Post Script

Why Splatoon 3’s singleplayer is a missed opportunity

Anyone who played the original Splatoon on Wii U will recognise the change in one of its returning maps. Indeed, had it not been one of the first game’s finest multiplayer stages, you could be forgiven for thinking Hammerhead Bridge had been brought back purely for narrative purposes. Back in 2015, it was still in the process of being built, with several elevated grated sections. Now it’s all solid ground. Its purpose in the Splatoon universe is to connect Inklandia – where you’ll find Inkopolis Plaza and Square – to the Splatlands where the new city hub, Splatsville, is situated. This thriving Kowloon-inspired metropolis is larger and more diverse than its predecessors and offers more reminders that time passes in the Splatoon universe as it does in the real world. That’s most obvious when you encounter ability-chunk dealer Murch – a literal street urchin – who has grown significantly in stature in the five years since Splatoon 2. The world has evolved. So why does Splatoon’s singleplayer component refuse to follow suit?

It begins, as ever, with the theft of the Great Zapfish (which we’ll accept as a wink to Splatoon tradition), and once again hived off from the rest of the game, accessed as before via a manhole close to the battle lobby, which takes you beneath the crater adjacent to Splatsville to a place called Alterna. After spending some time simply mooching around such a well-realised urban space, with its towering buildings, alleys, parks, screens, apartment complexes and functioning monorail, this icy archipelago is underwhelming. Housed within a colossal Octarian dome, it comprises six islands, all partially covered in a fuzzy ooze which must be removed with the aid of power eggs collected from the stages scattered across them. As before, you access them through kettles, descending into a succession of abstract obstacle courses, which – as in the brilliant Splatoon 2 DLC Octo Expansion – offer you a selection of three weapons with which to complete them.

Borrowing from that challenging add-on might seem smart. And, in fairness, there are several courses that match up to the series’ finest singleplayer campaign, particularly on the later islands. There are challenges that limit your ink supply, forcing you to sneak by patrolling enemies. On another you’ll blast clusters of balloons to make ink rails appear. Another course becomes a race in squid form, where you leap between platforms coated in ink, zipping along boost pads to gain momentum. You will solve puzzles by shooting Inkfurlers in the right order, and sculpt arrangements of boxes into familiar shapes. You will ride colossal missiles, blast oversized bowling balls, beat hasty retreats from explosive enemies, and tackle a horde of Octolings in traditional Splatoon combat. Several stages effectively act as tutorials for special weapons: the Zipcaster in particular is put to much better use than we ever manage in multiplayer combat. And there are boss battles besides, including one nod to Super Mario Sunshine that doesn’t so much feel like an affectionate tribute as a shameless lift.

That, indeed, is one of the biggest problems with Splatoon 3’s campaign: especially if you played Splatoon 2 and Octo Expansion, you have seen just about all of this before. These obstacle courses might be entertaining, but while the enemies may now boast a furry exterior, there are few new additions, and barely any mechanical twists: the Soaker Blocks, which form pathways when inked and disappear after a while, hardly feel any different in practice to the Inkfurlers. Does this suggest there’s a limit to how much you can do with Splatoon’s central motif? Was inking exhausted as a mechanic before the development team started work on 3’s singleplayer mode? A dazzling endgame suggests otherwise, an assembly of segmented stages that collectively form an extended set-piece, tied together with cutscenes and culminating in an encounter that has ramifications for the wider Splatoon universe.

Indeed, the collectable scrolls and logs yielded by removing the ooze demonstrate a clear passion among the development team for fleshing out this world and the story of how it came to be (which makes you wonder why all of this is reserved for text files and what looks almost like a digital manual). Perhaps because of this – and the effort that has evidently gone into the more expansive hub area – it’s never been more clear that Splatoon 3’s singleplayer game is not, in fact, a world, but a series of tangibly videogame-y levels, ones where the tools used to create it have never been more apparent. You can picture level designers placing down blocks, adjusting the position of features and then dropping in enemies, the striking backdrops never quite enough of a distraction from that.

It’s all the more surprising given the effort invested in situating all the stages within Splatoon’s wider universe. These arenas are convincing as virtual spaces: designed with function at top of mind, but with form not far behind. You see it in glimpses of the world beyond the stage boundaries; these are not merely arrangements of tiles and blocks floating in a metaphysical space, but a convincing approximation of a postapocalyptic settlement populated by humanoid-cephalopod hybrids. We can only assume Nintendo must have experimented with the idea of an open-world Splatoon, before reverting to a variation on Super Mario’s ‘void’ stages. Perhaps using weapons outside the arenas would break an unwritten rule of

Splatoon lore. But Nintendo has proved, here and with the likes of New Donk City, that it can create urban spaces that are enjoyable to traverse. There is a chasm between

Splatoon’s multiplayer and singleplayer elements. It is past time, surely, for Nintendo to find a way – other than Hammerhead Bridge – to connect the two.

The world has evolved. So why does Splatoon’s singleplayer component refuse to follow suit?