High key, I never thought we'd be back here talking about Splatoon in this format. There are, effectively, no blog posts I actively dislike on this blog. I feel like even my rougher early work is, if nothing else, historically significant even if it is very very rough. The only blog posts I've ever deleted from this blog are the monthly wrap-up posts I briefly did in 2026, which my reasons for deleting them were two fold. One, they just weren't working, having to manifest something to say about every old school 2D platformer I played was just not within my wheelhouse and a significant part of that content was just pointing the reader to more in-depth posts I did about games. And given that my entire summer was basically taken up by a single game, they didn't make sense to do. The other reason I stopped doing them was that I just felt like it took the fun out of the Top Ten List. You were seeing what games I loved as the year went on in real time and so the list would just be entirely retreading territory. However, if I have ever come close to regretting a post, it was the Splatoon 2 Gaming Diary.
Splatoon 2 was not a game I had a ton to say about, it turns out. I had started that diary after playing about half of my first play session and going "wow, I actually have a lot to say about Splatoon 2, I should write about this". Almost immediately after that first play session ended, I stopped having things to say about Splatoon 2 and I was really forcing it. It's just not that interesting of a game, it's a good game but the main campaign is kind of just an inferior version of Splatoon 1's campaign with a more intricate final boss. So I went back and forth on whether or not to do Splatoon 3 as a gaming diary. On the one hand, the precedent had already been set. Splatoon has already been written about on this blog, it only makes sense to keep going. And besides, there isn't a Splatoon game as uninteresting as Splatoon 2, Splatoon 2 made a million concessions to create a more competitively viable experience and while it definitely succeeded, it's telling that people weren't super invested in the 2 idols like they were the 1 idols until the DLC that made it clear that Splatoon 2's idols were the first gay characters in a Disney film Nintendo game. Splatoon 3 would be, very handedly, a more interesting game to write about.
On the other hand, Splatoon 3 is a Splatoon campaign. It is light fair, attempting to be sort of an onboarding point for the player to understand both the basics of Splatoon and also introduce the game's cast of characters. Committing to writing about it would create the same problem I had with Splatoon 2, where I had a lot to say at first and then it immediately fizzled out because it was just more of the same. And so I originally was not going to do a Splatoon 3 gaming diary at all. But as I played the opening levels of Splatoon 3, I knew I had to do this. There is too much interesting going on with Splatoon 3's design and story not to. So, my friends, welcome back to the Splatoon series. I'm going to cry over the silly squid game, fair warning.
Review
I did not need to play Splatoon 3's campaign in order to know that I loved Splatoon 3. Frankly, the campaign could've been garbage and I would've still given this the score I would inevitably give it because like. Splatoon is not about its campaign, its campaign is essentially an extended tutorial on how to play the game and how the weapon archetypes tend to function. I have played Splatoon 3 since launch and I believe it to be the best Splatoon game. By a pretty large margin. I think that it manages to be the "just right" entry of Splatoon. Splatoon 1 was a game that created a world that felt lived in and reeled people in with its undeniable charm and personality, but it was very messy and unbalanced. A game made by people who make single-player platformers and don't know how to make a shooter. Splatoon 2 really streamlined things and created a healthier, more balanced multiplayer experience, but it did so at the cost of the personality that Splatoon 1 had. Splatoon 3 splits the difference in what I believe is a very elegant and spectacular way. It is an excellent multiplayer shooter that also serves as a charming, well developed world that people love to engage with. And it does so without sacrificing anything, it's arguably better than both its predecessors at the pieces it took from them.
It is by no means a perfect game, mind you. Many of the flaws with Splatoon in general are still not fixed (Turf War, the game's casual mode, is still far more difficult and skill intensive than the competitive modes and encourage more aggressive behavior in gameplay). It had to tweak its new Splatfest system like 9 times in its first year to make it even remotely fun because the original version was miserable and turned a lot of people off the game outright. The game's solution to player disconnects, something that happens all too common as Nintendo continued to focus on player to player connection rather than develop dedicated servers to host games, while initially received positively, became reviled in practice because every disconnect kicked you out of a game. And in general, it's just an odd game to have released. Splatoon makes sense as a once a console generation title, having two on Switch 1 felt odd. But I think its incredibly refined gameplay that gives the player so many creative movement options, its ability to create the most in-depth and compelling world we've seen in the series thus far, the way it highlights everything that is great about Splatoon while compromising very little, and just how full of life it is more than make up for its shortcomings. And the campaign is good too, which helps a lot. It's actually maybe the best campaign in the series, to be honest. 9.7/10
Diary:
11/3/26
Despite my reservations, it feels great to be back talking about Splatoon again. This is like the only series I play where I'm like actually a fan of the series as a whole rather than just a fan of specific entries. I love these silly squids so much and it was a very important game as a gamer. As a hardcore Nintendo fanboy during the Wii and WiiU eras, I didn't get a lot of exposure to shooters. In fact, I tended to feel like shooters were "low art", which is ridiculous in hindsight given that games like Halo 3 and Modern Warfare are as artistically significant to the history of gaming as like. Mario Galaxy. But being a fanboy poisons your mind so none of my opinions back then should be taken serious. Splatoon opened up an entire world for me I wouldn't have tried for years without it. It's a series I love dearly and I'm just excited to be playing it for the blog, Full disclosure, for what it's worth, I already know I adore Splatoon 3. I played it at launch, I've done hundreds of hours of matches with randoms and with friends, it is my favorite Splatoon game and one of my favorite games of all time. The campaign isn't going to really positively or negatively impact the love I have for Splatoon 3, it's not like the campaign is even really the point of the game.
