Video Game / Splatoon 3

Back into the ink.

"Listen up! It's going down..."

Splatoon 3 is a Nintendo Switch Third-Person Shooter and the third entry in the Splatoon series, as a direct sequel to Splatoon 2. The game was announced at the end of the February 2021 Nintendo Direct presentation. A Splatfest World Premiere demo was held on August 27, 2022, and the game was released on September 9, 2022.

Five years ago, the Great Zapfish was once again taken back from the Octarians. Despite their villainous second wind and the assistance of a new conspirator, all it took was a single Inkling to foil their plans, leading to many Octolings reintegrating into the surface world. Around the same time, deep beneath the ocean, a separate plot to destroy the planet was upended, thanks to the efforts of one Octoling within the dank and eerie Deepsea Metro. Society at large will never know either of these young heroes' efforts to protect it.

Oh, and Team Chaos won the Final Fest.

After Team Chaos' victory, massive changes were underway in the arid, sun-scorched Splatlands. Development in the city of Splatsville — dubbed the "city of chaos" — accelerated to the point of transforming it into a melting pot that advanced current trends further and paved the way for the birth of new ones. Despite the harsh climate conditions, this has not stopped anyone from enjoying the sport they love the most: spraying paint all over the ground and each other.

In the single-player campaign, Return of the Mammalians, the player must take the role of New Agent 3 as they help the New Squidbeak Splatoon investigate the operations of the Octarian Army in the land of Alterna, as well as figure out what the deal is with this strange Fuzzy Ooze that gives everyone and anything that touches it a shaggy coat of fur.

In addition to the flagship Turf War mode, the ranked modes from prior games — Splat Zones, Tower Control, Rainmaker, and Clam Blitz — all return with some tweaks, under the replacement to Ranked Battle: Anarchy Battle, which is split into two sub-modes with their own map rotations. Anarchy Battle (Series) requires the player to wager their rank points, upon which you are entered into a series of battles; after you win five or lose three (whichever comes first), you are rewarded points back, and whether you made a net gain depends on both how many battles your team won and your personal performance as a player. Meanwhile, Anarchy Battle (Open) functions similarly to the prior iteration of Ranked Battle, allowing you to play a pre-built team with friends or solo and rewarding you points based solely on if your team won or not, and League Battle, letting a duo or team of players compete during a rotation to obtain the Highest Anarchy Power Level, with the difference that it's possible to play it solo this time (without the possibility to calculate Power Levels). This game also features a new mode known as Challenges: functioning like Limited-Time Modes in contemporary games, Challenges are available for specified periods of time and provide variants on the other game modes, such as increasing jump height or covering the screen with a dense fog.

Another returning mode is Salmon Run Next Wave, an expanded version of Splatoon 2's horde mode that features new enemies, locations, and scenarios. The most notable new features of this mode are the Xtrawave, an emergency fourth wave that can randomly occur at the end of a shift where you and your team are beset by a King Salmonid and must work together to take it down; and Big Run, a periodic event wherein Salmonids invade the cities of Splatsville and Inkopolis, forcing you do battle on the game's usual competitive multiplayer stages to force them back to the sea.

Splatoon 3 also introduces a new game mode in Tableturf Battle, a traditional 1v1 trading card game where players emulate Turf Wars by trying to cover more of the playing field by the end of a set number of turns using decks of 15 cards each, of which the game features upwards of 150. Other new features include a seasonal catalog, from which you can get new clothing, cards, titles, and miscellaneous items to decorate your in-game locker and "Splashtag" every three months; and Tricolor Turf Wars, a variant of Turf War done during Splatfests (which now have three teams instead of two) in which four members of a Splatfest team face off against two members each of the other two teams.

Paid Downloadable Content for Splatoon 3 was confirmed in August 2022 during a dedicated Splatoon 3 Direct and further elaborated upon in the February 2023 Nintendo Direct as the Splatoon 3 Expansion Pass, containing two waves of content. Wave 1 features the return of Inkopolis Plaza from the first game and serves as an alternative Hub Level accessible via the train station; it released on February 28, 2023. Wave 2 consists of Splatoon 3: Side Order, a new single-player campaign scheduled to release in Spring 2024; taking place in an alternate timeline where Team Order won Splatoon 2's Final Fest, the mode follows Agent 8 and Pearl, who has, one way or another, transformed into a small drone-like robot. Together they must ascend the Spire of Order, an odd structure that has come to replace Inkopolis Square's Deca Tower, with the aid of the mysterious DJ Dedf1sh.

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Back into the Tropes:

• Scavenged Punk has its own page, shared with the rest of the franchise.

General & Multiplayer (A-D)

