Written by Lan 2022 Cohort
Splatoon 3 has just been released. It’s a third-person shooting game, and it’s the third game of this series. Talking of shooting games, the first thing that comes to mind is likely: shooting around with all kinds of guns. But it’s Nintendo. It always brings you a surprise.
The gameplay of Splatoon is subversive. Instead of bullets, the weapon shoots ink, leaving traces on the ground. The characters of this game are squids and octopuses; therefore, they can dive into and move in the ink. Usually, there are two teams, each with specific ink colour. The primary mode of this game is to splash ink on the ground and see which team covers the most significant area. That is to say, every second the player shoots, it’s making the most direct contribution to victory. This is the most ingenious mechanism of this game, and it is also the biggest difference from other shooting games.
In most shooting games, “killing” is often the best and most direct way to win. But in Splatoon, Nintendo turned everything upside down – in the end, the MVP might not be the one who kills the most since the game’s focus is not “killing” but “splashing the ground.” This approach minimizes the frustration and self-doubt that comes from “getting killed” and “missing a kill,” which are blood pressure-raising events in traditional competitive shooters, and is in line with Nintendo’s philosophy that “everyone can have fun playing games, no matter who they are.”
There have been attempts to change this in previous shooters, such as Overwatch, which assigns a numerical value to each player involved in a kill, but this still doesn’t change the “kill to win” game model. It’s more of a way to further confirm that “traditional shooters use “kills” as the best way to win.”
The innovation is more than that. The weapons of Splatoon are made of all kinds of items, like toothbrushes, ball pens, crayons, and even washing machines and tubs. Believe it, everything you can or cannot think of is made into a weapon.
In addition to the above, Splatoon also has a lot of charm, such as the use of life topics to trigger the “party” without obstacles of the festival activities, incomprehensible but full of the joy of their language and music, and through the hero, mode to further build the absurd comic but full of a convincing wonderful world.
Welcome to the game world of Nintendo. Innovation is always beyond your imagination.