That being said, this campaign is already so so good. A huge part of that is Splatoon 3 just being more mechanically complex and fun to experiment with. Splatoon 3 added a bunch of movement options to the series that are useful for the core gameplay, the multiplayer shooting, but also let the player have many more options for platforming and dodging around enemies. Being able to rocket up the sides of structures means that climbing is now a breezy process that doesn't really slow down the levels at all, meaning you can keep things going at a brisk pace. And the ability to quick turn around with super armor at any time means that you have a way to get out of a tricky situation where an enemy corners you. This means that, a, the level design can be more inventive with what it does with regard to verticality because the climbing is no longer just a problem, but also 2, the game is allowed to get harder faster and put you in more mob situations than the other games because it gives you a quick escape option. It really enhances what the campaign can do.
You can also tell that the devs really sought to respond to criticism against Splatoon 2's campaign and how identical it was to the first game's. Like, Splatoon 2 has a really fun campaign, don't get me wrong, but it was definitely made quickly and reusing a lot of level ideas, boss fights, and plot beats from the first game. Splatoon 3 builds good will early by getting the prototypical Splatoon tropes out of the way immediately. Cap'n Cuttlefish calls you down to the Octarian underworld and deputizes you into the Squidbeak Splatoon, you start your campaign against the invading Octarians, you get to the end of the first area and bam, DJ Octavo is now the first boss of the game. You are done with the Splatoon 1 and 2 rework like 20-30 minutes into the game, before you even get to the main plot and the game's main hub world. It wears the fact that it's completely new on its sleeve, the focus isn't even really on the Squid Sisters as much. Instead it gives the new idols, Deep Cut, a chance to shine as the game's main antagonists, with the Squid Sisters being more of a support duo to the protagonist.
But even before Splatoon 3 switches it up and gets you into Alterna, where the game's actual plot starts, you're immediately hit with the apocalyptic stakes of Splatoon 3's plot. There is a massive ocean of ooze underneath the Splatlands, the setting of Splatoon 3, all spilling out from a mysterious vault buried underground. This ooze is turning those who touch it into these zombie-like versions of their normal selves, titled "the Mammalians". Just immediately hitting us with the stakes, whatever is happening underneath the Splatlands, it's threatening to destabilize the world and turn everyone into furry, mammalian zombies. It's a far cry from the pretty standard stories of Splatoons 1 and 2 but it is also something they'd been setting up since the second game. There is, admittedly, kind of a mystery at the center of what is causing the fuzzy ooze to spawn forth and why it wants Cap'n Cuttlefish but like. I'm not doing a "can I solve" for this game. I already know who the culprit is, I've known who the culprit is since before launch and I listen to the final boss theme for this game too often not to have it ingrained in my head.
The fuzzy ooze also brings me to my favorite new addition in Splatoon 3: our little buddy Smallfry. Smallfry is a baby salmonid, one of the enemies in the game's PvE mode "Salmon Run". Unlike most Salmonids, Smallfry is friendly, and will help you on your quest by eating the fuzzy ooze laying about (which is also a big hint as to the identity of the game's true villain). Smallfry is, first of all, adorable. Just a happy little guy who swims about and plays with the Squid Sisters and finds secrets. But he also takes the place of the player's sub weapon. Rather than having bombs like you normally would as a subweapon in Splatoon, during the campaign you toss your companion at enemies and obstacles to push forward.
This gives the gameplay a more personal touch overall that is very in line with the game's story, i.e. that the protagonist is a drifter who just stumbled into this conflict rather than a professional athlete who gets drafted into it. Rather than have an artillery available to you, you have the gun you were holding, the outfit you were given, and your little buddy to push through. It makes the subweapon feel more in line with the character and the world than it does with the kits these weapons represent, even if it does mean you are less likely to learn your subweapons through the campaign because you're always using your little buddy. Not that it matters anyways, because the first two games were ultimately only good at teaching you to use the Splat Bomb specifically.
