The Biggest Missed Opportunities with Splatoon 3

[Cephalobro]

This will cover both the single-player mode and the multiplayer-related stuff as well.

So for the multiplayer, they really missed opportunities with some of the emotes and gear. First, the emotes, they could've easily used the adjust feature to have some extra emotes. For example, one emote from Splatoon 1 has not returned, and they could've easily brought it back using the adjust feature. There were missed opportunities with the gear as well. None of the Splatoon 2-related singleplayer gear returned, which is strange considering shortly after Side Order's release, Splatoon 2-related content has gotten most of the attention.

Now for the single-player mode. The Return of the Mammalians did have some really big missed opportunities, firstly, it was going to feature all three of the previous games' protagonists in some way, but that obviously didn't happen. Another missed opportunity was having DJ Octavio replace Craig Cuttlefish as the mentor. The new Captain doesn't talk at all, so maybe we could've had DJ Octavio talk throughout the missions in addition to the Squid Sisters, we could've heard his side of the story, revealing a lot more than we knew before. This would've been very fitting considering Splatoon 3 is the end of the current story arc.

 

[object61]

ngl, but s3 felt rushed(at least in MP) to me, if compared to s2. Then again, i was not playing s2 at start, so i might be just a bit biased lol
(also i did not play s1, not after i beaten s2 sp campaign, so then it felt kinda okay?)

 

[missingno]

it was going to feature all three of the previous games' protagonists in some way

Do you have a source for this?

 

[TOD13]

i'm upset that dj octavio didn't have a bigger role in rotm, especially since he wasn't the villain this time.

 

[Cephalobro]

Do you have a source for this?

The Splatoon 3 artbook shows the concept art of what its base single-player mode was going to be like, and it showed the Captain (the original Agent 3), Agent 4, and Agent 8, some other characters were also shown in it as well, so it looked like it was going to be a lot more ambitious. Too bad they really cut back on the ambition.

 

[OnePotWonder]

The missed opportunities in this game could fill a novel-length book. For example: All of Side Order. Just the whole thing.

Side Order’s story is well beyond disappointing.
The lore was decent but handled poorly.
The difficulty completely falls off once you unlock enough hacks.
The bosses are ridiculously repetitive and the developers put zero effort into making them any more diverse despite there being at least a dozen ways to easily do so.
The final palette is a joke; sure you only get so many hacks with it, but the combination of main, sub, special, and colour chip bias is easily the strongest out of all the palettes, with no extra floor difficulty to compensate.
Danger is as unbalanced as Salmon Run’s night waves, with Stronger Jelletons being more overpowered than the Glowfly Rush.
Tone Chain bonuses are overpowered, giving players the ability to collect as many as 63000 extra points in one run. Prism bonuses provide a maximum of 15500 extra points and are harder to maintain.
Parallel Canon is what you find if you look up “wasted potential” in an encyclopedia.
Again with the difficulty, games should get harder the further you play into them, not easier.
The aesthetics, frankly, are a wet flop. I and I’m sure many others were hoping for something darker than even Octo Expansion. The darkest things we actually got in the game were robotic clones and angry LEGO fish. If Grayscaling was supposed to be this terrifying new threat, then it is officially the most poorly handled thing in the Splatoon series.
Order got even less screen time than DJ Octavio in RotM.
If different layouts of the same stage for different objectives are omitted, there are barely more floors in Side Order than there were stations in Octo Expansion, and the objectives are a hundred times easier to apply.
You cannot replay the original fight against the final boss.
The post-game foyer is worse than the pre-completion one.
WHY DID THEY HAVE TO MAKE IT SO DAMN GOOFY??

Overall, Side Order is a huge missed opportunity, in terms of aesthetics, in terms of story, in terms of gameplay. The game is practically over once you defeat Overlorder for the first time because the postgame is so lacklustre, limp-fish easy.

I still love Side Order, but I’d throw my switch in a river to see the mode remastered in a way that lets its true potential shine through.

Rant concluded.

 

[missingno]

The difficulty completely falls off once you unlock enough hacks.
Again with the difficulty, games should get harder the further you play into them, not easier.

This, unfortunately, is a consequence of Rogue"lites", a term I hate because it is the exact opposite of the original Rogue. But of course Nintendo was never going to make a real Roguelike, not when this game has to be accessible to young children. Their target audience would get way too frustrated with a game where you actually are starting over from scratch every time and dying means truly losing all progress, so instead we get a grinding game where dying is progress.

