the curling bomb stage perfectly showcases what could have been the case for these levels, where initial simple ricochets build up into longer areas with movable walls, platformers, and adversarial inkers to navigate and plan around; it helps that for this level the solution space is purposefully wide and more daring solutions yield rewards.

the more explicit puzzle stages have a couple bangers as well (the pac-man level is particularly cool), but too many fall into common level design traps like long obstacle cycles to listlessly wait through or boring auto-scroller sections. I could understand trying to make these easily solvable to make sure everyone has access to the final areas, but in this mode virtually every level is optional, and I would've enjoyed seeing some more out-of-the-box puzzle ideas beyond just shooting targets with a particular weapon on an ink rail or simple rube goldberg contraptions. some of these are particularly frustrating; the one I have to highlight is the tennis level, where the angle of the player's camera behind the "net" sort of kills my depth perception in the void beyond where the targets are shot from, and the level ends with a block that taps the net and never makes it into your play area as some sort of sophomoric joke to force you to replay another minute of scripted tennis target shots. bleh. just less than what I would expect from nintendo in terms of design finesse.

bosses are fine, but the standout is definitely the area six one. probably the most explicit reference we've seen yet to another game that dealt with cleaning up someone else's ink...