Speaking of kits, Splatoon 3 has kind of solved a very interesting problem that the first two games' campaigns had. The core purpose of the campaign in any Splatoon game is, first and foremost, to teach its playerbase the basics. Splatoon 1 did a pretty solid job with this, but there was a problem. In Splatoon 1, you could learn the weapon archetype you were most likely to use and nothing else. If you were going to use rollers primarily, you could learn roller and nothing else. Which is good if you're sticking within your main/archetype, but Splatoon benefits from knowing a wide variety of weapons and not sticking to what you decided in the first 20 minutes of play. So Splatoon 2 had a lot of missions built around using specific weapons, and encouraged players to learn every archetype during its campaign. The problem there became, however, that it was always keeping the player on a different weapon and not encouraging them to find a main. A swing too far in the opposite direction. Splatoon 3, instead, has a majority of the levels give the player multiple weapons to beat them with, with each weapon having its own unique rewards for the level you're on. This is kind of a perfect middle point, a player is encouraged to pick up weapons they like when they see them and really learn them during the campaign, while also encouraging them to come back and experiment and get good with weapons/archetypes they aren't as familiar with. It's such an elegant solution, I love it.
Splatoon 3 also just has a brilliant setting, the underground facility of Alterna. There's kind of a Aperture Science test chamber sort of vibe to the main story this time around, I wouldn't be surprised if the devs took a lot of inspiration from Portal when making this. Like the setting of Splatoon 3 is a massive underground training facility that was once populated by the dominant race that came before the Inklings and Octolings millions of years ago. There's actually a lot of interesting lore being established from the get go about how the world came to be dominated by squids, how there was an apocalypse-level event that the humans sought shelter from, but after running out of food they started breeding the sealife they found still surviving in the deep ocean, which inevitably ended up domesticating and then evolving into the races of Splatoon. But the fact that Splatoon 3 takes place in this massive, super clean, underground survival facility where the main character is undergoing tests developed by an AI who seems to love crafting tests gives it this really interesting parallel to Portal and a super interesting vibe to it.
It also creates a fascinating contrast with the above ground sections of Splatoon 3. Like Order vs. Chaos was the theme of the final Splatfest in Splatoon 2 and thus shaped the nature of Splatoon 3's general design ideology, and the final Splatfest in that game did have an apocalyptic lean to its aesthetic. And Splatoon 3 leans very hard into those apocalyptic feelings. The above ground of Splatoon 3 often feels a lot like a dystopian western, an endless desert where the player hops off a train and has to make their way across it to the city. It's the outcome of chaos winning, the dystopian future promised by that decision. But then you get to Splatsville and see the true outcome of Chaos winning, this beautiful, loud, tightknit community that feels super lived in and cares primarily about art and culture and doesn't sweat being organized. I love Splatoon 3 a lot, it's such a good game. But Alterna is kind of the other option, it is a clean, white utopian survival facility that is literally lost under the desert. It's everything "Order" would've been if it won. And you see the chaos breaking through as it's covered in fuzzy ooze and the idols from the above ground, Deep Cut, are breaking in to search for treasure. You see the juxtaposition play out in real time, the consequences of Chaos winning. It makes me wonder what Splatoon 3 would've been like if the other side had won in Splatoon 2, how the roles would've been reversed.
I'm also so glad the focus of the story is on Deep Cut. Like I said previously, I have a lot of experience with Splatoon 3 already, it's a game I've put a lot of time into playing Turf Wars and making a half-hearted attempt at Ranked from time to time. And because of that, I can already confidently say Deep Cut is my favorite idol group in Splatoon. No disrespect to the Squid Sisters and Off the Hook, I love them both dearly too, but Deep Cut is on a whole other level for me. I love how big and distinct their personalities are, but also how well they play off each other. Shiver tries to keep it cool but her overwhelming sense of greed and slightly psychopathic tendencies always burst through. Frye is an unrepentant chaos goblin with a heart of gold and a lot of anxiety about whether her friends actually like her. And then you have my beloved Big Man, my favorite Splatoon character of all time, who is just the wholesome and friendly backbone of the friend group who is ride or die for his homies. They're all just wonderful characters I love to death and I like seeing them as these morally ambiguous rogues who are seeking treasure just for the love of the game. These three are generationally wealthy, their families INVENTED Splatfests, the three of them just love stealing stuff. Callie is immediately like "I love them" when she sees them and girl, I agree.