I will continue to be grumpy old man angrily shaking my cane at how this genre got bastardized, but I can't pretend to act surprised about it. It's Nintendo. I expected this from the very start.

At least you can turn hacks off, and I appreciate that they left that option open. If you haven't already, try playing hackless. But it does feel like, despite being an option, the game wasn't balanced with it in mind.

You cannot replay the original fight against the final boss.

You can, there's a thingy you can examine in the lobby that'll let you replay the fight.

 

[TOD13]

agent 4 has had ZERO appearances in Splatoon 3. the only cameo (if you can call it that) they got is their palette. i hope they come back in S4, assuming there's going to be a 4th installment.

Spoiler: minor post-Side Order spoilers

Iso Padre also has no major role (besides from sitting in a cafe in inkopolis square). i'm particularly mad about this one cus he's my favorite character from Octo Expansion.

The aesthetics, frankly, are a wet flop. I and I’m sure many others were hoping for something darker than even Octo Expansion. The darkest things we actually got in the game were robotic clones and angry LEGO fish. If Grayscaling was supposed to be this terrifying new threat, then it is officially the most poorly handled thing in the Splatoon series.

they had to make Side Order lighthearted because Splatoon is a kids game. if they made it super dark and grim they would've gotten a million complaints from parents.
but i still agree, if it was even just a little darker it would've made the story a LOT better.

 

[briank913]

There were so many S2 stages people were really hoping for to come back. I know they tried to incorporate elements of beloved stages into the new ones but why not just give us The Reef and do some more unique things for Lemuria?

And Four being relegated to a dialogue wasn't cool D:

But with the Captain "Booyah"ing at the end was just adorable tho lol.

 

[TOD13]

anyway, here's some not Side Order related stuff:
-i'm kind of mad that Shiver isn't non-binary, especially after it was hinted that she was. though Acht canonically uses they/them so at least we got some enby representation (implicitly anyway, since it isn't confirmed if they are)
-Deep Cut's Springfest outfits were just plain bad. the color palette sucked and they weren't creative at all (EXCEPT for the flower and dango headpieces, those were a cool reference). they could've been a lot better in general.

 

[Cephalobro]

I'm kind of annoyed that there wasn't a single tentacle Octarian NPC that wasn't an enemy anywhere in the game. Even in a setting that's unrelated to Inkopolis and managed to avoid the Great Turf War, why is Nintendo actively avoiding this?

The fact that we have gotten a non-enemy Salmonid before we got a non-enemy tentacle Octarian is just so weird to me. Octolings already lived in Splatsville for generations, so it wouldn't be that complicated to have at least one tentacle Octarian appear that isn't an enemy. Heck, the concept art showed a tentacle Octarian as part of Deep Cut, but was replaced by Big Man.

 

[OnePotWonder]

You can, there's a thingy you can examine in the lobby that'll let you replay the fight.

True, but that only lets you replay the final part with the Colour Wail.
I’m personally more miffed that after clearing the spire for the first time you never get to see the pre-completion Control Room or Foyer again. The few bits of dark aesthetic we do get are stripped away never to be seen again.

You know what, actually? Remember project Spiral? What if it’s a story-exclusive Splatoon spinoff that’s really dark? Like E13+ dark? And a legitimate roguelike? That would genuinely be awesome, give Nintendo a chance to make another genuinely fantastic Splatoon campaign like OE.

Time to break out the hopium.

 

[NeoXVIII]

A lot of the kits were giant missed opportunities unfortunately, especially since they constrained themselves to spreading out both specials and subs throughout the classes while simultaneously making reference kits. Like Splash with Zip would have been pretty interesting to see, but instead we have a near identical kit to Splattershot on it. Then the weird kit Reeflux Deco got that doesn't really work together very well. We also have a ton of really mid kits that aren't good or bad, but are just really whatever and not really fun to play.

Buffs being really minimal and uninteresting don't really help the above. We have gotten some good, deserved nerfs but without buffs to bring some of the weaker weapons up to speed we're left using weapons that don't really feel great to use. Should say a lot when you hit a weapon multiple times and it's still chosen over the others, like Squeezer.

Weaker subweapons and specials being left in the state they're in.

Then the maps, if you check out pre release screenshots and trailers, scorch gorge and eeltail look huge and follow a completely different philosophy of the maps we got. I'm not sure what went on to give us not only release scorch and eeltail, but to continue that same pattern throughout a good chunk of the game's life.

