I Was COMPLETELY WRONG About Splatoon 3

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Splatoon 3 is my chill game at night most of the time, really excited for the rest of the dlc this year

Splatoon is the kind of franchise that, if it came out in the 90s, I can picture hundreds of spinoffs. I can picture party games, racing games, puzzle games, all in the Splatoon franchise

Minor changes in Splatoon go a long way. The new movements and finesse in Splatoon 3 was great. I can't imagine going back to no squid surge or egg toss. Salmon Run is all I play and it's been so fleshed out.

I think one of the biggest justifications for the new game instead of just DLC was the specials. Especially from a competitive perspective, certain specials in 2 were just really bad for the game in a way that was nigh unfixable, particularly ink armor and stingray which limited which weapons were good quite severely. But you can't really remove those from the game. The closest they did was stop adding stngray to weapons just a few months into updates because I think even they realized how bad its design was.

Splatoon 3 is honestly one of the best Switch games. I’ve sunk so many hours into it now. Just so much pure fun

As a competitive player who didn't own any prior splatoon game, I think that comment about people "wanting an in, but everything is so established so they waited for the next game" was the perfect description that I couldn't even make myself. With nearly 2k hours and having met new friends, the engaging and ever changing update cycle would have lost the appeal if it continued trying to build on an old game with exhausted or outdated ideas - so a third entry made a lot of sense.

Arlo: "It just seemed kind of alike an incremental jump" Me: "You mean an ink-remental jump?

I have a friend who got splatoon 3 as his first splatoon game and now he has more hours in it than me, and I’m a diehard fan since splatoon 1

Another theory I have for why this was a perfect time for Splatoon 3 to come out: it's the first Nintendo game in like a decade to move on from their old architecture for online games and use the new system developed for switch. This game was basically a stress test for the new system, and we actually saw the effects of this (at launch there were all these issues with online not present in the last game, and had to be addressed with patches). The switch successor and all the online games being developed for it will use this system too, and so by coming out when it did, Splatoon 3 is laying the groundwork for all these games to launch with far better online than if the system had never been tested on such a large scale.

I’ve always thought the reaction to Splatoon 3’s announcement was dumb. The whole “one game per system” only applies to Nintendo franchises. Everyone else does it. People even compared Splatoon to COD even though there hadn’t been an entry in 5 years. Also most of the people saying we didn’t need a new Splatoon weren’t even playing Splatoon 2 anymore anyways so what were they complaining about?

I put more hours in the first month of Splatoon 3 than I put into my entire time playing Splatoon 2. The quality of life improvements improved it THAT MUCH.

Splatoon 3 may actually be more proof that the Switch successor will have backwards compatibility. I can not imagine a world where Nintendo would greenlight a continuously ongoing updating game as massive as Splatoon knowing most of their player base will be moving on to a platform that doesn't support said game only 2 years later. Im hopeful, haha

one other fact to consider now that the game is in the latter half of its update cycle, side order is looking to be a big draw to people who enjoy more single player experiences and the replayability of side order looks to be a really interesting innovation on the splatoon formula

It really makes sense when you remember Splatoon is a Nintendo franchise: they care just as much about their worlds and characters and settings as the gameplay. So when they make a sequel, they're thinking just as much about the new setting, the new characters, the new music, etc as the new gameplay mechanics and they absolutely see Splatoon 3 as a substantially different game by that metric.

This is one of the best games to come out for the switch, and of the two splatoon games, I have for more hours invested in this one. There's just so many features and play styles that make it a big improvement over the second game, stuff they couldn't have just made dlc. I could never go back to not having squid surge. It's existence on the same console as 2 is definitely justified.

Me personally, I'm SO glad Splatoon 3 came out- even though I had splatoon 2 and enjoyed it a bit, I never really got into it since I got it after content had stopped in 2019. Splatoon 3 was like an opportunity for me (and probably so many others) to get into the community!! I've made so many friends from this game and it's such a big part of my life that I can't imagine what I would do if it had never come out

I think what may have helped the sales of Splatoon 3 during launch was the fact Splatoon 2 launched so early into the life of the Switch, back before it REALLY kicked-off in popularity. What probably deterred people from trying 2 was because of the end of content arriving around the time the Switch sales began to really get going with Animal Crossing (and the rising popularity of Mario Kart, Smash, Pokemon etc) so as you said Splatoon 3 is a perfect time to jump in. By the end of Splatoon 2's life the game could be incredibly rough to get into because there were so many weapons (and kits) which could confuse or overwhelm new players, not to mention things like the Kensa .52 Gal meta, Tenta Missile Spam, and EVERYTHING revolving around how gear worked in that game. 3 helped reset a lot of that but also carry-over a lot of the established elements from Splatoon 2, so players familiar with the game weren't missing out on things they liked from that game while also making sure new players had a healthy amount of things to discover and learn. Not to mention the singleplayer is MUCH better designed to teach players about the game than the S2 campaign, while also having moments for longer-time players to feel payoff too!

The funniest bit about current-day Splatoon to me is that for as beloved as the series is, the core fanbase here in the west is probably the most critical of the games? Especially 3, admittedly 3 is far from a perfect game but apart from the Tenta Missile meta of Splat 2, 3 has probably had the biggest "controversies" within the fandom. But despite all that, the fanbase still loves it and agree that despite its flaws it's probably the best Splatoon yet. Even with some of the worst maps in the series, metas that are actually on par with Splat 2 Missiles (looking at you Crab Tank) and a netcode possibly worse than Splatoon 2's, we still love it and the game has a huge playerbase. Most of the community, shockingly, did actually move from 2 to 3 and 2 is kind of around for nostalgia purposes. It's a fun game, and that's enough for most people. As for the topic of the video itself, most multiplayer games fall into what I like to call iterative sequels, as opposed to innovative sequels. Innovative sequels are most of Nintendo's sequels, brand new games built from the ground up to be completely different from the last. Your average Mario, Zelda, Smash, and others. Iterative sequels prioritize improvements over the last before adding brand new things, which at launch is pretty much what Splat 3 did. I still think at launch it had enough to be its own game (whereas Splat 2 at launch was a glorified port of the first game), but when it comes to new content, we've probably tripled new content since launch with the updates. It gives each game its own identity if it didn't have one at the beginning. Eventually we might need a game that's closer to an innovative sequel just because the current game would be nearly perfected, but we're a while off from that day. For a majority of multiplayer games, iterative sequels are perfectly fine until the formula is completely run into the ground, and if you need any evidence: just look at how much Call of Duty sells each year. Or nearly any multiplayer shooter with relatively frequent sequels. Might not indicate quality, but at least indicates it works for sales.

Arlo about Zelda: "It's not all about money". Arlo about Splatoon: "Money talks"