They also went absolutely crazy with the level design in this game. Like, Splatoon 1 and 2 had very good level design but it was often very standard. A lot of nearly identical levels where you fight through enemy rooms, solve puzzles, and get to the goal. The level design was rarely structured in a clever or compelling way. Splatoon 3 goes full creativity with it though. In the first two areas of Alterna we've already had so many interesting levels to play in. A level where you use the bow weapon's explosive arrows to kill enemies from behind by anchoring them into moving platforms. A level where you are grinding on rails and have to hit switches to keep the rails going, lest you reach the end of the line. A level where you go through an entire maze and get to the end only to then have the maze flip 90 degrees and now you have to climb to the top with the paint you laid on your way through the maze originally. There's a level where you have to navigate the entirety of it on the back of a crab tank, one of the game's supers, and you have to completely rethink how you move and engage in combat due to the crab tank's slow movement but rapid fire that fires in an arc from where you're pointing. But, of course, one of the most fun ideas that Splatoon 3 engages in is the "Spider-Man level", where you have the super move the Zipcaster, a super that allows you to cling to things and grapple to other things, and have to navigate an incredibly vertical level of pillars by moving from place to place. It's so much fun, they really went all out with the level design this time.
The boss design is killer too. There are fewer bosses this time around, you face a boss every two areas rather than every one. But they make them all really stand out. Octavo partakes in one of my favorite tropes in gaming of "starting out the character at full power and then stripping them of that power", you start out as a wrecking ball with a full kit and so it makes sense that the final boss of the first two games is the first boss of this one. This Octavo fight is super fun, I think the first game's Octavo fight is probably still the best due how complex and how hype it was, but trusting the player to immediately connect with DJ Octavo's hand combat and fire it back at him was so nice. And he genuinely has a wide variety of moves which, while none of them are particularly tricky to avoid, do keep the player on their toes. And I like how he fights this time with an Ink Vacuum, not only because it makes the player have to think about how to proceed in the fight when all their ink is being sucked up, but it teaches them how to counteract one of the supers in the game. And despite being the first boss, it doesn't turn Octavo into a joke, because you are starting at full power. It manages to get you past the expected villain by making him an Act One jobber without discounting his appearances in the other two games, it's so good.
But Frye? Frye really kills it as a boss. So Frye at first seems like she's going to be another "Octostomp" boss, in the first two games there was a recurring boss that was essentially a giant stamp that would crush the opponent. It's a boss that was used like four times in total across the two games. And when Frye enters her boss fight, she summons a giant Octostomp and you think "oh this again". But then she rotates the device on its side and it starts spinning on one of the corners and an endless stream of moray eels start spawning from it. And you quickly realize that this boss fight is entirely about mob control and determining which mobs you need to hit. Frye raises Moray eels and most of her eels are just random mobs, but the ones with mask can be thrown back at her if you fire at them. So you have to figure out which eels are worth firing at on the fly while also doing mob control as Frye will send mobs of like 20 eels at you sometimes. All the while she does some sick moves on the Octostomp corpse she's raising these eels in. Such a fun boss fight and such a clever subversion of expectations, Splatoon 3 rules. Like I already knew that it did, but the campaign is reaffirming that fact.
11/4/26
Guess who spent most of this play session on just one level? Anyone who has played the Splatoon 3 campaign will immediately know what level I'm talking about because it's the level everyone gets stuck on but I spent like 90 minutes on it and still haven't beaten it. I'm going to try my best, y'all. For those who don't know what level it is, it's a level where you are grinding over an instant death ocean and have to hit targets to keep the rail going. This is a level type that has shown up before, but this one in particular is very tricky because, to get the maximum reward, the player needs to use the Tri-Stringer. The Tri-Stringer being a bow weapon that fires slowly but has explosive arrows if it hits it mark. So what the level is asking you to do is to be very particular with your aim so you can hit all the switches with the explosion from your arrows. And if there is one thing I'm bad at in games, it's aiming! I am the reason why Half-Life was so difficult for me when I played it last month.
So I made it through Area 3, Area 4, and about half of Area 5 in this play session. I probably could've completed Area 5 but I kept getting pulled away from Splatoon so I ended it off early. I hesitate to say that this section of the game is less interesting than the first section, because it's not. A lot of the things that were true about the early game still remain true. There are so many cool level design ideas (my favorite of this section being a level where you use one of the game's paintbrush weapons and have to paint over every switch in a time limit and at the the end it forms a picture), the game continues to hold a high standard of quality. It's more like, it's settling into itself more. Like "here is the original level design idea we're working with, now that you know it, here's a twist on it". The levels are still fun but I've fewer where I was like "wow, that was an amazing level, I'll remember that one long term. Although there was a fun twist on the Zipcaster levels that had you use the Zipcaster to get a vantage point on an art installation, at which point you would have to recreate it by breaking boxes. That was neat.