• Accidental Truth: During the Nessie vs. Aliens vs. Bigfoot Splatfest results announcement, Shiver remarks that her Nessie sighting was actually fake. Almost right after, Big Man gets breaking news that a new creature has been seen in the Splatlands sea.
  Shiver: "WHAT?! Did I...lie this into existence? I'm even more powerful than I thought!"
• Acronym and Abbreviation Overload: Many of the locker stickers feature abbreviated names. Some of them are obvious enough ("WNQ-IZ" is a pair of winking eyes), some are more obscure ("GGTNA", a fishy sticker that appears at the end of the end of a Grizzco shift — maybe short for "good game tuna"), and some are borderline indecipherable ("BGGFVBZ" is a stock "hello, my name is" sticker with Generic Graffiti on it).
• Action Bomb: The Reefslider is a special that explodes after carrying its user a fair distance forwards.
• Actionized Sequel: Once again, the latest Splatoon installment is faster than the previous game. New movement options, the Squid Roll and Squid Surge, give players more options to traverse the level and act in battle. Special design has reverted to 1's style of individually empowering specials, such as giving players a powerful and long range bazooka, letting them pilot a Mini-Mecha, or allowing them to zip across the map with extendible arms. And map design continues the trend set by 2 of being even smaller, especially with the ones included in the launch version of the game, making confrontation way more likely.
• After the End: As if to remind players Splatoon is set after the end of humanity, the first trailer shows what appears to be the Eiffel Tower upside-down and in the middle of a desert wasteland. The base game's single-player campaign involves exploring the underground world of Alterna, an abandoned, snowbound civilization where humanity met its end and Inklings and Octolings were born.
• All Deserts Have Cacti: This map of the Inkadia and Splatlands region◊ has a single doodle of a cactus in the deserts surrounding the Splatlands. The region is based on Japan, which you can see in it having a mountain named Mt. Nantai, and which doesn't naturally have any cacti.
• Ambiguously Evil: Amusingly, Li'l Judd has started to act quite suspicious, possibly setting up a Kill and Replace scheme on Judd the elder. Sunken Scroll 23 is an analysis Li'l Judd has written of Judd's anatomy, movement patterns, and abilities, which refers to him as "prey". After completing Return of the Mammalians, Li'l Judd is heavily implied to have taken over Grizzco, which former boss Mr. Grizz was using as a front for his world domination scheme; he begins wearing a headset to communicate with workers, and his Tableturf Battle deck consists of Salmon Run-themed cards.
• Americasia: Splatoon 3 continues the blend of Eastern and Western cultures from the past two games. While Splatsville is mostly a Japanese-style city, the "Splatlands" name evokes the American Badlands, and Scorch Gorge features hoodoo-like rock formations similar to those found in the region in real life. One of the victory poses you can unlock through the first catalog involves a dab, which is popular in the United States (and elsewhere in the West) but nearly unknown in Japan; conversely, Shiver takes after a performer of rakugo, a form of comic storytelling that's only well-known in Japan.
• And Your Reward Is Interior Decorating:
  • The seasonal Catalog is loaded with all sorts of locker decoration goodies, many of which are borrowed from a map newly added during that season.
  • Using a weapon enough will reward you with a sticker version of it to use in your locker. Use it even more, and you'll get a holographic version of it.
• An Interior Designer Is You: Players have their own lockers that can be accessed in the lobby's locker room that can be decorated and filled with stickers, books, clothing, magazine cutouts, speakers, statues, fire hydrants and anything else you can think of. The size of your locker depends on your level, with it being upgraded to the largest size once you hit Level 30. You're also able to examine the lockers of anyone you've recently played with as well.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Players can technically skip the Anarchy Splatcast news report whenever they boot up the game by choosing to have the commentary display on a text box while exploring Splatsville. The only portion of the broadcast that is mandatory is whenever major information about in-game events such as Splatfests, Big Runs, and new updates is being shared, which are less bothersome for happening only a few times a month combined.
  • Ammo Knights has been reworked in some ways:
    • Weapon progression is now separate from cosmetic progression. Cash is used at the other shops, while Ammo Knights exclusively takes Sheldon Licenses earned by leveling up.
    • Like with previous games, weapons are gated from the player to help ease them into progression, buying new weapons one at a time. In this case though, it's not a hard gate: if you really, really want a weapon beyond what your current level allows, Sheldon will let you buy it anyway for an increased license cost.
    • If you import data from Splatoon 2, you'll get three Gold Sheldon Licenses after your first battle. Gold Licenses can unlock any weapon regardless of level without the increased cost, and give returning players a way to quickly reacquire their favorite weapons from the previous game.
    • The Chill Season 2022 update adds a feature that lets you repeat Sheldon's description dialogue for a given weapon. Useful if you need a brief overview of how you might use that weapon, and skipped past his description of every weapon you unlocked from him.
  • Like in Splatoon 2, if someone on your team disconnects during a match, the results don't count if your team loses with that handicap. However, now if the disconnect occurs within the first minute of a match, it will end instantly in a "No Contest"; only players who disconnected will eat a loss, and the remaining players aren't forced to play the match with a handicap.
  • The ability to save gear loadouts is no longer restricted to Amiibo and now comes in the form of the Freshest Fits feature. You can save up to five loadouts and customize settings specific to each set such as motion control sensitivity, and this can be done both in-game and through the SplatNet 3 phone app, with the latter also informing you of the total ability points granted by your Freshest Fits. For those that still want to use Amiibo figures, they now provide another five Freshest Fit slots in addition to their exclusive gear.
  • You have the option to change loadouts between Turf War matches if you feel like spicing things up, but sticking with the same squad. The option was originally not present in both Anarchy Battle modes to keep team compositions predictable, but it was changed to allow players to change loadouts between queues in Anarchy Battle (Open) when players didn't like that.
  • The online multiplayer lobby and the Shoal both now boast their own weapons testing ranges, allowing players to more easily practice and experiment with their chosen weapon, or even just whittle away the time between matches inking the floor before the pressure is on.
  • Splatfests now have a "Sneak Peek" objective for the teams to score in, where the team that earns the most Conch Shells per player during the week leading up to the Splatfest weekend gets a healthy score bonus. This enables anyone who can't make it to the Splatfest weekend itself to still be able to contribute in a way by playing.
  • Recon mode now lasts a full hour instead of being limited to the time it'd take for the map to end. This provides way more time to plan strategies on the maps, or go sightseeing there.
  • If an Angle Shooter dart hits the ground, the direction it reflects in will be fairly flat to the ground, even if you're aiming it down as low as you can. This makes it so that the resulting trajectory will be more likely to hit players instead of shooting into the sky where it can't affect anyone.
  • The ranking system in Anarchy Battle (Series) only is structured so that, outside Rank-Up Battles, player performance — measured through the medals you receive at the end of a match — is taken into account. Gold medals represent higher rank point values that will improve your evaluation more than silver medals. While winning is still the largest factor on your rank, if you personally did well, that will mitigate how many rank points you lose. The medals are purely cosmetic in other modes, however.
  • New gear customization options have been added so that you have more freedom with fashion choices without sacrificing viability.
    • First, attending Splatfests for Super Sea Snails is no longer a must-do to increase the star power of gear; buying a duplicate piece of gear from the three gear stores lets you use cash to increase its star power.
    • Next, gear can continue gaining EXP even after all of its available slots are filled; once the bar is filled, you're given a free random ability chunk, allowing you to can continue farming chunks without needing to either swap gears, scrub them, or spending gold or precious Super Sea Snails to reroll abilities.
    • Finally, Murch can now change a gear's main ability, albeit for the hefty cost of 45 ability chunks.
  • In previous games, Turf War was strictly a solo-queue mode; if you wanted to have friends play with you, you would have to queue up first then have them join, which puts them in the queue for the next match, and even then there was no guarantee that those friends would be able to get in and they might end up on the enemy team if they do get in. Now in this game, you can group-queue for Turf War (much like for open Anarchy Battles, open Splatfest Battles, and Salmon Run), and everyone in your group will be put in the same team.
  • Spawner Drones are meant to give players more freedom on rollouts from spawn, but a symptom of this is that there isn't a built-in safe spawn point area players can stand in while shooting away spawncampers. To help reduce this issue, players that launch from their drone instead of superjump gain ink armor for a short period of time, and map design has been tweaked so that spawning players can land on at least one high-ground area that's impossible for enemies to reach without something like a Zipcaster or Inkjet.
  • During a Tableturf Battle match, you can press the L button at any time to view your deck, with cards that you haven't played yet being indicated separately from those you have. Useful if you need to make a play that involves creating space for another card to slot perfectly into, and you need to remember if you have yet to play said card.
  • If decorations or stickers are obtained from the Shell-Out Machine, the game will prioritize giving you items you haven't gotten yet. Not only does this give you a chance to get really expensive items from Hotlantis for a much lower price, it also avoids situations where you just bought something expensive, only to get a much cheaper duplicate of it from the Shell-Out Machine.
  • This game's version of the "do this daily to make significant progress to your Rewards Pass" Sidequest is very lenient compared to contemporary uses of the trope. Other games such as Apex Legends and Deep Rock Galactic ask you to devote multiple 10-20 minute-long play sessions to fill the play per day requirement; Splatoon 3 only requires you to win a single match, and Turf War matches can last as little as 3 minutes. If you're only around for the extrinsic reward, the game won't eat up a significant amount of your time for it.
  • After the season ends, the rewards for completing its Catalog will start showing up in the shops, and the catalog's emotes and banner items get added to the Shell-Out Machine, so picking up the game late or taking an extended break from it won't permanently bar you from getting the goodies from them.
  • Also, any equipment you earned in a current Catalog immediately also starts appearing in the shops, so you can get a head-start on upgrading its tier without needing to spend Super Sea Snails.
  • Starting with Chill Season 2022, you can now reset your Anarchy Battle rank. Useful if you got into a rank that's beyond your skill, since you otherwise can't go back (However, the game can match you up with higher rank players regardless). Also, it's limited to only being used once a season, to reduce abuse from anyone trying to fight in Anarchy Battles where everyone's at a way lower skill level than they are.
  • Also starting with Chill Season 2022, Tricolor Turf War allows players to be on the defending team or attacking team regardless of which side is currently in the lead. This makes it so that, in the worst-case scenarios, being ahead at halftime can never be an Undesirable Prize if the Tricolor map's design puts defense at a disadvantage (and, relatedly, it can't cause Unstable Equilibrium if the opposite happens). It also gives players opportunities to play either defending or attacking regardless of what team they chose at the start, instead of being locked into one or the other by factors they couldn't have predicted.
  • Fresh Season 2023 increases the number of items sold in the gear shops from 6 to 9, making more of the game's wide selection of equipment available.
  • Starting in Fresh Season 2023, a closeout bonus enables you to get extra catalog points during the final week of the update season. Perfect for quickly grinding out the last catalog levels before the season ends proper.
  • The jukebox allows you to press the Y button to preview a selected song, so you can make sure you know what you're going to be playing before purchasing that song to play.
  • The pools system is a quality-of-life feature that allows players to join lobbies of other players who have chosen the same pool keyword as them. Extremely useful for streamers who want to play battles with viewers, as they can now invite other players without needing to send friend requests using this feature.
  • The Goo Tuber has a unique feature of being able to One-Hit Splat opponents using partially-charged shots, whereas other Chargers will require a full charge. The 4.1.0 patch changes it to have a two-stage charge; it works mostly the same as before, only the first stage of the charge indicates when the weapon can splat when it would have been unclear with a partially-filled meter.
• Arc Number: Splatoon 3 unsurprisingly uses three as the number.
  • The game's highlighted weapon, the Tri-Stringer, is a Stringer-class weapon that shoots three ink arrows. Meanwhile, two returning specials, Inkzooka and Inkstrike, were completely revamped into the Trizooka (which shoots three big globs of ink three times) and the Triple Inkstrike (which lets the player hand launch three smaller, but more versatile downpours of ink). See also the returning and revamped Killer Wail, here known as Killer Wail 5.1, which shoots three pairs of lasers, and the Wave Breaker, which generates up to three shockwaves.
  • The new idol group, Deep Cut, is a trio, meaning three idols. Their signature pose also has the two humanoids folding their thumb and pinky back so they're pointing three fingers down.