Splatfests could use more custom maps like the triforce map.

Challenges.

Bloated special pool, we have a bunch of specials that do similar things in a mediocre fashion.

Abilities affecting more things, such as Intensify Action/Swim Speed affecting Kraken, Intensify Action affecting roll speed of Rollers/Brushes and charge speed for Splatanas, Run Speed affecting Rollers/Brushes/Splatanas, Sub/Special power up doing anything meaningful... anything to give you the option to change the way you play.

Having more to do in the lobby, being able to use the jukebox to "vote" for a battle song for your next battle.

Not tapering off Grizzco rewards so harshly after the last superbonus. Let me get some money salmon running with like overtime capsules or something. It's also really weird to get to the point where you only get a single capsule or less per shift, no reason for that.

Single Player stuff:

RotM was neat. Honestly more than I could ask for, for a Splatoon singleplayer. Kinda wish I could activate the sheldrone remotely though, the loading screen, walk, and dialogue between is enough to disincentivize me from using it.

Side order was neat, it's easy yeah even at its hardest, but the main problem I have is the lack of stuff to do and builds you can make. 3 bosses that you'll get tired of fighting over and over again, their difficulty will never vary either, and the builds aren't really satisfying since you'll be locked into a main for a run, diverting very little from it apart from raw stats, your sub and special, or the drone. Even when you 100% it it's kinda whatever. Octo Expansion is still peak on peak.

 

[Neko :D]

i'm upset that dj octavio didn't have a bigger role in rotm, especially since he wasn't the villain this time.

Ikr. DJ octavio is way underrated. He helped in the end of RotM, but I wish he showed up more though out the whole game as more of a main character rather than a side charcter.

 

[Alphine_Agnitio]

the story mode this time around was a huge step up, but I think it still fell into the pitfall of "pretending to have any writing but instead its just a bunch of mini levels with a mild story" + deep cut felt forced into the story in a weird way that doesn't really mesh well with their dual roles as the idols of the game too, + smallfry being a deus ex machina at the end for literally no reason

Side Order was a LOT better in this regard, but the same complaints apply - story was cool but not expanded on enough for a singleplayer story mode, acht felt shoehorned in for little purpose, same with the character references, and the overall experience was pretty meh.

To the multiplayer stuff, I think a 5th ranked mode would have been preferable over tri color, or just make tri color and splatfests in general more interesting. I assume theres some hardware limitations to prevent "real" 4v4v4's, and the ultra signal is a good and interesting way to make turf into an objective mode while simotaniously giving the 2v2v4 team mode a balancing mechanic, but it doesn't feel expanded on enough. Kits this game felt meh as well, with a lot more stinkers then usual, the new specials this game were overall okay but still kinda bland, and I think the new weapon classes are super underbaked and, again, felt shoehorned in to add any amount of new content.

Salmon Run def needed more night waves and more maps, king salmonids are a fun mechanic to shake up the mode a bit but they happen so rarely it just feels like a rehash of S2 salmon run, but with very slightly more bells and whistles.

I didn't play S2 that much so a lot of this is just "my stance based on the last year of me playing this game" and my memories of S1 is even hazier, at the same time, I think S3 is a solid like, 6/10 in terms of content, it fumbles a lot but its still relatively enjoyable and an okay experience.

 

[Yeenom]

The missed opportunities in this game could fill a novel-length book. For example: All of Side Order. Just the whole thing.

Side Order’s story is well beyond disappointing.
The lore was decent but handled poorly.
The difficulty completely falls off once you unlock enough hacks.
The bosses are ridiculously repetitive and the developers put zero effort into making them any more diverse despite there being at least a dozen ways to easily do so.
The final palette is a joke; sure you only get so many hacks with it, but the combination of main, sub, special, and colour chip bias is easily the strongest out of all the palettes, with no extra floor difficulty to compensate.
Danger is as unbalanced as Salmon Run’s night waves, with Stronger Jelletons being more overpowered than the Glowfly Rush.
Tone Chain bonuses are overpowered, giving players the ability to collect as many as 63000 extra points in one run. Prism bonuses provide a maximum of 15500 extra points and are harder to maintain.
Parallel Canon is what you find if you look up “wasted potential” in an encyclopedia.
Again with the difficulty, games should get harder the further you play into them, not easier.
The aesthetics, frankly, are a wet flop. I and I’m sure many others were hoping for something darker than even Octo Expansion. The darkest things we actually got in the game were robotic clones and angry LEGO fish. If Grayscaling was supposed to be this terrifying new threat, then it is officially the most poorly handled thing in the Splatoon series.
Order got even less screen time than DJ Octavio in RotM.
If different layouts of the same stage for different objectives are omitted, there are barely more floors in Side Order than there were stations in Octo Expansion, and the objectives are a hundred times easier to apply.
You cannot replay the original fight against the final boss.
The post-game foyer is worse than the pre-completion one.
WHY DID THEY HAVE TO MAKE IT SO DAMN GOOFY??