I think another reason this section just kind of felt "bleh" to me comparatively is that Shiver is just less interesting of a boss than Frye or Octavo 3? That's not to say Shiver is bad, I like Shiver more than the bosses of 2 pretty handedly, but she is the weakest boss in a game with exceptionally great boss design. Shiver is a boss that requires a lot of patience, she circles around the arena outside of it just out of reach and the player can only damage her while she is between attacks. Couple that with how many of her attacks either require you to stop making progress in the fight to dodge or make her unable to be hit, and Shiver is a very slow, patient boss fight that plays with its food. And it's good. It's just, you know. Not as punchy or fast paced or fun as the other bosses. Shiver makes the player wait a minute and a half for each cycle and you feel it. Again, Shiver is one of the better bosses in the Splatoon series but for Splatoon 3, the fact that she's not as good as the other bosses is definitely felt.
I'm also glad I didn't do a "can you solve it" post for the "mystery" at the core of Splatoon 3 because they've already revealed who the big bad is. Not that it's any huge secret, mind you. The entire story is titled "Return of the Mammalians" and there's only like three Mammals in Splatoon period. The two judges of Turf Wars, Judd and Lil' Judd, and the mysterious head of GrizzCo "Mr. Grizz". And while Lil Judd is pure evil and is likely to be the villain of the fourth game, calling my shot, it's pretty obvious that the big reveal was going to be that Mr. Grizz was the main antagonist of this game. Mind you, from before the third game was, revealed everyone knew Grizz was going to be the villain of the next game. There was a post around the end of the Splatoon 2 content cycle from Mr. Grizz talking about the holidays and encouraging people to return to their Salmon Run shifts post-haste, and the Salmonids in the post were spelling out a message asking for help. And then a Salmonid is your little buddy for this game. It was pretty clear from the start that where we were going was "Grizz is the main antagonist". But you know what? Fair. Dude's a libertarian, he deserves what's coming to him.
Something I didn't mention last time about Alterna that I really dig is how they play around with the theme of it being a survival sanctuary for the last vestiges of humanity. While a lot of the level design is very "obstacle courses in the sky", as is standard with Splatoon, they have a greater focus on like. Art and culture from "before". As you explore the world of Alterna, in fact, you'll find capsules scattered about that contain within them paintings and statues and cultural touchstones from the time before the Inklings. Everything from the great works of the Renaissance artists to simple sound equipment. It tells a story of a race trying to ensure what they were far outlasts who they were, and I think it's a really compelling not to include with Alterna's environmental storytelling. But it also explains a lot about how Inkling culture got this way. Inklings are, in a lot of ways, parroting the best of humanity. They have taken our art, our culture, our knowledge and made it their own. Some of humanity's paintings and sculptures even survive as fixtures within the modern Inkling cities. Knowing that Inklings began evolving in Alterna and then rose to the surface, it makes a lot of sense. They didn't just show up to the ruined cities of humanity and go "this stuff looks cool, we should refurbish it", they are, directly, a successor to what came before. Their preservation of human culture is not an accident, it's deliberate.
I think the next play session will probably be the last? Assuming I ever finish this bow grinding level, mind you (I will do it, I just need to lock in). I have like, half of Area 5, Area 6, and then the final Area where I confront Grizz left so. Should be able to knock it out in one go. It's very funny playing Splatoon 3 now because when it first came out, a lot of people I know just did not like this game. A lot of long time Splatoon fans who had put hundreds of hours into Splatoon 1 and 2 just came out against basically every aspect of Splatoon 3. They thought every new weapon was garbage, they hated the brand new maps, they thought the changes to Splatfests were terrible. And of course there was the whole "Shiver sweep" controversy where a bunch of people posited, with 0 evidence, that Shiver was a plant designed specifically to win Splatfests because she is insanely attractive. Which is ludicrous because Splatfests are not a popularity contest, they have changed the system several times to ensure the popular team doesn't have an advantage, and if you look at Splatfest results you'll see that by and large the results during the "Shiver Sweep" were even. People's ability to forge a conspiracy so that they never have to admit that someone else played better than them never fails to baffle.
But now that the dust has long settled, I don't know how you could truly say that the third game is significantly worse than 1 or 2? Like, obviously it's my favorite, but like. It's so full of life and creativity. It has such instantly iconic characters, it has the best world of the three, the best level design, the most interesting gameplay. Like, I don't know, I feel like a lot of people who played 3 and didn't like it were just, themselves, off the Splatoon train completely. This game rules, I have adored it since launch and playing through the campaign has only made me love it more, even if I am hitting kind of a "lull". I hesitate to call it the perfect Splatoon game because an online multiplayer shooter can never be "perfect", people will always have problems with it and love the balancing of previous entries, but I think 3 is easily the overall best and it's sad how this entry was the one that a not insignificant number of people looked at and went "wow, the series has really gone downhill".
