@JustinWicker
SPLATOON 2 DLC (Nintendo Entertainment Planning – Switch – TBA 2018) – Single-player has not been the focus of Splatoon as a series. The fast-paced inking action of the online turf wars, showing new threads to your friends, and ranking up in the competitive modes encompassed the majority of the time for most players, and I think that was Nintendo’s intent.
This is not to say that the single-player mode was an afterthought; it has a fully featured campaign with fun levels and bosses that, when paired with the online multiplayer, felt like the complete package players have come to expect from first party Nintendo titles. They have been great at keeping up with the player base with regular updates: new stages, new game modes, new weapons etc.; but, they never did any additional content for the solo campaign. Until now.
Nintendo revealed the Octo Expansion back in March with a stylish music video that asked more questions than it answered. In the expansion, you take control of an octoling (an octopus-like foil to the squid kid protagonists) for the first time in the series, a pleasant surprise after their previous villainous status. The trailer features a series of disheveled subway stations and new single-player levels, taking the game in a slightly darker direction than it’s previous bright colors, cheeky robot enemies, and overall punky aesthetic. Also featured in the trailer was octolings appearing at the start of multiplayer matches, a feature that players have been asking for in multiplayer since the first Splatoon.
Type hype is real for me, especially as someone who has dropped hundreds of hours into the previous ink-slinging titles. The brief glimpses we got into some of the new levels show off massive waves of enemies and levels tooled to make use of the special weapons in a way that few did before. What came as the biggest personal surprise was how excited I was to see some of the frames showing what appears to be the dark origins of the octolings, and possibly the whole world of Splatoon itself.
What little qualifies for a ‘story’ in the games thus far has been at its best interesting, and at its worst more like a tacked-on justification for the existence of squid-human hybrids. Nintendo is smart in bringing it out now, learning more about the story will definitely bring back players that may have dropped it in favor of other games, and give the active multiplayer community what it has been asking for in the process. I will definitely be checking it out, and I’m pumped to hear more about it at the E3 Nintendo Direct coming up this Tuesday!
-Justin Wicker
You can find all of Justin’s video game reviews and more at The Movie Sleuth.