now all that being said. i'm doing a whole lot of nitpicking for someone who hasn't played the previous games before lol. so i'm curious: were the kits the previous games actually that much better? my impression of splatoon 2 is that the kit balancing wasn't all that great either (i've heard legends of endless shooters getting picked), and my impression of splatoon 1... doesn't really exist outside of knowing a total of like 5 kits from it that people liked, but a lot of the specials in it don't seem that impressive to me. compared to them, the variety that exists in splatoon 3 feels quite remarkable to me, so i wonder what the previous games did better than splatoon 3 has done?
Splaton 1 had a lot of failed experiments at kits, especially among launch weapons. It was chaotic. That being said, very many things in Splat 1 were just
powerful. Basically everything in Splat 1 with a few exceptions is faster, stronger, bigger, and overtuned compared to 2 and 3. Quick Respawn and Stealth Jump is the best strategy in the entire series. Damage up fundamentally changed how gear builds worked. Some Specials give you Invincibility without much drawback. Broken kits existed.
Thing is, when everything is busted, nothing is busted. It kinda feels like a Melee or a Marvel vs Capcom in that the game feels balanced simply because everything is too good in its own way such that it balances out.
Splat 2 is much more tame, and many of the broken specials and mechanics were toned down. In addition, there was noticeable care taken to ensure that weapons had the tools they needed to function against other strong weapons, and that someone who played a certain class or style of weapons had options available if they wanted to use a certain sub or special for this rotation, to flex, etc. It made team building interesting. Not all weapons wound up being good, but for the most part you could see where they were going with their choices.
I stopped playing S2 competitively in 2019, so my account of late S2 should be taken with a grain of salt, but TLDR the endgame of Splat 2 saw a lot of bad balance changes that left shooters in too good of a position compared to most other classes. It's kinda important to note the difference between early S2 and late S2 when people make generalizations such that you don't realize they're talking about one while you're thinking about the other.
A lot of people dislike Splat 3's kits because the devs have clearly stopped trying to enable weapons and instead want to limit them. Instead of trying to ensure that
YOU have strong, fun options that can take on whatever your opponents can throw at you, the focus seems to have shifted to making sure your
OPPONENTS can't throw anything that would require a strong weapon in the first place.
For example; Aerospray is a bad main weapon. It's going to have issues functioning versus normal weapons with decent kits. Splat 2 gave Aerospray a kit with Burst Bomb and Booyah to help remedy this. The Burst Bomb especially helps the Aerospray be relevant in combat when the main weapon can't. Compare this to Splat 3 where the same weapon got Sprinkler and Booyah. Now the assistance to ensure the main weapon can function is gone. It feels terrible to someone who has played Splat 2, and I think it perfectly portrays how most people feel about kits in general going from 2 to 3.
On paper, a game where all weapons have limited kits would be more balanced. If you take like, 85%-90% of Splat 3's weapons, you kinda see a playing field where everything has huge weaknesses and limitations to keep everything at the same low power level. Unfortunately, the 10%-15% of remaining weapons do not have these restrictions, as I noted in the post above, so that on-paper balance simply doesn't exist in reality. What you get instead is a handful of weapons that feel up to par for Splatoon weapons, then a huge list of weapons that just feel week in comparison and are kinda just not not fun to lose with when your opponents are playing the few good ones.