11/5/26
So I didn't beat the game. Could I have? Absolutely. If I had abandoned the level that I spent an hour and a half on last night. I spent another like hour and a half to two hours on it in this play session and let me tell ya, it's a rough level. Like maybe the hardest main level in a Splatoon game? The DLC gets more difficult levels, mind, but I've heard the level I'm talking about is a comparable difficulty to what was in the second game's harder DLC, Octo Expansion, and it definitely feels it. That being said, it might be my favorite level in the game so far? Like, maybe after playing it for like 3 and a half hours I just have Stockholm Syndrome, except I don't because there is very little quantifiable evidence that Stockholm Syndrome is even real and people who perpetuate it are instead being baffled at the concept of empathy. I digress. But like, I just love this level. If the purpose of Splatoon's campaigns are to teach people how to play the game, One-Way Ride to Target Town is doing its job the best. It demands you learn how to aim the Tri-Stringer, the weapon in Splatoon 3 that has easily the highest learning curve by far, as being off by even a little can fail the level. It's precise, it's difficult, and I don't know if I'd call it "fun" per se, but man is it satisfying. Great level.
Speaking of great levels, there were genuinely a lot of them in this section. I didn't think there was going to be at first because the game's fifth area seems a bit lackluster at first. A few really basic levels revisiting previous ideas, with the "cool level" being the one that I spent 3+ hours on. But there ended up being a few levels in Area 5 I really liked. There were two Zipcaster levels in this part, which had even more of a lean into the Spider-Man theme by having you swing from pillar to pillar. One of them was even called "Zipping Over the Neighborhood", a pretty clear reference to Spider-Man being a hometown hero. There was this really cool level where you played through it twice but mirrored, with the first half being exceptionally easy as the enemies are all facing away from you and the second half being difficult as now the entire place is covered in enemy ink and they're all facing you. There was another really fun grinding level where you have to hit switches using a sniper rifle while grinding but this one is low stress and more about discerning where the switches are, with you just looping endlessly at the end until you find all of them. But the best level in Area 5 is the Splashdown level, where you have an always charged super and you have to keep slamming into the ground with it to make progress. Just a very satisfying level.
Area 6 is actually the more tame of the two areas I encountered in this play session. I think, low key, I need to go back and tier list every Splatoon level because I'm more specifically talking about the levels in Area 5 and 6 when I was just like "there were a lot of good levels in 1 and 2 and then 3 and 4 slowed it down a bit" in the other sections. Area 6 had a lot of more standard levels, but there were like a few key standouts. There was a really fun "the floor is lava" level where you had to use the game's curling bombs to carve a path through enemy ink because touching the enemy ink insta kills you. There was a great racing level where you had to make it to checkpoints before the timer ran out by swiming through the path of ink. There was a level that reminded me a lot of bandit chasing in Spyro, with a bunch of Octarians running around and you having to cleverly place traps for them to get the keys they've absconded with. There was a really fun level where you had to hunt Octolings in low visibility while you searched for a way to unlock the goal. Splatoon 3 has so many great levels y'all, just the highest standard of quality in a campaign so far.
Also Area 6 had the Big Man boss fight. I'm sorry I had to do it to him, Big Man is my... what do the kids call it? An oshi? A bias? I don't know, I don't know idol culture. Anyways, I love Big Man, and I absolutely love how they immediately go "Big Man doesn't really want to fight you". He's actually very awkward about it. Love this guy, I want to give him a hug so badly. Anyways, this is the boss fight everyone freaks out about because it's a version of the Paper Manta Storm from Super Mario Sunshine and everyone gets excited about the reference. I hate that boss fight. It's one of my least favorite Mario bosses in gaming history. It's fun here though, mainly because Splatoon is better suited for "firing at the ground" than Mario Sunshine is. It's a cute boss fight, the reference is fun, I love that because Big Man is not super used to fighting the way his boss fight works is that he just throws whatever he can find at you. It also can be slightly overwhelming because of that, this is the first boss in this game I've actually died to because the third phase is just so much to deal with and I kept running out of ink at the worst moments. I still think Frye is the best boss in this game so far but I liked the Big Man fight a bunch.
Something I haven't really commented on before but I find really interesting is what you unlock through the game's skill tree. I mentioned previously that the game starts you out at full power and then strips that of you after the first boss. To reclaim your power, you have to engage with the game's skill tree. Most of the skills are what you would probably expect, you can hold more ink, your gun's power and fire rate goes up, your ink recovery goes up, etc. But one of the more interesting things, at least to me, is the sub weapon unlocks. You can, as you go along, unlock the three core bomb types on the skill tree, allowing you alternate, high impact sub weapons besides just throwing Smallfry at things. But, unlike in the main game, you don't have to only equip one. You have all four sub weapons equipped at once and you switch between them using the Dpad.
