When it comes to Nintendo’s most significant releases of the past 10 years, most would – quite rightly – point towards the towering achievement of The Legend of Zelda: The Breath of the Wild, though for me there’s a game that came out a few years before that’s every bit as important. The Wii U era was a commercial nadir for Nintendo, enlightened by the spark of something new; the lurid splash of colour that was Splatoon, a long-awaited all-new IP from the house that built Mario, and an impeccably enjoyable subversion of the modern-day shooter. For a company that can be too quick to fall back on the familiar, it offered the shock of the genuinely new.
What’s more, Splatoon was a huge success and has since become nothing short of a phenomenon, with convenience stores in Tokyo stocked with official snacks and toys while its knockabout brand of messy third-person shooting action has been embraced by millions. Perhaps a little too successful, mind; Splatoon 2 played a part in the Switch’s busy launch year, a quickfire sequel to the bold original that could feel a little too familiar. That’s certainly how I felt at launch, though the hundreds of hours I’ve since put into Splatoon 2 suggest I might have been wrong, or perhaps they suggest more Splatoon wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
There’s a sense in the run-up to the release of Splatoon 3 – which comes a clean five years after its predecessor – that it’s only offering up more of the same, and that’s fair enough. It’s spot-on, even; I’d understand if you couldn’t quite distinguish a game of Turf War in Splatoon 2 from one in Splatoon 3. They’re still both whip-quick, four-on-four, three minute affairs in which you’re claiming territory with your ink gun, spraying the map in liberal dashes of colour and eliminating any enemies in your path, diving in and out of the pools in gracious arcs as you switch to you fast-swimming squid form. It’s the modern multiplayer shooter as pithy pop art, and it’s every bit as fun to play now as it was on the Wii U back in 2015.
