splatoon shrine: my journey with splatoon
i first got into splatoon when it was first announced back at e3 2014! i was just barely 14 at the time, so i was in the prime demographic to find something like splatoon appealing. it was actually the first year i decided to keep up with e3 coverage in general, and i made a point to wake up early to watch nintendo's presentation and keep up with treehouse. seeing it for the first time, everything about how loud and in-your-face and fun it was just hit right with me from the jump. i made sure to pay full attention whenever they were highlighting it on treehouse later in the day and i was just! so excited for this little thing that wasn't even a quarter done for a dead-on-arrival console.
as an overexcited teenager would do, i preordered my copy of 1 and the accompanying amiibo as soon as i could. i counted down the days to release, talked about it and played the testfire with friends, and once it finally released, i was PUMPED. i went to target to get my copy and... my store hadn't recieved the 3-pack amiibo that i reserved :[ they were able to give me the boy and girl amiibo though. then i went home and NEARLY completed story mode. nearly as in 'i played every stage but was too intimidated by the final boss to even try'. took me a full year of playing to actually feel comfortable trying to beat octavio, lol. i mostly played turf war with friends, then with randoms when that friend group exploded because teenage friend groups tend to do that. i stopped playing as frequently for a while, especially after the final splatfest (team callie btw), but then, along with the announcement of the nintendo switch...
SPLATOON 2 WAS ANNOUNCED!
despite being EXTREMELY excited for splatoon 2, i had to show up to the party a tiny bit late. i wasn't able to get a switch until a few months after launch, as being a junior in high school with no job, i had no real money to spare. i had to sell off a bunch of my anime figures in order to get my switch, which took me the whole summer to be able to do. i did still preorder my copy of 2 though, despite not getting my switch for a few weeks after.
for a bit of context, despite my love for 1, i definitely didn't put a huge ton of time into it. maybe 50 hours tops, in part due to the friend group i mentioned falling apart, and partially because i was (and still am) too intimidated to play competitive.
splatoon 2, on the other hand...
...yeah. i got REALLY into 2, due to a variety of factors. for one, there were modes aside from turf war that i got really into! i LOVED (and still love) salmon run, and i played it as much as i could as often as i could. i'm not sure what exactly grabbed me about it, but clearly something clicked. something else that popped up between the release of 1 and 2 was discord! while i'm sure there were discord groups for 1, i only started checking them out with 2. i hopped from group to group as they ebbed and flowed, playing matches with people, making short-term friends here and there, who i'm still grateful for even if we don't talk now, even if their names slip my mind. it was a good time, and a welcome respite. i also feel like 2 had stronger single-player offerings, at least with the DLC. main story is... fine? it's more of one, but more polished. i don't like the final boss nearly as much as i enjoyed 1's octavio fight once i got to it, as i feel that 1 did a better job of weaving everything you know into the fight. 2's was just... dodge, shoot, dodge, shoot, rail-grind, shoot, dunk, done. nothing special. octo expansion was and still is peak splatoon single-player.
at some point, i slowed down in playing 2, as i had entered college a little over a year after it's release and my workload increased once i switched majors. ...then the pandemic happened. surprised i didn't get back into it during that. i ended up finishing community college during that time, and i moved to and finished my first year of upper division at university. then, halfway through my second semester at uni...
SPLATOON 3!??!?
yeah i wasn't expecting they'd do another splatoon on switch. like, with the install base it has, it makes sense they'd cast as wide a net as they could now instead of waiting for new hardware, and it HAD been like 4 years since splatoon 2 released at the time of announcement, but this kind of caught me off guard even with the 'save our salmons' teaser back in 2020 (wth was that about anyway? was that just to tease salmon run coming back? was it bc of grizz harvesting salmon eggs?). i... honestly wasn't sure about splatoon 3 on reveal, which was odd. i was so hyped for one and two, but for some reason i was super cautious about 3. i liked the new setting, but... i don't know. it just hadn't quite separated itself from 2 in regards to what was new, and it didn't really for a while. once it got closer to release and we knew more about it, though, i got more excited about it. i picked it up digitally this time, as i was living in university dorms and 1) didn't want to deal with the hassle of having it sent to the mailroom and taking days to be sorted 2) didn't want to have to hike all the way out to the closest best buy or gamestop or whatever and pick it up physically (even though we did end up doing that for a friend of mine anyway). i enjoyed story mode, as many gripes as i have with it lore-wise, though again, i don't think it was as strong as octo expansion. multi-player is still fun, though i do think the maps could be better, and i still adore salmon run. i even got the DLC, though it took me a few months to pick it up, as i fell off of 3 for a while due to IRL stress and being in my last year of university. i got it on discount though because i had like $10 in nintendo coins somehow lol.
i don't play super often currently, as i'm currently in the process of finding work and dealing with other IRL responsibilities, but i do still pop on every so often to play salmon run or participate in splatfest.
but yeah! i love splatoon. i hope it continues in all of its fun for years to come.