I really like this, normally in Splatoon you are locked into a very specific loadout, the game is built around predetermined kits and that means your subweapon is often out of your hands. This is good for a multiplayer game, to be clear, a lot of casual Splatoon players are often like "why can't we get customizable kits" and it's like. That'd be a nightmare for game balance, you know. But I like being able to experiment with my play style like this, to have a bunch of different subweapons available to me at any time and change how I approach a situation based on that. It really kind of makes me want a Splatoon game that is like just the single player stuff. Which I guess is kind of Raiders but Raiders is more in line with the roguelike DLC of Splatoon 3 than the singleplayer content, as far as I know.
I am definitely beating the game in my next play session. I think I literally have 7 more levels and the final boss? It's probably two hours of game left. I'm probably going to try and find the rest of the lore scrolls before I head off to the final area though. Something I find really interesting is that like, the lore scrolls in this game aren't focused on Alterna all that much. You get a lot of lore for Alterna, don't get me wrong, but the majority of the lore scrolls found down there have to do with the modern history of the Splatoon universe. The foundation of Splatfests, the history of various clans, news articles about the various main characters of the Splatoon universe. It paints the picture that this is all research being done, and knowing who the main villain is, Mr. Grizz, what he wants, a return of Mammalian superiority by turning all the Inklings, Octolings, and Octarians into mammal zombies, and exactly how long he's been watching the Splatlands, it feels very sinister. Like he's been plotting this for an incredibly long time.
11/6/26
Welp. Guess I'm crying over the silly squid game again. This always happens, I get to the end of one of these things and I get SO EMOTIONAL. I shouldn't say always, I don't actually remember if I got emotional at the end of Splatoon 2 because like. It's Splatoon 2. It's just astounding to me how these very lighthearted, colorful, comedic video games about squids having paintball matches never fail to make me tear up. I knew I would do so at the end of Splatoon 3, because I've been listening to Calamari Inkantation 3Mix since launch it always makes me emotional. Just this grand, epic culmination of everything we've been building towards since the first game that literally has a chorus of the voices of the world itself playing in the background. But then the credits song hit and I was weeping like a baby, I swear. I can't believe they did this to me, how dare art manipulate my emotions like this when that's the entire point of art!!!
Once again, I love Deep Cut so much. Deep Cut has been standing in our way this entire time as we've been going through Alterna because they want the machine parts that we keep finding. Deep Cut are bandits, they are obsessed with treasure and want the machine so they can bring it back to the surface to sell it. Well, it never occurred to them to ask whether we even wanted the machine or if we just wanted to use it to get past Grizz's wall of fur surrounding the rocket ship in Alterna. So they try and throw down with us again only to be hit with a "oh yeah, we're done with it, you guys can have it". And they are immediately like "...wait? That's it?" And then they swear their loyalty to the Squidbeak Splatoon because they just feel like they have to make it up to them for all the trouble they've caused and start calling Marie "boss", completely unaware that their boss and her assistant are the world famous Squid Sisters Callie and Marie. Which, as an aside, kind of implies that Alterna takes place after the first Splatoon 3 DLC because in that one they're feuding with Callie and Marie but in Alterna they befriend them. I love these three idiots so much, Deep Cut is the best idol group.
Every level in the final stretch of levels was an absolute banger. Every single one. It starts out with one of my favorite level design ideas: a stealth level where they completely strip you of your resources and you have to earn them back. It's me, hi, I'm the reason this kind of level keeps on getting into these games. I love them dearly, This one was especially great though because it tested how well you understood Smallfry mechanically, as he was the only thing you had to get through the level. You had to use him to kill or distract enemies while your player character snuck through. There was a level where you had to go through room after room of enemies, killing each room with a different super, that was really fun. There was a "protect the elevator" level, that was really fun. A level where you had to endure a seemingly endless spiral up as you climbed to find an entrance to the rocket ship. And, most importantly, another killer Zipcaster level where you had to Spider-Man around the inside of the rocket to make sure you didn't miss the launch. A truly fantastic set of levels, they pulled out all the stops for the last area.
Mr. Grizz is also such an interesting antagonist. Like, his primary motivation really plays into the themes of Splatoon 3. Splatoon 3 is all about the beauty of chaos, right, it posits that chaos is necessary for art and for culture. But the capitalist, Mr. Grizz, does not see it that way. Grizz believes this chaos is a mockery of what came before, that "mammals and marine life have switched places and not for the better". He believes the Mammals were organized, they provided the world meaning and structure. The marine life is chaotic. And chaos is bad for profits. So Mr. Grizz wants to bring the world back to what it once was, and he's willing to sacrifice himself in order to do it. Literally, his plan is to absorb so much energy from the radiation hanging about in space and then launch himself at the planet in order to drown it all in a mammalian ooze which will return the Earth to how it should be in his mind.