  • As a result of having three idols, Splatfests are now divided between three teams. Splatfest themselves now have the randomly-occurring 10x and 100x bonus matches accompanied by a third bonus, 333x. They also feature a new mode in the second half called Tricolor Turf War, where all three teams are fielded at the same time.
  • The "Game saved!" symbol on the lower-left-hand corner of the screen takes the shape of a number 3.
  • You can receive up to three accolades at the end of a multiplayer match.
  • Going from Rank 49 to Rank 50 in Tableturf Battle, the highest rank, requires 3,333 experience points.
  • You can read Crusty Sean's travel blog, "Wandercrust", on SplatNet 3, and each of his posts requires you ink enough turf to view them. Whenever they don't cost an even number of points, they'll cost 33,333 points, 333,333 points, etc; the final post of Journey 1 and every second post in Journey 2 are examples of those.
  • The maximum Hazard Level in Salmon Run has been increased from 200% to 333%.
  • This game's main band is a Rock Trio named C-Side; C is the third letter of the English alphabet. One of their songs is named Triple Dip.
  • The first major update for the game brought with it three new main weapons: the Splattershot Nova, Big Swig Roller, and the Snipewriter 5H.
  • The most expensive item in Hotlantis, a decorative Super Sea Snail, costs 333,333 coins.
  • The most expensive item in the Grizzco exchange counter is a golden Grizzco banner that costs 333 gold scales.
• The Artifact: Tricolor Turf War used to be a Comeback Mechanic against the defending team (who used to always be the leading team) to potentially give way to the attacking teams (who were never in the lead); for this reason, Tricolor Turf War can only happen starting from the second day of Splatfests, after the leading team gets announced. But as of Chill Season 2022, any team can play any role in Tricolor regardless of how close that team is to being the victors (the winning team just gets more Clout points for winning defenses while the other teams get more points for winning on the attacking side), yet the restriction of only being able to play that mode after halftime remained.
• Artificial Brilliance: Higher AI levels in Tableturf Battle can be deceptively smart. It knows to rush mid and gain control early in the game, and if you manage to breach into its back lines it'll switch tactics from painting empty spaces on its side of the field to trying to cut you off from the rest of its territory.
• Ascended Extra: Harmony, who acts as the shopkeeper of Hotlantis. She was first seen on the album cover for the band Chirpy Chips/ABXY, making this the first time a band member from the Splatoon universe has appeared in-game.
• Ascended Meme: "Squidbagging", ie. spamming the swim button, is a concept created by the community as an equivalent to teabagging in other games defeated opponents. One particular Japanese commercial for this game prominently features a player squidbagging their opponents constantly, with the wobbly, sloshy sound effect of repeatedly entering swim form amplified in one instance to really set in the taunting effect.
• Attack Drone: The Killer Wail 5.1 creates six speaker drones that follow your character until they fire.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Now that primary abilities can be replaced, Ability Doubler has become this. It's an ability unique to the Splatfest Tee, unavailable on anything else, and made outclassed if the player has grinded to a mild degree. Secondary abilities give 3 points worth of their ability, while primaries give 10 points, so as an example, a shirt with Swim Speed Up in all its slots provides 19 points of it... but an Ability Doubler shirt with 3 secondaries of Swim Speed Up only provides 18 points of it. So if you have the ability chunks for it, replacing Ability Doubler is strictly optimal; you don't even need to be concerned about wasting the chunks just for the limited time event, as it costs a reduced price of 6 chunks to add it and you can refund all of those chunks by replacing them with an ability you don't want as much, so long as you do so before the shirt is taken away at the end of the Splatfest.
  • Barnacle & Dime has a massive, spacious interior. This is impressive, but also, quite a hassle to visit all the shops. Frye may mention that Shiver struggles to visit everything in the mall during Anarchy Splatcasts.
• Background Music Override: Starting with version 5.0.0, "Daybreaker Anthem", a Surprisingly Gentle Song performed by Deep Cut, plays in Splatsville after a Splatfest ends while the results are being tallied. It also overrides the default music rotation in the Battle Lobby. "Maritime Memory" is used for the same purpose in Inkopolis Plaza.
• Back Stab: The Crab Tank provides a high degree of armor for its rider from the front and sides, but is notably exposed from behind and has a sluggish turning speed. You can take out a Crab Tank user near-instantly by getting around them and hitting them from the back before they can react.
• Bad Luck Mitigation Mechanic: Duplicate Tableturf Battle cards you pull from a booster pack will automatically be traded for Bits. Bits can be traded in to get cards of your choice, with rarer cards costing a higher amount of Bits.
• Balance Buff:
  • Ink Armor not returning for Splatoon 3 indirectly buffed many weapons, mainly Mighty Glacier types like Blasters and the Sloshing Machine, which used to have to contend with being much worse in the presence of an enemy who suddenly gained the ability to soak at least one extra hit and getting punished for it.
  • Graphical adjustments have made Ninja Squid even better than in the previous games, as it's now practically impossible to see the ink ripple made by Ninja Squid swimming even up close, much less from a distance. It's now even easier to reposition and surprise foes without being noticed. The swim speed penalty added in Splatoon 2 was also reduced, making it less dependent on Swim Speed Up to be usable and giving players running it more flexibility with ability slots. It's also one of the beneficiaries of Ink Armor's removal, since Ink Armor would reveal allies trying to hide in ink, Ninja Squid or not.
  • The Goo Tuber is a beneficiary of multiple indirect buffs, such as the addition of the Squid Roll and Squid Surge giving it more flexible utility of the weapon's unique high charge-hold ability and a vastly improved sub/special combination in the form of powerful space-control tools, the Torpedo and the Tenta Missiles. It also helps that its main competitors in the Charger class were devalued compared to Splatoon 2 by virtue of having worse kits.
  • In multiplayer, the Splashdown, which was widely regarded to be the worst special in Splatoon 2 in anything higher than casual play, was replaced by the functionally similar, but more useful, Reefslider. Like the Splashdown, the Reefslider is a "panic button" special that generates a massive ink explosion around the user to splat any foes who happen to be in close proximity. Unlike the Splashdown, the Reefslider gives armor once the bike starts moving, making it harder to get smoked instantly, and functions as a Dash Attack that is unimpeded by enemy ink, giving it the ability to break through enemy lines and create openings for allies if used strategically.
• Beam Spam: The Killer Wail 5.1 special conjures six flying speakers that fire narrow beams of splatting sound that tracks whoever is caught within the targeting reticle when first activated.
• Bioluminescence Is Cool: Inkling and Octoling ink has a slight change during Splatfests: it looks like it's glowing vibrantly in the night setting, with the color of the ink turning a paler stint near its edges.
• Bland-Name Product:
  • The Crab-N-Go kiosk has stickers near the cashier that resemble the logos of credit card companies Mastercard and American Express. As usual, the Inkling language is used for any actual company names, rendering them illegible.
  • The Sizzle Season Catalog gives you the opportunity to obtain several old Nintendo Consoles for your locker ordered oldest to newest, but named in humorously different ways. You can pick up the Play & Observe, Intended Entertainment System, Supreme Ness, eight-squared game system, a see-through Game Youth, and a cubic gaming system.
• Breaking Old Trends:
  • Like the previous two, this game has another "outdoors PvP stage with a general urban theme and an overhead bridge dividing it in two" — Eeltail Alley, as opposed to the previous games' Urchin Underpass and The Reef. Unlike the previous two, this stage wasn't the first to be shown in a trailer and first of the stage list; that would be Scorch Gorge.
  • Instead of receiving a major update every month or so, Splatoon 3 works on a "catalog" system similar to the Rewards Pass of other shooters, receiving one major update every three months with a few minor bug fixes and quality-of-life updates in-between.
  • The new idol group, Deep Cut, breaks many trends; they're the first idol trio, the first with a non-humanoid member, the first with a male member, and the first to play an antagonistic role (at first) in the story. Due to their extra member, Splatfests are now between three teams instead of two.
  • The Running Gag of Callie holding her communicator upside-down (resulting in upside-down text) is completely absent.
  • Splatoon 3's villain is unique for being the first mammalian villain, Mr. Grizz.
  • Gnarly Eddie is the first male hat vendor, a position that was always female until now. The sole female vendor is instead Hotlantis' Harmony.
  • Splatoon 3 is the first game in the series to not have any variant weapon kits at launch. Every Splatoon 2 main weapon is featured in the launch roster instead.
  • Unlike 1 and 2, this game doesn't have a variation of a Grenade Spam special weapon. The closest it has is the Super Chump, which fires all its bombs at once instead of as giving as many uses as the duration permits and doesn't shoot an existing grenade type.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: Purchasing the Inkopolis/Side Order bundle DLC gives you a large sum of cash, three EXP-doubling food tickets, and one of every drink ticket. Thankfully, the advantage is limited only to speeding up grinding slightly.
• Build Like an Egyptian: Um'ami Ruins is set in a dig site for some form of Ancient Egypt-style ruins, only squid-ified. A structure is visible in the background that evokes the Temple of Hatshepsut by its "rows of sandstone columns layered on top of one another" architecture.
• The Bus Came Back: Purchasing the DLC gives players access to Inkopolis Plaza, which also brings back many of the Splatoon 1 vendors, who haven't been seen or had a major role since the first game. Annie and Moe, Spyke, and Jelonzo even have updated designs to emphasize how much time has passed.
• Central Theme: Chaos, following the theme established by the victor of the Final Fest in 2:
  • A minor one when customizing your Inkling/Octoling. Before, the game used to ask you what gender your Inkling/Octoling was, and your choice of hair and legwear was dependent on that. Now, it's possible to choose any hairstyle (depending on species) or legwear regardless of which character "style" you choose.
  • Splatsville's setting is not as orderly as Inkopolis Plaza and Inkopolis Square were. The city's design is a jumbled mess for the most part, with the buildings placed wherever they can fit instead of an orderly layout; the shops share the same street for practical reasons, but even then they don't obey any sense of order (Naut Couture is on the second floor of Ammo Knights' building, Crush Station is underground, etc.). Splatsville's architecture is an eclectic blend of styles with no rhyme or reason. There are many paths that aren't really connected neatly, with several dead ends here and there.
  • Spawn Points are removed from the stages. Instead, players have individual spawn drones that can launch them at different spots in their starting area to head to their preferred routes faster.
  • The new swimming techniques added to the game, the Squid Roll and Squid Surge, promote unpredictable and sudden movement to throw your opponents off their game.
  • The tape that covers the screen at the end of a match gets torn apart rather than simply fading out.
  • The user interface in general has an intentionally scuffed, roughshod detailing put into it. The map menu in Splatsville for example is worn on the edges and features a sheet of paper with broken holepunches, while the shop UI's letterboxing is made of a long strip of duct tape.
  • Splatfests do not have two opposing teams, but rather three teams, and during the last day of a Splatfest, the Tricolor Turf War mode unlocks, pitting all three teams against each other on one map. One team of four defends from the center of the map, while two teams of two attack from the traditional spawn areas.
  • The idol group doesn't cleanly fit into a single genre, being a combination of traditional Japanese, Indian, and Brazilian musical styles.
  • Deep Cut doesn't have a set dynamic like the other two idol groups. While the Squid Sisters are a Boke and Tsukkomi Routine, and Off the Hook is a Senpai-Kohai duo with heavy Queer Romance subtext, none of Deep Cut's members follow any sort of pattern—Shiver is a rakugo storyteller, Frye is a Belly Dancer, and Big Man is a hip-hop musician with Brazilian leanings.
  • Ranked Battles are now called "Anarchy Battles", Inkopolis News is replaced with the "Anarchy Splatcast", and Deep Cut's signature song is "Anarchy Rainbow".
  • One recurring character in marketing for the game has the username of "kAyOSs", a fancy way to spell "chaos".
  • One of the new brands added to the game is Emberz, which is said to "reflect the ethos of the chaotic city of Splatsville", referring to their use of multiple disparate types of materials when creating clothes.
  • The main band of this game, C-Side, is a grungy, garage rock trio that rose from the bottom despite having no formal connections in the music industry nor any formal music theory training. Their songs are aggressive and Punk Rock-ish, a genre generally associated with rebellion and anti-establishment beliefs.
• Character Customization: Like previously, the appearance of your Inkling and Octoling can be customized, which then is combined with customization of their offensive and cosmetic equipment. There is now a much wider array of options before you even hit the clothing stores, with the various trailers and social media posts highlighting new hairstyles, eye colors, legwear, and eyebrows. You can also give your Smallfry pet/sidekick a bunch of different hairstyles, which affects its appearances in the hub city and in Return of the Mammalians. Captain 3 is also customised via Cuttlefish's sketchbook in the crater during Hero Mode, which is framed as the new Agent 3 suggesting that his sketch of them looks a bit off and tells him what they really look like.
• Charged Attack:
  • Stringer shots can be charged up to two stages. The first stage charge increases both dart damage and range while narrowing dart spread. The second stage charge further decreases spread, allowing the darts to focus fire.