Overall, Side Order is a huge missed opportunity, in terms of aesthetics, in terms of story, in terms of gameplay. The game is practically over once you defeat Overlorder for the first time because the postgame is so lacklustre, limp-fish easy.

I still love Side Order, but I’d throw my switch in a river to see the mode remastered in a way that lets its true potential shine through.

Rant concluded.

Honestly I think Nintendo was too afraid to really do anything with the concept, I see SO as them experimenting with the concept of Roguelites without going all in, what a shame they just had to use Splatoon as their test subject. I think originally it was intended to be this super hard, story heavy (Heavy for Splatoon ig) experience like Octo Expansion but at some point in development an executive just said "Make it a roguelike!" or "This is too hard, ease all of this down!". It's insane how basically everything shown in the initial reveal trailer didn't make it into the main game, whether it be stage concepts, weapons or even just random details like the school of fish swimming in front of the spire. My theory is that Side Order was originally entirely different but because it fell victim to Nintendo wanting to kid-ify the game, the team basically had to scramble everything they could into *something*. The minds behind Girl Power Station were clearly not at work during the final months of development.

 

[Cephalobro]

Honestly I think Nintendo was too afraid to really do anything with the concept, I see SO as them experimenting with the concept of Roguelites without going all in, what a shame they just had to use Splatoon as their test subject. I think originally it was intended to be this super hard, story heavy (Heavy for Splatoon ig) experience like Octo Expansion but at some point in development an executive just said "Make it a roguelike!" or "This is too hard, ease all of this down!". It's insane how basically everything shown in the initial reveal trailer didn't make it into the main game, whether it be stage concepts, weapons or even just random details like the school of fish swimming in front of the spire. My theory is that Side Order was originally entirely different but because it feel victim to Nintendo wanting to kid-ify the game, the team basically had to scramble everything they could into *something*.

I think it's also because Side Order was rushed too, according to the art seen on the trailer itself, it looked like they were going to build up to having really big lore revelations, but because of possible time constraints due to Splatoon 2-related content being announced as part of a season, they were forced to scrap a ton of that.

This is yet another reason why they should stop doing seasonal catalogs completely starting in Splatoon 4, it tends to affect other aspects of the game as well.

 

[Smash Arena]

I have to assume that the Splatoon team was unable to create their true vision for Splatoon 3 because development was interrupted by a well-known worldwide event in 2020. If we think how much development time was lost because of limitations in place during the height of Splatoon 3's development in 2020 and 2021, it makes a lot more sense why Splatoon 3 launched as a half-step from Splatoon 2 as opposed to the pinnacle of the series.

The version of Splatoon 3 we received is likely heavily distorted from the developers' original vision, and I feel bad both the development team and the players. It must stink to not be able to bring your vision of a game to life due to external factors, and it sucks for the players because we haven't been able to experience that grand vision.

 

[OnePotWonder]

This is yet another reason why they should stop doing seasonal catalogs completely starting in Splatoon 4, it tends to affect other aspects of the game as well.

I think the catalogue system is fine, the problem is more that it dictates the update cycle. If it was a simple matter of eight catalogues circling around in a two-year cycle, there would be no problem, and it would give Nintendo room to make bigger gameplay-based content closer to the end of the next game’s lifespan.

The catalogue makes for a simple, tidy goal for casual players to aspire to complete. While updates 110% should not be tied to them, their existence isn’t problematic. Especially if the devs do a good job of the FOMO aspect, which they’ve done fairly decently this time around with regards to being able to obtain old catalogues’ rewards.

 

[missingno]

Considering how late Side Order was released, I don't think it makes sense to call it rushed.

I think the real problem with Side Order is a lack of direction. They almost tried to make a challenging Roguelike, then remembered it has to be something casual Nintendo audiences can beat.