The final boss is also appropriately epic. I don't know if it's the best boss fight of the trilogy, I think DJ Octavio in Splatoon 1 probably gets that honor. But in terms of scale, nothing beats Mr. Grizz. Mr. Grizz swells up to a kaiju size and starts his crash course into Earth, with the protagonist being given three minutes and thirty-three seconds to stop him. Luckily, Calamari Inkantation, the "sacred melody" begins playing. Calamari Inkantation is canonically a sacred tune in the Splatoon series, it is believed to be imbedded into the DNA of every creature on planet Earth but was never vocalized until Callie and Marie unlocked the melody. And in this instance, that belief is proven to be fact, as the souls of every being that has ever or will ever live on Earth sing in unison to stop Mr. Grizz. Which causes the song to have an interesting effect: turning Smallfry into a giant kaiju-sized salmon (now dubbed "Bigfry"). It becomes a kaiju battle in outer space, Bigfry can defeat Grizz, but he needs help. So long as Grizz is able to restore the fuzzy ooze on his body, Bigfry can only stall him and not do any real damage to him.
That's where the player comes in. The player gets help from a surprising source: main antagonist of the series DJ Octavio. Octavio has repaired his robot from the start of the game and outfitted it with every piece of tech he could find. Including an industrial grade vacuum cleaner. What the player must do to assist Bigfry in defeating his enemy is vacuum up the fuzzy ooze that pools outside of Grizz's body, weakening him so that Bigfry can go in for some serious damage. They must work fast though, because again they have three-and-a-half minutes to touchdown. And while Grizz might be distracted, he's become so powerful that he can impede their progress almost subconsciously, albeit with limited success. It is a fight that, if not the most engaging boss in the series history gameplay wise, is definitely the greatest spectacle the series has put on. It is, as the kids say, peak. This is a fight for the world. It's almost as big a deal as One-Way Ride to Target Town.
But while defeating Grizz is monumental, it is bittersweet. Splatoon 3 marks the end of the "Squid Sisters saga", the storyline that has been building since the first Splatoon game. Dj Octavio, the main antagonist of the previous two games, has now patched things up with his friend-turned-enemy, Craig Cuttlefish (yeah, Cap'n Cuttlefish's name is Craig, I couldn't believe it either). The Octolings have fully integrated into Inkling society, creating a more diverse and welcoming society and going against the hard stances that either of the older men had taken about how one species needs to be in charge. It seems like there is nothing for the Squidbeak Splatoon to fight against or for with Mr. Grizz gone. But, more than that, the Sisters have just been living their own lives.
I didn't touch on this in Splatoon 2 but if you refight DJ Octavio after beating him, they explain that Callie is now openly working with Octavio because she just likes how these underground performances and their unique fashion feel. And Callie is still wearing that style in Splatoon 3, implying that she has chosen the world of underground performance over her previous mainstream work. Marie, meanwhile, wants a more low key life. She enjoys journalism and interviewing more than her idol work, she has become an incredibly successful podcaster since the Squid Sisters were the main idols and her dress and attitude makes it clear she's retired. The two of them are still very close, but it's no longer a "live and work together" closeness. Marie's podcast cut a 5 hour episode of just the two women catching up. Splatoon 3 treats the Squid Sisters like people who have moved on from idol culture and found their own lives and, rather than attempting to reinvigorate their love for music and performance, chooses to let them go. Which brings us to the end credits theme, Wave Goodbye, the last song Callie and Marie are choosing to cut as an active duo before the retirement of the Squid Sisters, about how this is all over but one that sounds hopeful for the future. I bawled like a baby at it. I love this series so much.
I didn't have to play the campaign to know that I loved Splatoon 3 dearly. I have put too many hours into the multiplayer to ever debate that fact. But I'm glad the campaign held up to the rest of this experience. Splatoon 3 nails the Splatoon formula in such a nearly perfect way that I'll be curious if it is ever topped. It is full of the personality, color, charm, and depth that drew people to the series in the first game, but it also is a wonderful and compelling competitive experience with an interesting and diverse format like in the second game. It is "just right" in all the ways that matter. And that's not even talking about all the additional side modes that they included. Splatoon 3 is everything Splatoon should be and I think it is essentially perfect. If the next mainline Splatoon game is somehow better than this then I'm going to have to rescale my entire rating system I swear. 9.7/10
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