  • Splatanas can be charged up to fire vertical ink beams that inflict more damage. Holding up on the L Stick while releasing a charge attack causes the user to dash forward a step during the swing, which inflicts a One-Hit Kill if the swing directly connects with a target.
• Chainsaw Good: The Splatana Stamper is a sword fashioned out of a giant rolling stamp. When you charge its stronger attack, it makes a buzzing, whirring noise and the stamp wheel starts spinning rapidly, like a chainsaw.
• Chocolate of Romance: The fifth Splatfest's theme is the best kind of chocolate (dark, milk, or white), and it takes place the weekend just before Valentine's Day.
• Color Motif:
  • This game employs contrasting colors of highlighter fluid yellow and indigo. They're used for the Inklings and Octolings on the cover art and game's icon, color lock mode makes the player yellow and enemies indigo, Deep Cut's Octoling and Inkling members are indigo and yellow, and the loading screen icon alternates between the two colors as well.
  • When using Inkopolis Plaza as your current hub, the usual color motif is replaced with orange and blue for all the loading screens (including when booting up the game), as a fun nod to Splatoon 1.
• Combining Mecha: One comment Big Man can make about Sturgeon Shipyard is that he likes to imagine all the cranes coming together to form a giant robot.
• Commonplace Rare: Some of Hotlantis' wares are hilariously expensive. Things like small posters and graffiti patterns can have costs in the four or five digits. The absolute priciest of this trope is the SQSN-HOLO sticker item, which costs 101,010 coins — and it's merely just a holographic version of the existing SQSN-Y sticker with twenty times the cost.
• Company Cross References:
  • Sometimes when entering Hotlantis you'll find Harmony playing with an Ultra Hand, a grabber toy made by Nintendo way back in the 1960s. Her playing with the toy also serves as the artwork for her Tableturf card.
  • Some of the locker decorations are what look like squid versions of Super Famicom and Nintendo Switch game boxes. Games available include Volley Volley Panic, Octo Kong Country, and Super Squid Collection (based on the Japanese box art of Super Mario All-Stars).
  • One of the many magazines you can buy to decorate your locker at Hotlantis is Nostalgia Power, an Inkling version of Nintendo Power.
  • Once again, the N-ZAP '85 is an equippable weapon in the game, based off the original NES Zapper. Sizzle Season 2023 also introduces the S-BLAST '92, which is based on the Super Scope.
  • The Game & Watch knockoff introduced with Sizzle Season 2023 is specifically based on Donkey Kong Junior's G&W port, bearing the same button layout and cyan-colored shell, only reskinned to be jellyfish-themed instead of monkey-themed.
• Composite Character: Composite Weapon, in this case: the Triple Inkstrike is a combination of the Inkstrike and Bomb Rush. It borrows much of the aesthetic of the former, summoning massive tornadoes of ink at selected locations using missiles, while taking a page of the functionality from the latter, as the missile locations are selected by throwing bombs.
• Confusion Fu: The Super Chump will spam out a crapton of bombs into an area. Said bombs are Crosshair Aware, but the crosshairs show the landing marker an ally's super jump. Seeing all of them at the same time won't trick anyone into trying to spawncamp a landing, but it can smokescreen an actual super jumping teammate's landing.
• Console Cameo:
  • A very non-obvious one: the giant overhead curved screen in the multiplayer lobby has depressions on either side of it for Joy-Cons to slot into and a large USB-C port at the bottom, as if it were a gigantic Nintendo Switch.
  • Starting with the Sizzle Season 2023 update, players can obtain decorations for their locker based on miscellaneous Nintendo systems. This includes the NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, Nintendo GameCube with the Game Boy Player peripheral, Game Boy Color, and a Game & Watch.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Splatoon 3 generally loves to reference Splatoon 1 whenever it's appropriate.
    • The game's specials descend from Splatoon 1's specials, with specials such as Killer Wail 5.1 and Kraken Royale very clearly being send-downs from 1's Killer Wail and Kraken.
    • Relatedly, many of the weapon kits reference Splatoon 1. For two of many examples, the Krak-On Splat Roller has Squid Beakon and Kraken Royale (like the first game's Squid Beakon and Kraken), and the H-3 Nozzlenose D has Splash Wall and Big Bubbler, like 1's Cherry H-3 Nozzlenose (which had Splash Wall and Bubbler).
    • Hammerhead Bridge from the first game is now complete, giving in-universe justification for the layout being drastically different from the Splatoon 1 version, where it was still being built.
    • Front Roe is Squid Squad's remaining members after reassembling with a new bassist, and their style of music sounds distinctly similar to the electronic-rock blend that Squid Squad used.
    • The Reppin' Inkopolis emote gives each weapon type the same win pose it had in the first Splatoon. However, any weapon types that didn't exist in that game just use their regular win animation.
    • Some Hotlantis decorations seem to be box art for the Wii U Gamepad minigames in 1.
  • The NILS Statue, the world-destroying superweapon wrecked by Pearl during the climax of the Octo Expansion, can be seen discarded in the ocean near Hammerhead Bridge if you look to the side of the stage.
  • When hanging around inside the lobby, the player can play tracks found in the original Splatoon and its first sequel.
  • One of the items in the Sizzle Season 2023 catalog is a visor with the Crust Bucket's logo emblazoned on it.
• Contrasting Sequel Setting: The first two games took place in Inkopolis, an ultra-modern urban metropolis. This game takes place in Splatsville, a traditionalistic and more rural city.
• Cool Boat: During Splatfests, Deep Cut parades around Splatsville with a flying, trifurcated boat glowing in their respective teams' colors and decorated to look like a dragon; Shiver gets the head piece, Big Man dances on the body, and the tailfin is reserved for Frye. After halftime, the boat recombines to its full size and becomes a proper stage, with the three dancing together.
• Cool Sword: One of the new weapon classes is the Splatana (which are sword-like, but hardly resemble actual katanas). The base Splatana Wiper is a squeegee-based windshield wiper while the Splatana Stamper, a slower and more powerful version, is a rolling stamper crossed with a chainsaw. They launch ink Sword Beam style attacks and when used ranged act like pistols from other shooters, short-range with moderate but unexceptional damage, and deal extra damage if the actual melee hit also connects. They can be charged which can't be done as often as uncharged attacks, but it increases their damage, enables a mild Dash Attack, and deals a One-Hit Kill if an enemy is hit with a charged melee strike.
• Crippling Overspecialization:
  • The Big Swig Roller is designed to be a painting specialist weapon, sporting a horizontal flick that covers a massive area, a long-range vertical flick, and a wide roll mode that barely uses ink. This comes at a severe cost of kill potential; it's the only Roller weapon in the game that is incapable of One-Hit Splatting with horizontal flicks, and its vertical flick can only instantly splat at point-blank range.
  • The Splattershot Nova struggles with this as well. Like the Big Swig, it's designed to be a painting weapon, with very good ink efficiency, long range, and painting capability, but having a 5-shot kill relegates it to doing nothing but paint, in the same vein as the Aerospray line.
• Crossover: Fresh Season 2023 provides an In-Universe example, and introduces the Z+F fashion brand, which is a collaboration between the Zekko and FireFin brands.
• Dash Attack:
  • Holding forwards while letting go of a charged Splatana attack lets the player do a short dash forward before swinging. Useful if you need to close the distance on someone who is just barely out of your melee range, but using it against someone who is too close will make you whiff, and using the lunge at all delays the actual attack from coming out.
  • The Reefslider rapidly carries its user forwards before exploding.
  • In lieu of being able to One-Hit Kill with its normal jumps, the Kraken Royale instead gets the ability to perform Squid Surges by charging up with ZR. A fully charged Surge will shoot the player forward while resisting knockback from enemy fire, and if it directly hits another player they will be splatted instantly.
• Decomposite Character: The two previous Splatoon games had a special that takes the form of a teammate-buffing protective support ability (Bubbler in 1, Ink Armor in 2). Splatoon 3 splits this into two separate abilities: Big Bubbler and Tacticooler.
  • Big Bubbler takes the form of a protective support ability: it gives its user and immediately-adjacent allies breathing room against most forms of attack by creating a shield. Unlike previous examples though, Big Bubbler isn't a status effect, instead being a stationary object that has to be destroyed or bypassed to affect enemies inside.
  • Tacticooler is the teammate-buffing support ability, throwing a minifridge that gives nearby allies a buff. Unlike previous examples, the buff does nothing to actually protect against attacks, and only affects allies' stats.
• Demoted to Extra: Some special weapons from Splatoon 2 remain present in 3, but in a greatly reduced role:
  • Splashdown is no longer available in multiplayer, now being exclusive to the Story Mode and serving as the default special for the Hero Weapon.
  • The Sting Ray is no longer usable by the player to any degree, only existing in the form of the Stinger Boss Salmonid in Salmon Run.
• Department of Redundancy Department: Some of the in-game Splashtag titles allow players to invoke this, with titles such as "Tableturf Battling Tableturf Battler", "Salmon Run Salmon Runner", "Pro Pro", "Stand-Up Stand-Up Comic", "Story Mode Story Mode Legend", or the extremely rare "Super-Duper Lucky Lucky Duck".
• Deserted Island: The theme of the second Splatfest is what Deep Cut (and what the playerbase) would bring to a deserted island: gear, grub, or games.
• Developer's Foresight: In Splatsville, you cannot challenge any member of Deep Cut to a Tableturf Battle during a Splatfest, with the attendant remarking that they're not available. You can challenge them if you take the train to Inkopolis Plaza, but Agents 1 and 2 will be unavailable there due to performing as the Squid Sisters.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • Stringers are a much more finicky weapon class than they seem at first glance. They ink turf well but fare poorly in close-range combat, with uncharged arrows being slow and weak for splatting opponents and charged shots needing good aim and distance between you and your target to function properly. The weapon class as a whole possesses a much higher learning curve than most other weapons, but played properly, a good Stringer player can become an extremely annoying thorn in opponents' side, as their functional range makes the weapons great at harassing targets from vantage points, they're excellent team players due to their splash damage, and the Subs and Specials afforded to them can be used to displace and disrupt enemies with ease.
  • The S-BLAST '92 has a gimmick where grounded shots have extended range, the projectile travelling just outside the range of the Range Blaster yet still retaining its One-Hit Kill, unlike the Rapid Blaster Pro. The tradeoff is that the S-BLAST's long range mode has the smallest explosion radius of any blaster, so spacing won't be as effective for turning missed shots into hits. Combined with an exploit at its release that disables jumping inaccuracy for the weapon so long as it is shot immediately before jumping, and you have a weapon that encourages quickly blasting at distant enemies and enables doing so while on the move, but requires great aim and disciplined timing to do so.
• Divergent Character Evolution: Well, more Divergent Weapon Evolution. While several returning weapons have been redesigned, some have been redesigned more extensively to set them apart from the base weapon they're an offshoot of, as seen in this Squid Research Lab report. The Tri-Slosher stands out the most by having a complete redesign. Rather than being a circular green bucket divided into 3 wedge shaped partitions, it's now a square shaped blue bucket with 3 rectangular partitions.
• Doomy Dooms of Doom: Claiming an Ultra Signal during a Tricolor Turf War summons a Sprinkler of Doom, a super-sized version of the Sprinkler subweapon, to ink a large portion of the stage in your team's ink color.
• Double Weapon: The Dread Wringer, introduced in Drizzle Season 2023, is a Slosher constructed from a janitorial washbucket and an attached mop wringer. When the user swings, it shoots two sloshes of ink one after another, one from the bucket and one from the wringer. It can't swing as often as most other Sloshers, but the second slosh aids it in hitting a wider area or dealing a ton of damage at once to a single target.
• Down in the Dumps: One of the new levels is Mincemeat Metalworks, a junkyard full of metal bordered by cubes of compacted trash.
• Down the Drain: Undertow Spillway manages to incorporate many sewer level tropes without actually being a sewer itself. It's underground, has an industrial metal-and-concrete aesthetic, and transports water.
• Dramatic Irony: When Hammerhead Bridge comes into rotation, Deep Cut may randomly remark on the statue visible near it. From the point of view of a Splatoon 2 fan, that's the NILS statue, a superweapon which nearly ended marine life society as we know it. From Deep Cut's view, though, it's just some weird statue that rose up from the sea one day which nobody talks about, and has been sitting idly in the sea as boat tours explore it.
• Dualvertisement:
  • The Splatfest in early November 2022 is a tie-in to the release of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, with the three sides being Grass, Fire, and Water, the elemental typings of the starter Pokémon.
  • The May 2023 Splatfest is a tie-in to the release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, with the three sides being the three pieces of the Triforce - Power, Wisdom and Courage. There's even a Triforce-shaped Tricolor Battle arena in Scorch Gorge for this Splatfest.
• Dub Text: The opening dialogue of the Splatfest song "Big Betrayal" features Shiver and Frye realizing that the "Ian BGM" character the Squid Sisters collabed with for "Liquid Sunshine" is actually Big Man, and calling him out for working with another group and not giving them a cut of the money. International promotional materials skim over the fact that Big Man wrote the song, giving the impression that Shiver and Frye are simply holding the Jerkass Ball and trying to control every aspect of his life.

