Splatoon: Nintendo Finally Makes a Shooter, Only Not Really

Nintendo made a shooter! Sort of. Not really.
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Nintendo made a shooter! Sort of. Not really.

It's funny to joke about Nintendo---and here I should say, I really mean Nintendo Nintendo, the core game development team that makes Mario and Zelda Nintendo, not some outside contractor---designing a game in that most popular of Western genres, one that it has studiously ignored until now. And there's no denying that Splatoon is, essentially, a shooter, insofar as you will spend a lot of time firing guns at other players' heads.

But that's not giving Splatoon, to be released Friday on Wii U, enough credit. It's a clever, quite novel action game with the trademark Nintendo stamp of finely polished action and otherworldly design sense---although Nintendo's ongoing war against everyone else's prevailing philosophies of game design does hurt Splatoon, too.

You do score points for taking your opponents out in a 4-on-4 online Splatoon match with a well-placed splatter of ink, the game's non-violent ammo. But you won't win the match that way. The victor of a Splatoon "turf war" is whichever team coats more of the game's map in their color of ink. A lot of the ground will get covered accidentally as you're firing ink rifles and setting off bombs, yes. But you've got to actually try to paint the floor if you want a shot at victory.

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The characters (the first new squadron of franchise characters that Nintendo-Nintendo has created in well over a decade) are squid. Rather, they're fashion-forward teenagers who can transform into squid. As a humanoid, you can fire your weapons; transform into squid mode and you can swim through the ink lines that you just sprayed. Swimming leaves you vulnerable, but it's also faster---and you're invisible when submerged.

The cover-the-map-in-ink conceit certainly makes Splatoon novel among online shooters, but it's this kid-to-squid dynamic that makes its basic action mechanics stand out from the rest. Laying down an ink path and swimming through it is more fun than just walking everywhere, it rewards precision and daring, and it makes the simple act of moving from place to place something that can be accomplished in myriad ways.

Splatoon's presentation has the same degree of polish. The aesthetic feels less Nintendo and more like something Sega would have put out in its glory days, a slightly-edgy Saturday-morning vibe that's also unmistakably Japanese (the game's hub area feels like nothing but Shibuya's shopping street). The music is addictive on its own, like J-pop written by aliens. It's a real shame that this Nintendo division devotes so much of its resources to pumping out increasingly samey Mario iterations, because it's so good when it throws off those shackles.

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Splatting Alone

Since it debuted the game at last year's E3, Nintendo has pushed Splatoon as an online-only competitive game. So I was surprised to find that there was a quite appealing single-player mode here as well. (Is it okay to say that it's what I've spent by far the most time on, so far?)

I imagined the single-player mode would be a series of matches against AI-controlled bots, or something. As it turns out, that's just one small element of the solo adventure. It's actually a series of mostly bespoke challenges that are less about combat and more about traversal. You're using that combination of shooting and swimming to make your way through a variety of enemy-laden obstacle courses that are suspended, like Super Mario Galaxy's planetoids, over an ever-dangerous bottomless pit.

In fact, the whole thing feels like nothing so much as the Super Mario Galaxy sequel we're still waiting for on Wii U. It even has a classic Mario-style hub world in which simply finding the entrances to each level is a challenge in and of itself. It's a bittersweet reminder of the days when not every Mario game's interface had to be idiot-proofed.

The single-player mode is longer than I thought it would be, but still pretty brief---you can tell there wasn't time or resources to create a fully-realized adventure. If you buy the Amiibo figurines for Splatoon, they unlock more single-player challenges, although most of these are remixed versions of existing levels using different weapons. (You'll probably want to buy the Amiibos anyway, since they look pretty great.)

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Splatting With Friends

Like Nintendo's Mario Kart games, Splatoon seems engineered to let crappy players win sometimes. I say this because I won a lot of matches. Then again, I tend to win a lot of matches in these halcyon pre-release periods when it's just a bunch of game reviewers. Once you let the general public in there it's more of a bloodbath. So we'll have to see what happens when Splatoon goes wide. That said, there are some features in there that seem aimed at leveling everything out.

Teams are always randomized. Even if you're playing with Wii U friends (this requires seven of the people on your Wii U friends list to be online and playing Splatoon, so I'm not sure how often that's going to randomly transpire for you), the game mixes up the teams each round. So if you're stuck with people who don't know what they're doing (or if your three teammates were), maybe you'll be paired with the people who won last time, next time.

It's difficult to hurt your team. If you're playing a normal FPS and you keep blowing yourself up, running into chainsaws or generally making a fool of yourself, you're ruining your team's kill-death ratio. In Splatoon, if you run around firing willy-nilly and not doing anything in particular... you're still putting ink on the ground. You're not a negative, just less of a positive. And if you'd rather just avoid confrontation and run around the periphery of the arena spray-painting every corner, you can do that. In fact, once I got the "splat roller"---a giant paint roller that's great for covering tons of territory and terrible for attacking---I've just stuck with it ever since.

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You might think that Splatoon would be a game that would lend itself to team strategy. You've got to keep an eye on the map (helpfully always displayed on the Wii U's GamePad controller, which you're forced to use even though the Wii Remote would be a far better control option for pointing and shooting) to see what areas need to be colored in. Being able to tell your teammates that you're going to go handle one area and that they should break for another, especially in the crucial final seconds, would be helpful.

But Splatoon has no voice chat option, even solely among friends. Nintendo says it's to curtail any possibility of any online abuse. It certainly does, at the expense of preventing any communication whatsoever. Preventing teams from strategizing might be another way of leveling the playing field.

Nintendo has said that it plans to update Splatoon in August, adding the ability for groups of four friends to form a permanent team. Once that happens, smart teams will just set up Skype chats so they can better strategize, and they'll be a force to be reckoned with versus teams that aren't setting up elaborate end-runs around Splatoon's silent treatment.

I'm not sure if Nintendo pushing back the features that will make online battles decidedly less random was simply because it wanted to cut down the feature set to get the game out the door (quite possible, considering Wii U's lack of big games), or as part of a sneaky trick to get more people playing and enjoying themselves with a rule set that makes battle outcomes a little more evened out.

And that may all be for the best. Nintendo has a lot riding on Splatoon, and once players have spent the single-player levels, online multiplayer is all that's left, which means that if the game ends up being dominated by marauding teams of militant strategists, newbies may be turned away and never come back. And if you log on to Splatoon and find no one there to battle, Splatoon is useless.

At this point, we can't say if that's actually going to happen or not. But even if you only want to play the single-player mode and spend a little while messing around online, Splatoon is worth your time if you'd like to see what Nintendo can do on the rare occasion that it lets its imagination run free.