General & Multiplayer (E-Z)

• Easter Egg:
  • As with the other two idol groups, peeking into Deep Cut's studio in first-person for long enough will cause them to wave at you. At the start of the game, you'll get little more than a token nod, but they'll be much happier to see you if you stop by after completing Hero Mode, now that they recognize you as Agent 3, the person who saved the world from getting covered in Fuzzy Ooze.
  • It is actually possible to watch the Splatcast without technically tuning into it; looking into Deep Cut's studio while the Splatcast is still live will show the idols actually acting out the news as though you were watching them normally, even being in sync with the information being displayed in the corner, and are also animated going back to their usual biz of talking to each other once the news are done. They even animate during the part of their Splatcast when they announce stage rotations, which is normally zoomed into Big Man's TV to the point of excluding Shiver and Frye from the camera.
  • The gag with the Squid Sisters greeting you if you peek in their studio returns if you go to Inkopolis Plaza. Like with Deep Cut, they'll just wave at you normally at first, but after beating Return of the Mammalians, they'll give you a friendly "Stay fresh!" gesture instead.
  • If you Super Jump in Mincemeat Metalworks, you might get an angle that reveals the Crust Bucket food truck from the previous game, waiting to be turned into scrap.
• Elemental Absorption: The Ink Vac special generates a cone that absorbs any enemy ink fired into it, but not ink already on the ground. It even sucks up ink out of enemies themselves, having an effect similar to toxic mist, including slowing them down.
• Enemy Mine: Downplayed. Once a Splatfest reaches half-time, Tricolor Battles are unlocked to field all three teams on one map. In this mode, it is a 2v4v2: the team of four spawns near the middle of the map and defends, while the two teams of two spawn near the edges and attack into mid. Both attacking teams benefit as long as the defending team loses the match, and thus are focused on making sure that doesn't happen. But since the team credited for the win gets the bigger share of clout, there is still some incentive for making sure the other group of two isn't the one that accomplishes the task.
• Fake Longevity: While the single-player campaigns avoid it unlike in Splatoon 2, players aiming for 100% Completion are in for a rough time. Getting card sleeves from Tableturf Battle opponents requires beating them on the max difficulty level 30 times, meaning at minimum 450 Tableturf games pre-DLC or 600 post-Wave 1 to get them all (and that's if everything goes in your favor). Some of the items at the Grizzco exchange counter also require an insane amount of Boss Salmonid grinding to purchase - the standout example being the golden Grizzco banner, which is the most expensive item in the shop at a whopping 333 gold scales. And that's not going into the many collectibles for your Splashtag that need several thousand plays or kills of a specific mode/enemy (in Ranked modes and Salmon Run respectively) to unlock. Then there's badges you get for maxing your Level and Grizzco points (at 999 and 9,999,999 respectively). If you're going for 100% Completion, be prepared for a massive time investment of several thousand hours at the very least.
• False Camera Effects: New to Splatoon 3, standing at the edge of the Ship Level Manta Maria causes little drops of sea spray to fall on the camera.
• Four Is Death: One of the locker decorations, a sticker that looks like a squid-shaped skull, costs 44,444 cash to buy from Hotlantis. Another decoration, the "suspicious garbage can", which has a limp octopus tentacle hanging out of its opening, costs the same amount.
• Funny Background Event:
  • In the spawn area of Museum d'Alfonsino and near Flounder Heights' midpoint area, you can spot a jellyfish attempting to enter the main play area, but repeatedly failing when they bonk their head on the glass door.
  • MakoMart has a baby jellyfish stuck inside a box of balls in the out-of-bounds area.
  • One jellyfish is left hanging for dear life from an overhead light fixture on Hammerhead Bridge.
• Furry Reminder: Big Man receives quite a bit of dialogue that plays off the fact that he's a talking manta:
  • One of the dialogues for Salmon Run comment has Big Man say that the idiom "risking your neck" doesn't really work for him, since he doesn't have a neck.
  • In the opening to the Gear vs. Grub vs. Fun Splatfest, when Frye says that you need food to survive out on the ocean, Big Man suggests swimming around with her mouth open, which is how real manta rays catch their prey.
  • During the opener to Chill Season 2022, Big Man wonders if any of the new weapons work with fins.
• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • Leaving the game running for too long could lead to players unable to fire weapons. This was fixed in version 1.1.1.
  • In Version 1.2.0, Rainmaker was updated so that if the player is splatted right at the moment they placed the Rainmaker at the goal, the count will be at 1. However, a glitch occurred where the game was unable to distinguish between checkpoints and the final goal in such a scenario, meaning it would drop the score to 1 when this happened on a checkpoint as well. The game mode was temporarily removed from rotation to fix this.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: The Inkopolis Plaza versions of the lobby and Grizzco do not have unique interiors, sharing the exact same ones as their Splatsville counterparts. This is most noticeable with Inkopolis Plaza's Grizzco location, which is not only depicted as being only having a ground-floor when you approach the building to enter, but leaving to exit clearly showcases the same staircase as the Splatsville location, right down to having the exact same street-level doors.
• Gameplay Grading: After each match, you'll get up to three medals that indicate what you did the most of on your team. These vary from simple tasks (getting the most splats, providing the most Super Jumps to allies, be the biggest distraction to the enemy team) to context-sensitive ones ("Splat Zone Guard" is for splatting the most enemies while controlling the zone, for example). Medals come in two varieties: gold medals that indicate important or difficult tasks, and silver medals, which are generally easier but lower value. They're decently useful to get a quick summary on one's individual performance in any mode, but are gameplay-relevant in Anarchy Battle (Series), where they determine how many rank points you earn from that series.
• Game Within a Game: Tableturf Battle is a card-based puzzle game version of Turf War wherein players utilize paint cards to cover more of the board than their opponent within 12 turns. Each player has a deck of 15 cards each, with there currently being 162 cards overall to collect in the game that represent different weapons, enemies, and characters.
• Gateless Ghetto: Though larger than its equivalents in Splatoon 1 and 2, the main city hub has no connections to the rest of Splatsville. There are areas that should reasonably connect, but they're blocked off with temporary walls (and you can hear construction sounds coming from the one on the east side).
• Gender-Inclusive Writing:
  • The Character Customization screen no longer makes reference to choosing a specific gender, instead asking players to select a "style", analogous to the previous games' gender options and letting the player infer their character's gender identity however they wish. Unlike previous games, hairstyles and legwear options are unrestricted no matter which option is picked. Gendered amiibo outfits have even been split up into two separate pieces of gear.
  • In Return of the Mammalians, Agent 3 and the Captain are both referred to with gender-neutral pronouns. Customizing the Captain is referred to as selecting their "hairstyle" rather than picking their gender.
  • The Splatfest titles of "Fanboy/Fangirl" and "King/Queen" have been swapped out for "Fan" and "Ruler".
• Grappling-Hook Pistol: The Zipcaster special allows players to grapple onto objects and zip across the stage for a short period of time.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • The game is a bit vague about where the lockers are beyond them being in the lobby. The entrance to the locker room are the opaque glass double-doors located behind the capsule machine, and while the windows and doors do clear up when you approach them, they won't start doing this until after you've entered the room for the first time. If you're used to the visual language of video games, you might assume the dark glass means it's an inaccessible area and never even try to approach them.
  • In addition to the 10% scrubbing cost for Splatfest Tees, Murch can now replace a Splatfest Tee's main ability for only 6 ability chunks, which is not outright stated by him in his dialogue for Splatfest Tees. This lets players grind cheap chunks without being forced to use the subpar Ability Doubler.
  • There is an advantage to the Squid Roll that is never stated in-game: it gives armor. Utilizing it effectively takes very precise timing and awareness, but it can help you survive otherwise lethal damage, such as a Carbon Roller's melee splash.
• Gun Twirling: The default post-match victory animation for a Dualie player has them twirl both of their guns around their fingers after performing a couple of somersaults.
• Hero-Tracking Failure: The Killer Wail 5.1 always moves slightly slower than its target. In fact, the target can avoid it by just walking perpendicular to the beams.
• Hot Springs Episode: Brinewater Springs takes place at a large outdoor onsen resort in a mountainous quarter of Splatsville. There are many pools of water throughout the stage that you can spy jellyfish bathing in.
• Human Cannonball: Rather than the spawn points of the first two games, Splatoon 3 gives each player their own spawning drone that shoots them onto the field. Players have temporary armor upon landing, though the maximum spawn distance is far back enough from any of the action that it only matters if the enemy team is spawncamping.
• Hypno Pendulum: Frye finds the back-and-forth motion of the Sturgeon Shipyard pendulum hypnotic. She might fall asleep on live television if the crew discusses that map.
• Impossibly-Compact Folding: The Tacticooler is a minifridge twice the size of an Inkling, pre-loaded with four drinks, each the size of one's leg, but it unfolds from a device with about a quarter of its maximum size.
• In the Hood: During character customization, your Player Character wears a tattered hooded cape (plus glasses and a mask) that conceals their face until those features have been chosen.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler:
  • Fresh Season 2023 adds an alternate series of Tableturf Battle cards for Deep Cut (The Cold-Blooded Bandit - Shiver, The Eel Deal - Frye, and The Hype Manta Storm - Big Man) that depict them as they appear in Return of the Mammalians, specifically their appearance during boss fights. Haven't gotten to that part? Too bad.
  • The ending dialogue for the Power vs. Wisdom vs. Courage Splatfest has Shiver casually mention Deep Cut's side job as thieves, a minor spoiler for Return of the Mammalians. Big Man points out that this is supposed to be a secret to everybody.
• Loot Boxes: This game introduces the Shell-Out Machine, a gachapon machine in the battle lobby that will dispense a randomized capsule that can contain snack tickets, Splashtag backgrounds/titles, locker decorations, gear chunks, Tableturf cards, and emotes. The first pull daily costs 5,000 and every one after costs 30,000, but if you level up your Catalog during a Splatfest or the week preceding it, you can earn Conch Shells that redeem one free pull each.
• Luck Manipulation Mechanic: A new addition to Splatfests is the Festival Shell mechanic. Players who win 10x Splatfest battles will earn Festival Shells, which make them more likely to be queued into a 100x or 333x Splatfest battle.
• The Mall: Sizzle Season 2023 introduces Barnacle & Dime, a giant indoor shopping complex. At the center of the mall is a water fountain that doubles as a Turf War arena.
• Match Cut: The Sizzle Season 2023 trailer features a segment where various stickers fly onto the screen, with one last sticker (a circular one with cycling arrows) coming last and into the center. The camera zooms in on this last sticker, then cuts to a matching ground painting seen at mid in the newest returning map, Humpback Pump Track.
• Męlée ŕ Trois: A new twist in the Splatfests of Splatoon 3 is that in the second half of the event, all three teams face each other at once, with one in the center of the map with four players, while two players each from the other teams starting from the sides. And even though the two teams of two in a Tricolor Turf War have the main objective of making sure the defending team loses, they also have the secondary objective of coming in first place themselves to eke out some extra clout, meaning they can still attack and splat those of the other team to take the overall win.
• Mighty Glacier: The Brush class is characterized by its short range, rapid-but-weak attacks, and fast sliding speed. The Painbrush rejects this philosophy; it has the slowest attacks and sliding speed of all brushes, but makes up for this with a longer-range swing that deals more damage.
• Mini-Mecha: The Crab Tank special is a small walking mecha that the player pilots from the back, and has two different types of cannons.
• Mirror Boss: Clone Jelly, the final unlockable rival in Tableturf Battle, uses an exact copy of the player's deck of cards, contrasting against all other rivals, who have preset decks.
• Mistaken for Exhibit: One comment Big Man can make about Museum D'Alfonsino is his love of the modern art they have there sometimes. Frye asks him if he's not just looking at the Turf War splatters.
• Money Sink:
  • Hotlantis sells cosmetics for your custom locker, some of which can be hilariously expensive. Most items go into five-digit values; some go into six digits.
  • The Star Power Up mechanic raises the number of Ability Slots and EXP gain of your equipment, and both methods of doing this are pricey. Doing so with a shopkeeper besides Murch costs increasingly large sums of cash, while Murch will ask for increasing amounts of limited Super Sea Snail supply. Equipment can have up to 5 stars, with the upgrade from four stars to that maximum being 200,000 cash or 20 Super Sea Snails alone.
  • You can spend card bits on Tableturf cards you already have to upgrade the card art to a different appearance. Serves no in-game advantage, but you can't use card bits for anything else once you obtain all of the cards.
• Monumental Damage: An upended Eiffel Tower appears near the mouth of the crater leading to Alterna.
• More Dakka: The Drizzle Season 2023 update adds the Heavy Edit Splatling. A member of the Splatling weapon class, it naturally dumps bullets out at a typical Splatling rate (that is to say, really quickly). But getting a full charge with the weapon lets it shoot even more rapidly, easily topping every other weapon in the game for the fastest-shooting gun.
• Morton's Fork: The Super Chump Special launches a ton of bombs at an area. Opponents on the receiving end of a Super Chump have to deal with the bombs one way or another, either by popping them (thereby diverting their attention away from their foes), running away (allowing you to push your advantage), or ignoring them (allowing the Chump bombs to ink turf and risking taking chip damage), all situations that can be beneficial if you and your teammates can properly capitalize on its strengths.
• Multishot: Stringer-type weapons are capable of launching three long-range shots of ink at a time. Exaggerated with the Grizzco Stringer, which fires nine shots.
• Mutual Kill: To demonstrate the unique mechanic of the S-BLAST '92, the Sizzle Season 2023 trailer shows two players firing at each other with a jump shot (which has reduced range and does not hit each other), then with a standing shot (which has extended range and wipes both of them out).
• Mythology Gag: Tucked in a corner of Splatsville (all the way to the right from the starting point), you can find what appears to be an issue◊ of the CoroCoro manga, with Gloves front and center on the cover.
• Nerf:
  • Main Power Up was removed from the game after being a rather controversial late-stage addition in Splatoon 2. Among other things, this heavily nerfs weapons that were extremely dependent on the ability to be viable, such as the Bamboozler 14 Mk 1, which could use MPU to effectively One-Hit Kill enemies^* Main Power Up is capped so that it can't decrease the shots to kill, so the Bamboozler would be capped at 99.9% damage... which could then easily finish off the opponent with one shot anyway thanks to painting the ground around them to deal that last bit of damage but can no longer do so in Splatoon 3.
  • Bomb Defense Up DX was also rolled back, replaced by Sub Resistance Up. This essentially removes the damage resistance against Specials that Bomb Defense Up DX provided, forcing players to be more wary about stray hits and splash damage once again.
  • The roller class no longer has a rolling hitbox when falling. They must properly land and start moving again to get the hitbox back.
  • Tenta Missiles now hover in the air above the target destination for a brief moment before making impact, decreasing their effective impact speed. Its homing properties were also adjusted so that it now only hits the area where the target was when the Tenta Missiles were fired, rather than tracking them. Version 2.0.0 also added a cooldown period after initiating the special before the user can start building their special meter again.
  • The Ultra Stamp's One-Hit Kill hitbox was decreased from the previous game; combined with its awkward handling, it's a significantly harder weapon to pressure with than before.
  • Many of the Special Weapons in Splatoon 3 are retools of ones from the original Splatoon, all significantly toned down due to how notoriously overpowered they were in Splatoon:
    • The Triple Inkstrike summons big tornados like the Inkstrike, this time three at once; however, the Inkstrike markers are now thrown like grenades, unlike the original Inkstrike which could target anywhere on the stage, and their individual coverage and duration are significantly reduced.
    • The Trizooka shoots up to three large, explosive globs of ink instead of the Inkzooka's mini-ink tornadoes, which could be shot any number of times until the special timed out. The hitboxes are also smaller and it no longer paints a trail while flying, limiting its utility for getting splats to long range.
    • The Killer Wail 5.1 summons six small homing beams instead of one massive, powerful (non-homing) laser, preventing it from being used to completely lock out an area for its duration. Even when targeting foes, the automatic tracking makes it vulnerable to being predicted and manipulated, limiting its use for splatting and making it more of a harassment tool to limit enemy movement while you do something else.
    • The Big Bubbler summons a massive shield that covers a large area around where it's activated. However, unlike the Bubbler, which encased all nearby allies and protected them from all damage for its duration, the Big Bubbler's shield is limited to a sphere directly underneath a stationary flying drone, which can be destroyed with enough firepower, pierced with specials like the Killer Wail 5.1, or simply entered by an enemy player. Its only advantage over the Bubbler is it also doubles as an infinite, though temporary, Squid Beakon.
    • Like the Echolocator, the Wave Breaker is a massive area-of-effect Special that reveals enemy locations. Unlike the Echolocator, the Wave Breaker has a finite range instead of a global effect, it can be negated by jumping over the shockwaves or destroying the Wave Breaker itself, and users can't farm a second Special while the first is active.
    • The Kraken Royale takes longer to activate than the Kraken, leaves the user vulnerable when it ends, and its jump attack takes two hits to splat enemies, compared to the original Kraken's One-Hit Kill, which now requires a charged Dash Attack. It also is unaffected by Swim Speed Up, so you can't make it go faster. Overall, this makes the Kraken Royale less of a guaranteed escape option and gives enemies a better chance of avoiding and punishing it.
    • The Super Chump has a similar function to a Bomb Rush/Launcher (specifically the Suction Bomb variant), but scatters all of its explosives at once around a wide area and heavily telegraphs where they'll land. The bombs themselves are also significantly weaker, with a fuse time longer than a Suction Bomb while having damage comparable to the weak Burst Bomb, and can be attacked to negate their threat. This reduces both specials' notorious coverage capability and ability to singlehandedly lock down certain parts of the stage while giving it new use as a Confusion Fu distraction tactic.
  • A number of Splatoon 2's more oppressive specials, including the Splashdown (outside of Hero Mode), Sting Ray, Ink Armor, and Baller, were removed in Splatoon 3. Weapons that had them were instead given the game's new specials, which are on the whole considerably more balanced.
• Nerf Arm: While they looked the part of toy foam dart guns in previous games, the Rapid Blaster and Rapid Blaster Pro have slight redesigns that make this especially apparent: they now have orange-tipped barrels to indicate it.
• Ninja: The Zipcaster special plays into ninja tropes by concealing a user in a full-body ink costume and giving them extreme mobility.
• Non-Standard Character Design:
  • Various Inklings, Octolings, and Splatsville inhabitants take on a cute Super-Deformed appearance on Tableturf cards... except for the Inklings and Octolings on the cards that represent brands, which clash against the other Inkling and Octoling Tableturf art by being quite obviously just renders of the normal Inkling and Octoling character models.
  • While most Salmonids use their in-game models on their Tableturf Battle cards, the Smallfry, Cohozuna, and Horrorboros use the same kind of cartoonish drawn artwork as most named characters.
• Noodle Implements: When discussing Mincemeat Metalworks, Shiver may remind Frye and Big Man about the cars that are impaled on I-beams there. Big Man asks if she has something planned for them. Shiver has no further comment.
• No Sidepaths, No Exploration, No Freedom: Many of the new or heavily-reworked stages in this game lack flank routes that have been in previous games' stages. Brinewater Springs, for example, only has the singular route up the slope for players that are trying to push deeper into the enemy base, while Undertow Spillway has no alternate routes through its narrow mid. Among the ones that do have multiple approach options, one of them will generally be really weak, such as with Scorch Gorge's grate bridge on its non-Turf War, non-Splat Zones layout, which doesn't enable the use of the faster swim form and leaves users vulnerable to attack. This design direction is acknowledged in one of Deep Cut's Splatcasts:
  Frye: "I like battling on Hammerhead Bridge 'cause it's a no-brainer. Just charge ahead!"
• Nostalgia Level: Inkopolis Plaza is the focus of Expansion Pass Wave 1, with the Hub Level from the first game making a return; right down to the cutscene that plays when you enter it for the first time being a shot-for-shot remake of Splatoon 1's opening. This not only includes the return of a number of previous characters, but the Plaza is also host to Splatfest concerts by the Squid Sisters as well, complete with a remix of "City of Color".
• Not the Intended Use: While using the Zipcaster, the point of activation becomes the location allies will Super Jump to if they do it to the Zipcaster user. This can be exploited by the Zipcaster user by initiating the Special at a point of interest before running far away enough to where enemies can't splat them. This turns the Zipcaster origin point into a Squid Beakon or Big Bubbler jump location that is well and truly invulnerable, which — with some coordination — can be used to dunk a Power Clam into the enemy basket in Clam Blitz.
• Obvious Rule Patch:
  • This game introduces a Rewards Pass through which players can earn gear by leveling up their catalog. You can't order the gear through Murch or Spyke finding other players' equipment, since that would defeat the whole purpose of the pass.
  • Checkpoints were added to Rainmaker in this game, which are designed to stop aggressive teams from just rushing the goalpoint while an unprepared opposing team is unable to do anything about it.
  • You can cast a Big Bubbler while standing on the Tower in Tower Control and it will follow, but its duration will be cut by roughly half, so you don't get 14+ seconds of free Tower riding. Similarly, the 3.1.0 patch increased the knockback that Kraken Royale gets while standing on the Tower, preventing it from sitting on the objective and getting points for free.
  • The Zipcaster is incapable of throwing Power Clams. Because that Special enables unprecedented mobility that nothing else can reasonably pursue, if there weren't a rule specifically preventing Zipcaster from throwing Clams, the Special would trivialize Clam Blitz by taking the Power Clam and rushing straight to the enemy goal with no opportunity for them to stop it.
  • In version 2.0.0, the damage of the Ink Vac and Reefslider were significantly increased in order to guarantee a One-Hit Kill even if opponents try to parry it with a Squid Roll.
  • Also in version 2.0.0, a cooldown was added to the Tenta Missiles after firing them, during which the user can't refill the special gauge. This was to address complaints about it being easily-spammable with the right weapon and abilities, or if multiple players on the same team are able to use them.
• Old Save Bonus: If you have Splatoon 2 save data, you can choose to import it when starting a new Splatoon 3 file. Doing so instantly unlocks Anarchy Battles, sets your Anarchy Battle Rank to B-, allows you to skip the Salmon Run tutorial, and carries over some of your Salmon Run rank to the new system. You also get 3 Golden Sheldon Licenses, which can be used to purchase any weapon from Sheldon even if you do not meet the level requirement to buy it. If you purchased the Octo Expansion, the game will also carry over your chosen design for Agent 3, as long as you've reached the point where you customize Agent 3's appearance. amiibo figures will also immediately give you all their cosmetic rewards if you used them at least once in Splatoon 2.
• Once per Episode: The now-traditional Love vs. Money Splatfest returned for a third round in August 2023, this time joined by Fame to bring the team count up to three.
• One-Hit Kill: A thrown Ultra Stamp will deal roughly 660 HP worth of damage to a Crab Tank (a Special with 500 HP armor) on a direct hit, breaking it instantly.
• Out of Focus:
  • Crusty Sean is not present in-game, due to going on a bike tour.^note The role of the food stand is taken over by a generic goldfish employee, and Shrimp Kicks in Inkopolis Plaza is instead run by Fred Crumbs. However, he has a blog called "Wandercrust" that can be seen on SplatNet 3, and points you earn in-game via inking turf can be donated to the Wandercrust blog to support Sean; donating enough will have him send you exclusive clothing items.
  • Pearl and Marina are off on a world tour for the base campaign, so Sunken Scrolls aside, you'll only see them in person if you scan their amiibo. They do provide the vocals for Damp Socks' tracks in multiplayer matches, however, and the bus comes back in time for the Side Order DLC.
• Paranormal Episode: The sixth Splatfest uses this as a theme. It pits Bigfoot, Nessie, and Aliens together and asks players which one is real. Shiver, Frye, and Big Man recount their creature sightings:
  • Shiver tells a tale of seeing "a long, thin THING slithering out from the water" after coming off of work. That perfectly fits the description of Horrorboros, which is long, thin, lives in the sea, and only appears in Xtrawaves at the end of Grizzco shifts (which Deep Cut is known to work at sometimes).
  • Frye goes over her memory of seeing a flying, metal UFO near the crater. She also specifically outlines that it had "fierce-looking fists", which indicates that it was DJ Octavio's mecha, which is also flying, made of metal, encountered in the crater, and has enormous fists.
  • Big Man's story is the vaguest, with him having gone skiing, locating a giant footprint, and hearing gossip from others nearby about "a big fuzzy shadow". Being giant and covered in fur perfectly describes Mr. Grizz, an utterly massive bear covered with a dark brown fuzz.
• Photo Mode:
  • While in Splatsville, Alterna, or exploring a map during Recon, you can press the minus button to activate this mode. Using the Shel-Drone as a camera, you can take pictures of yourself from any angle, set filters, and enable a delay to give yourself time to move into position before the camera fires. All photos taken can be put in your locker, but sadly won't appear for other players viewing your locker from their room.
  • If you win a 100x or 333x battle during Splatfests, as a reward you'll be allowed to enter a special photo mode with the squad you won the battle with. Visiting the Splatfest booth enables you to take a photo with your squad and your shared team's idol from the stage they dance on.
• Pinball Projectile: The Angle Shooter is a weaponized highlight marker that bounces off any walls or floors that it hits. It also leaves a marking trail in its wake that tags any enemy that collides with it, marking them for a few seconds.
• Player Nudge: Listening to the Anarchy Splatcasts can give a hot tip on how to play the various multiplayer stages. On MakoMart for example, Shiver stresses the importance of keeping the high ground on the produce boxes near the midpoint.
• Play Every Day:
  • Your first victory of the day (whether in Turf War, Anarchy Battle, or Salmon Run) gives you a huge 7,500 experience point bonus for both your character and catalog level. The Catalog's maximum level is 100 and sticks around for three months, so if you want every reward, the most time-efficient method is by snagging the victory bonus and doing a couple more games to fill up the rest of your Catalog tracker for that day.
  • The Shell-Out Machine normally costs 30,000 G or one Conch Shell to use, but your first draw of the day costs only 5,000.
• Power Echoes: While rotating a card in Tableturf Battle to be used as a Special Attack, the sounds made when rotating the card gain an echo effect.
• Power-Up Food:
  • The Tacticooler special puts down a soda can-shaped standing beverage cooler, which gives drinks to you and any teammates near it that grants numerous temporary buffs, which includes increased swimming and running speed. On top of that, if you and/or the others got splatted while still under the buffs, their respawn time lasts only a second. Special Power Up abilities increase the effect's duration.
  • The lobby has a food stand that acts like Crusty Sean's food truck from 2, allowing you to trade tickets to get Coin, EXP, and skill roll-increasing buffs. There are two new items that double the entire team's XP or Coin gain.
• Product Displacement: The Toejamz shoe type made by the in-universe manufacturer Z+F are evidently just a spin on the real-world shoe brand of Crocs, down to their hole-dotted toe caps holding decorations on them.
• Product Placement:
  • A number of the items sold at Hotlantis, such as the "squid cushions" and "octo cellie charm", are based on real pieces of tie-in merchandise sold at Nintendo's Tokyo store.
  • Inkopolis Illustrated is an Inkling language-ified version of the real-world HaikaraWalker artbook based on Splatoon 2, which itself was a Defictionalized version of one of the game's magazines.
• Punctuation Shaker: Remove the apostrophe from Um'ami Ruins, and you get "umami", one of the five basic tastes.
• Punny Name:
  • In the Japanese version, Splatsville is known as "Bankara-Gai". This is a three-way pun on "Bankara" (a Meiji-era term which is the opposite of "high-collar"), "Color" (referring to the constant squid ink theme throughout the series), and "Bunker" (the city is built on the ruins of Alterna, a giant underground bunker).
  • The shoe shop in this game is dubbed Crush Station. Sounds like an apt name for the Lovable Jock employed there, but saying the location's name quickly puns it into "crustacean", referring to the kind of animal said employee is.
  • The Snipewriter 5H, a Sniper Rifle pencil, is a triple pun: combining "snipe", "typewriter", and 5H (a pencil hardness category).
  • The Super Chump is a pun on Super Jump, which it mimicks, and the word "chump", referencing the Confusion Fu nature of it.
• Rare Random Drop: The Shell-Out Machine has a chance to dispense sparkling capsules, which contain much rarer and more valuable prizes than usual, such as rare cosmetics or 10 each of every Ability Chunk in the game. Each Catalog season has a designated rare title and rare Splashtag banner, which have a drop rate of 0.6% and 0.1% respectively. Some players were not enthused to discover that their specific RNG seed on the Shell-Out Machine made getting the gold capsules effectively impossible, with some players having their drops buried 1,000+ draws deep.
• Recurring Riff: In the Inkopolis Plaza hub, the train once again plays a rendition of "Calamari Inkantation" when approaching and exiting the station. The jingle gets replaced by "Clickbait" during Big Runs.
• Recycled Lyrics: From the energetic Splatfest song, Anarchy Rainbow, its chorus' first line is borrowed at the 3:20 mark of Daybreaker Anthem, a more sober song that plays immediately after Splatfests when the energy winds down into catharsis.
• Red Baron: Each player has a customizable title displayed alongside their name in multiplayer, which shows up at the beginning of a match and whenever they splat you.
• Respawn Point: Once again, death isn't much of a concern thanks to characters being synced up to respawn points. The respawn points seen in the 4v4 multiplayer modes have been changed, with the static, grounded spawn point that was shared by an entire team now being replaced with individual spawning drones that allow the player to select where in their home base they want to land, giving them temporary invincibility in the process. The Scorch Gorge stage even has the old spawn points covered with tarps, as opposed to the retired devices being removed.
• Rewards Pass: Besides the usual daily rotations of shop items, Splatoon 3 introduces catalogs, the game's version of this. Catalogs contain special time-limited items, poses, and tags that you can earn from Hotlantis by increasing your Catalog Level. Each catalog goes up to Level 100 and lasts for three months before being replaced by a new one with its own bevy of rewards. If you manage to reach Level 100 before season's end, Harmony will give you bonus Catalogs to use until then that give a Mystery Box every ten levels. Raising your catalog level during a Splatfest period also rewards you conch shells to use with the Shell-Out capsule vending machine, with experience gain for catalog levels also increased by 20%.
• Riding the Bomb: The Reefslider special has the user mount a rocket-propelled, inflatable shark pool toy before detonating it after a short ride.
• Rock–Paper–Scissors: This was the theme of the World Premiere Splatfest demo, with Shiver on Team Rock, Frye on Team Paper, and Big Man on Team Scissors.
• Rooftop Confrontation: Crableg Capital is a multiplayer battle stage set on an under-construction skyscraper. Towering cranes loom over players as they duke it out on the rooftop's scaffolding, taking advantage of the various building materials left around as cover.
• Ruder and Cruder: While Splatoon 3 still isn't vulgar, the addition of the Ink Vac Special allows DJ Octavio and Sheldon to crack some jokes about how it "sucks," which may be a bit harsher than expected from the series.
• Scenery Gorn: The barren wasteland that is the Splatlands — a harsh desert littered with metal scraps and rusting train cars. Sitting just outside the entrance to the Crater is a long-abandoned Eiffel Tower, overturned and left to time.
• Scenery Porn:
  • Splatsville is easily the most ambitious version of the Hub World thus far; not only is it big enough to fit Inkopolis Plaza and Inkopolis Square inside it quite handily, it manages to blow them out of the water in terms of fine details, like with the row of incidental shops opposite the gear vendors, the overhead walkways above the parkette behind Grizzco, or the small alleyway connecting the two that becomes full of food vendors come Splatfests.
  • Barnacle & Dime has an insane amount of detail included in the surrounding shopping mall area. You can see bookstores, clothing stores (of various fashions too), restaurants, bathrooms, and tech shops from the main arena.
• Sequel Non-Entity:
  • Agents 4 and 8, the main protagonists of Splatoon 2's Hero Mode and Octo Expansion campaigns, respectively, make no appearance whatsoever and are never mentioned, not even in the Sunken Scrolls.
  • Off the Hook would eventually get their time to shine in Side Order, but their near-complete absence from the base game is still striking considering the amount of Character Focus they got in Splatoon 2. Besides some voice-only cameos in Damp Socks's songs, a handful of locker decorations, and one Sunken Scroll to quickly explain why they aren't around, nobody ever mentions them (not even Callie, Marie, or Cuttlefish, who they're supposedly friends with).
  • While the Inkopolis Plaza DLC brought back the absent shopkeepers Annie and Jelonzo, the ones from Splatoon 2 (Bisk, Jelfonzo, and Flo) are still AWOL.
• Shifting Sand Land: Splatsville is located in the middle of a desert known as the Splatlands. Two of the multiplayer levels added in this game take place in that outer desert: Scorch Gorge, a newly built arena made of cardboard taped to sheet metal and surrounded by hoodoo-shaped rock formations, and Um'ami Ruins, an ancient Egyptian-like ruins that may have once been a Turf War battle site.
• Shout-Out:
  • One of the user tags used in several of the English game trailers is "Hirooooo," seemingly a shout-out to Mobile Suit Gundam Wing's Relena Peacecraft who would often draw out protagonist Heero Yui's name when calling to him.
  • The greeting used by the Squid Research Lab in this trailer for the game nearly word-for-word references the infamous "How do you do, fellow kids?" line from 30 Rock.
  • One of the locker room decorations from the first season's catalog is a figurine of a red and silver-costumed tokusatsu hero named Ultra Squid.
  • Another locker room decoration appears to be a squid-ified version of DanceDanceRevolution, bearing squid-shaped neon arrows it uses for its rhythm gameplay.
  • The "You're Welcome" emote heavily resembles Frieza's iconic bow from Dragon Ball Z, complete with the character's left foot at the front.
    • The See-an-Enemy HUD is a gear item that resembles a Scouter from Dragon Ball Z.
  • The Astro Wear gear item, being an orange suit with thick black gloves, a metal flak vest, and a chest panel, resembles an X-Wing pilot's flight suit.
  • The "Backflip Atcha" emote has the player strike a pose that resembles Akuma's Raging Demon from Street Fighter.
  • The Sizzle Season trailer features the Windmill Whip emote, where your character will strike the original Kamen Rider's signature pose at the end; the arm windmilling prior to it is meant to evoke the image of his belt spinning its fan to start the transformation.
  • The Retro Future Suit has Tron Lines that change based on your team ink, which fittingly resembles the general aesthetics of '’TRON''. Its default color of light neon green also makes it resemble Futaba Sakura's Oracle Phantom Thief outfit, who has had plenty of memes and comparisons to the default female orange Inkling.
• Sliding Scale of Cooperation vs. Competition: Tricolor Turf War features dynamic alliances. Three teams drop into the match, with two teams of two attackers and one team of four defenders. Since they're outnumbered and generally spawn further away from the middle, the two attacking teams will want to cooperate to splat the defenders. If defenders lose, both attacker teams win, but the one with the most turf covered will get a bonus, so if the defenders are dispatched then attackers are incentivized to clash and attempt for that bonus until the defense forces squabbling attackers to unite again.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Shipshape Cargo Co. is a multiplayer stage set in an arctic ocean, with glaciers and cold water surrounding the main play area beneath an offshore oil platform. The jellyfish here keep warm by slurping hot instant noodles and wearing insulated parkas, as they watch Inklings and Octolings duke it out in various ink-based sports.
• Spin to Deflect Stuff: One of the new features Splatoon 3 adds is the Squid Roll: while swimming, players can roll and change direction by tilting their analog stick in a direction at least 90 degrees away and pressing the jump button. This allows them to avoid some amount of damage if hit while rolling.
• The Straight and Arrow Path: One of the new weapon classes is the Stringer, a series of bows that can shoot three jets of ink at once. They come in long, the Tri-Stringer, and shortbow, the REEF-LUX 450. The Tri-Stringer leaves behind explosive darts that gives it more pressure, as well as no aiming laser, over chargers. The REEF-LUX 450 is shorter range with no explosive payload but a faster charge, shoots more rapidly, and can charge hold while swimming like the Nautilus and most unscoped Chargers. Both versions can score a one hit splat if all three projectiles make their target.
• Support Party Member: This is the theme of Chill Season 2022's new main weapons. All of them are designed less to fight enemies head-on, instead providing some utility for allies.
  • The Splattershot Nova has long painting range and high ink efficiency, but low damage and poor accuracy compared to other weapons in its range class. Its sub weapon is Point Sensor to identify enemy locations for the user's team, and its special is Killer Wail 5.1, which it can farm and use to force enemies to move from a distance.
  • The Big Swig Roller rapidly paints a ton of area with its horizontal swings and has amazing ink efficiency when using its ultra-wide roll, but is the only Roller weapon that is incapable of dealing a One-Hit Kill with its faster horizontal swings. It has a Splash Wall to give teammates cover, and can further protect them with Ink Vac to suck up enemy projectiles.
  • The Snipewriter 5H is a semi-automatic sniper rifle that loads five weak shots when it charges, which won't One-Hit Kill enemies but can weaken them for another ally to follow up or be used to rapidly cover a space in paint. It has the Sprinkler to paint the floor even faster, and the Tacticooler to give buffs to allies.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Out of all the special weapons in this game, the Kraken Royale is by far the most blatant example of this. Though it is technically a separate special from the original Kraken from Splatoon 1, it otherwise functions almost identically, with your Inkling or Octoling transforming into a souped-up swim form that can brute force its way through enemy fire.
• Sword Beam: One of the new weapon classes, Splatanas, are effectively swords that can fire a horizontal wave of ink forward when swung. This allows for a decent amount of range, and it's also capable of a charged attack that makes the wave vertical.
• Sword Plant: The default post-match victory animation for a Splatana player has them jam their weapon in the ground to lean on it. This is despite the Splatana Wiper and Stamper both having blunt tips.
• Temporary Online Content: Splatfests fill this role as usual, but a new gamemode known as Challenges have been added to the game as of Sizzle Season 2023. Available for 2-hour time slots and filling a similar role to "Limited Time Modes" in contemporary games, they cause new conditions to happen in the stages — such as creating Fog of War, limiting everyone's weapon selection to Trizooka specials only, and drastically increasing the jump height.
• Team Shot: Happens at the end of every multiplayer match to show off the victors' emotes. If it was a 100x or 333x Splatfest match, the victors disregard whatever emotes were selected to do a coordinated and much more badass pose instead.
• Theme and Variations: The main theme of this game, Clickbait, basically boils down to two specific melodies repeated in various keys and with different instruments until the song ends.
• Time Skip: Set five years after the events of the previous game's single-player campaigns and three years after the events of the Splatpocalypse. The former is the real-life amount of time between releases, while the latter is the real-life time between this game's release and the previous game's Final Fest.
• Toilet Humor: Stick around the portable toilet in the corner of Splatsville near the construction area, and you'll hear an Octoling groaning in distress, using the same lines that you'd hear when one gets splatted in multiplayer. Someone's not having a fun time, it seems.
• Total Party Kill: While this is a frequent occurrence in all of the game's multiplayer modes thanks to the Rocket-Tag Gameplay nature of combat, Splatoon 3 now announces these to all players in Turf Wars and Anarchy Battles with a large "WIPEOUT!" message to make it clear that one of the teams will be spending the next several seconds (or less, depending on abilities and Tacticooler buffs) going completely uncontested for the objective. White text means the opposing team was wiped, while black text is for your team.
• Training Stage: In addition to the Splatsville branch of Ammo Knights having a testing range in their basement, the lobby in Splatoon 3 is now a physical space that includes one for use while queuing for a match. The lobby testing range features indestructible giant targets, as well as a Copy Bot who, when turned on, will fire when you fire and throw a splat bomb when you use a sub to help test gear effects. Grizzco is a physical location now as well, boasting its own testing range where in addition to the regular weapons-testing with the current rotation's arsenal, you can practice throwing eggs over enemies into the basket.
• Unstable Equilibrium: During a Tricolor Turf War, if the defending team manages to keep both of the attacking teams from claiming an Ultra Signal for the entire match, they stand a good chance of winning the round, considering their number advantage. But if even one of their opponents can sneak through and grab a Signal, it will summon a Sprinkler of Doom that inks a huge area of turf in their team's color for the rest of the battle. If this happens early enough, it will take all of the defending team's coordination and skill to clutch out a victory, because they'll have to focus on both keeping the attacking teams away from the center and inking the turf the Sprinkler of Doom covers, while the attackers only have to push through to the Ultra Signal.
• Variable Mix: During the first half of a Splatfest, Shiver, Frye, and Big Man ride through Splatsville Plaza on floating platforms. Each one is playing their own variation of "Anarchy Poisons", which fade in and out depending on who you're closest to. In the second half, they join together on one stage, letting you hear "Anarchy Rainbow", a medley of their individual performances.
• Video Game Perversity Potential: The Splashtag's title system is somewhat limited — you can choose from an "adjective" part and a "noun" part — but some players still like using them to create inappropriate phrases. The noun "Head" is almost never used except to make Double Entendres.
• Violation of Common Sense: One way for a high fire rate weapon to counter an Ink Vac user is to run up in front of them and start shooting. It seems counterintuitive to do so, given what exactly the Ink Vac does, but this serves two purposes. The first is that, if the Vac is being used to protect an enemy, filling up the Vac faster means that enemy's being protected for less time. The second is that there is a brief moment between the gauge maxing out and the actual attack where the player charges up before firing the explosive shot, which is enough time to splat them while they're standing there helpless. Even beyond those reasons, it'll charge up a power shot regardless of if it's fed ink or not, so you might as well shoot at it to get it over with faster.
• Visual Pun: New players have a default banner with a yellow-and-green star-shaped character with googly eyes on them. This is a reference to the Shoshinsha mark, a sticker that new drivers in Japan must apply to their cars and is generally associated with inexperience in something.
• Wall Jump: You can swim up inked walls in your color like normal, but this game also allows you to Squid Roll off of them, invoking this trope. Squid Rolling off of walls gives you more armored time than rolling off of the floor, and gives you some level of unpredictability if an opponent starts shooting you while you're trying to climb.
• Weapons That Suck: The Ink Vac special sucks up enemy shots and fires them back with a powerful blast.
• Wham Shot: The announcement for the one year anniversary Splatfest seems normal, with Deep Cut doing their usual banter, but before they move to the stages, Shiver notices the camera is still running and upon questioning this, the studio TV changes to show the Big Run announcement logo, marking the first time in the game's history that a Splatfest and a Big Run take place during the same month.
• You Have Researched Breathing: You can give your character different victory emotes, but only if you reach certain catalog levels. What's stranger is that you can do most of these poses already when taking pictures with amiibo characters.

Return of the Mammalians

Discover the secrets of Alterna...

• 11th-Hour Ranger: DJ Octavio, surprisingly. After being absent from most of the campaign after his initial defeat in the crater, he suddenly shows up to pull a Big Damn Heroes during the final boss and assists Agent 3 and Smallfry in their fight against Mr. Grizz.
• 11th-Hour Superpower: During the last phase of the final boss, Smallfry absorbs the marine-life energy on Earth to transform into the giant Hugefry to battle Mr. Grizz.
• 100% Completion: You can get a special sticker for your locker for each area in Alterna that you fully chart. Fully charting the entire world unlocks the Shel-Drone, an automated delivery drone that can be fed 999 Power Eggs each day to fetch a random item, as well as a wallpaper for your smartphone via SplatNet 3. Unlike the previous game, completing every test with every weapon yields no unique rewards.
• And Your Reward Is Interior Decorating: Some of the buried treasures you can find in Alterna, as well as the stickers for map completion and Sunken Scrolls, are locker decorations.
• Antepiece: The bosses in Return of the Mammalians borrow a ton of multiplayer elements, as if to prepare players for fighting opponents off in that mode.
  • The Crater boss has an attack where they slap the ground, creating a Shockwave Stomp similar to the Wave Breaker's. He also has an Ink Vac-like attack that sucks up your ink and then shoots it back as an explosive, though unlike the Ink Vac, it gets foiled by throwing sub weapons (in this case, Smallfry) at it.
  • Site 2's boss has a Tenta Missiles-like attack, dotting the ground with visible crosshairs before striking them.
  • Site 4's boss will launch fin-shaped beams at the player, which are suspiciously similar to the Splatana's Charged Attack. They'll also occasionally charge at the player like a Reefslider.
  • Site 6's boss will launch Tri-Stringer shots, Splat Bombs, Torpedos, and Fizzy Bombs at the player. They may also try using another Reefslider-like attack against them.
  • The final boss of Return of the Mammalians uses Triple Inkstrikes and a laser attack similar to the Splatoon 1 version (or Splatoon 2 if counting Octo Expansion) of Killer Wail. The battle also involves collecting Golden Eggs, like in Salmon Run.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Sunken Scrolls and Sardinium are no longer found inside the levels in Story Mode, but instead are all found in the overworld. This removes the tedium from having to replay levels again just because you ended up missing a collectible.
  • Also, the map screen will highlight an area of interest in green, to give you a rough idea of where you can search to find a hidden collectible.
  • In the rare, unlikely case that you run out of Power Eggs, Callie will occasionally provide 100 for free.
  • Limited-ink levels feature Balloon Fish near the goal, so you won't need to reserve a ton of ink just to make the goal object accessible.
• Apocalyptic Log: The Alterna Logs, which detail how remnants of humanity survived the apocalypse, how they ended up wiping themselves out, and how the aftermath gave rise to the Inklings and the Octolings.
• Arc Number: The Return of the Mammalians single-player campaign is filled to the brim with the number 3, as with the rest of the game. The player is given the title of Agent 3, with the previous Agent 3 having been promoted to Captain. There are 3 signals in Alterna that you have to go after, each leading to a boss fight against a member of Deep Cut. The final phase of the final boss gives you 3 minutes and 33 seconds to stop Mr. Grizz (whose real name is Bear #03) before he succeeds in covering Earth in Fuzzy Ooze, while the song that plays during said phase is called Calamari Inkantation 3MIX, which is not only the third iteration of Calamari Inkantation, but is also performed by three music groups: the Squid Sisters, Deep Cut, and DJ Octavio. Finally, the bonus level known as "After Alterna" that is unlocked after beating every level and defeating the final boss has a fee of 333 Power Eggs and a reward of 3,333 Power Eggs, along with a section with target balloons that appear in groups of numbers that are either 3 or a multiple of 3.
• Artificial Outdoors Display: Alterna is encased with a dome that shows a view of the open sky despite being deep underground, in a way comparable to the Octarian domes of the previous games but in a more seamless, less obviously artificial appearance. The Alterna Logs reveal that this is not an innate property; the crystals that make up the dome actually display Your Heart's Desire, and the people in Alterna had a collective desire to return to the surface that caused the crystals to take that form.
• Artificial Stupidity: Smallfry is rather prone to eagerly running off of cliff faces in Alterna, landing right into the water and recalling back to Agent 3's backpack.
• Astral Finale: The final boss of is fought in space, over an old human rocket loaded full of Fuzzy Ooze.
• Bait-and-Switch: The single-player campaign starts off like a beat-per-beat remake of the original Splatoon single-player campaign, with the Great Zapfish going missing and Cap'n Cuttlefish, believing it to be the Octarians again, recruiting a new cephalopod to be the new Agent 3. The first few levels even involve retrieving a Zapfish at the end of them. But then DJ Octavio shows up way too early as a boss fight, and after being beaten, reveals that he didn't steal the Great Zapfish this time. Suddenly, the crater beneath everyone gives way and they all plunge into the depths. Agent 3 finds themselves waking up in the snowy landscape of Alterna, and that is when the "Nintendo Presents Splatoon 3" title card finally appears, telling players that what they just experienced was the Cold Open and that the true story campaign has now begun.
• Bathos: The game tries very hard to play off the final boss of Return of the Mammalians as a serious Knight of Cerebus. Mr. Grizz is a Funny Animal who speaks in constant business puns and looks like an overstuffed teddy bear with a comically small head.
• Batman Can Breathe in Space: Nobody seems to have any trouble breathing in space during the final battle against Mr. Grizz. While Agent 3's armor may provide some level of protection against the vacuum, and the Octobot King protects DJ Octavio the way any spacecraft would, Mr. Grizz, the Octarian minions he spawns, and Smallfry/Hugefry are completely exposed and completely fail to express any symptoms of decompression.
• Behemoth Battle: The final battle of Hero Mode features your Smallfry — transformed by the energy of all marine life on Earth into a gigantic salmon called Hugefry — duking it out with the colossal grizzly bear Mr. Grizz, who's absorbed all his Fuzzy Ooze to grow even larger than he already was. However, Hugefry only keeps Mr. Grizz distracted while you pilot DJ Octavio's Octobot King, which is dwarfed by comparison, to do the real damage.
• Big Bad: Cuttlefish believes that DJ Octavio is once again behind the Great Zapfish theft (like the last two times). However, Octavio is innocent this time and the real perpetrator is Mr. Grizz, who has been harvesting Golden Eggs since at least Splatoon 2 to fuel his fuzzy ooze plan, since those Golden Eggs are a vital ingredient in making the ooze.
• Big Ball of Violence: Throw Smallfry at an enemy and it'll distract them with this, dealing damage over time.
• Big Damn Heroes: At the end of the third phase of the Final Boss, the rocket Smallfry, Agent 3 and Mr. Grizz were fighting on is destroyed, launching both Agent 3 and Smallfry into space. It looks like they're doomed... until DJ Octavio, who has been conspicuously absent since the game's opening, swoops in with his Octobot L3.Gs to save them, with his systems hooked up to your Mission Control to allow them to provide support via a Theme Song Power Up.
• Big "NO!": Callie screams "OOOH NOOO!" at the very end of the level "Those Aren't Birds" when the final target hits the fence and falls backwards into the abyss.
• Birth-Death Juxtaposition: Fundamentally, Alterna is where humanity met its end, which led to cephalopods turning into what we know them as today.
• Boring, but Practical: Your Smallfry companion isn't exactly flashy, but the little guy is an incredibly useful multi-purpose sub-weapon. If it hits an enemy, it'll render them unable to attack you, and when fully upgraded will immediately kill any normal-sized enemy (including Octolings), and cause shielded enemies to panic and spin around, making them vulnerable to your shots. And even if you miss or can't hit anything with it, it'll distract nearby enemies until it gets splatted, giving you an opportunity to attack (Octolings included, which is quite handy in the Brutal Bonus Level). Unless you need to paint ground, a fully-upgraded Smallfry is more useful than a bomb.
• Boss-Arena Idiocy: If the Final Boss didn't leave a bunch of Golden Eggs around on the rocket, you'd have no way to clear out the Fuzzy Ooze that blocks you from getting in attacking range.
• Boss Remix: "Happy Little Workers" gets a dissonant reprise for the first half of the Final Boss. As per tradition, "Calamari Inkantation" gets remixed for the second half.
• Brutal Bonus Level: After Alterna, unlocked after beating every level and defeating the Final Boss. The level is a long gauntlet consisting of four different sections: climbing walls and navigating moving platforms, shooting targets while riding on rails, more platforming via soaker blocks, and lastly a battle with multiple waves of enemy Octolings. The only checkpoints are the ones between each section (apart from one checkpoint partway through the soaker block section). Completing it unlocks a final Alterna Log entry providing details on the Ark Polaris (a spaceship containing Earth animals tasked with locating a new planet to inhabit), how it ended up returning to Earth with only one of the animals surviving re-entry (Bear #03, aka Mr. Grizz), and how he came up with his plan to coat the world in Fuzzy Ooze.
• Character Customization: Just as in the Octo Expansion, the Captain's appearance can be customized, either near the start of the game or any time after by using Cuttlefish's sketchbook. Also like the Octo Expansion, the Captain cannot use any customization options added in Splatoon 2 or 3, being limited to options from the first Splatoon. If you choose to import Splatoon 2 data and played the Octo Expansion to the point where Agent 3 can be customized, the chosen customization will be carried over.
• Clothing Damage: You start off with a fully-upgraded Hero Suit that gets damaged once you enter Alterna, with the damaged suit you spend much of the campaign trying to upgrade back to full power being this trope.
• Colony Drop: Mr. Grizz plans to launch a rocket full of Fuzzy Ooze into space and then cause it to fall back to Earth and crash on the surface in order to spread the ooze worldwide. When he loses his patience, he becomes the colony being dropped.
• Company Cross References:
  • The Site 6 boss fight is a direct homage to the Phantamanta fight from "The Manta Storm" episode of Sirena Beach from Super Mario Sunshine, complete with Big Man becoming the same silhouetted Asteroids Monster, an ink color identical to the Phantamanta's goop (thankfully minus the Phantamanta goop's electrical properties), and the Boss Subtitles "The Hype Manta Storm".
  • O.R.C.A.'s start-up music when the player first activates them is a softer-pitched version of the Wii U's start-up music.
• Continuity Nod:
  • The RotM trailer does the same editing trick as the Splatoon 1 Hero Mode trailer: starting with footage of the game's multiplayer, then glitching out and showing images of Octotroopers on a black background.
  • When he first gives you the Hero Suit, Captain Cuttlefish makes a remark about it somehow growing in the wash despite not having washed it, then about the last Agent 3 being "clean as a catfish". His memory might be failing him; Marie notes in Splatoon 2 that Agent 3 was The Pig-Pen.
• Contrived Coincidence: The Octobot King L3.Gs would normally be completely unstoppable with its Inc Vac, if it weren't for the fact that you just so happen to have a baseball-sized throwable ally that is coincidentally large enough to get stuck in the Inc Vac's nozzle and stop it from absorbing your ink.
• Curious as a Monkey: While wandering around Alterna, Smallfry may jump out of Agent 3's backpack to stare at random scenery; some examples include Captain 3, an armored vehicle near the middle of Site 1, and posters on one of Site 2's vertical silos. Sometimes, Smallfry's random curiosity can be helpful, like when it locates buried Power Eggs, but a lot of the time it'll run off of cliffs in pursuit of things that interest it.
• Death from Above: The Splashdown Special, returning from Splatoon 2, lets you divebomb Octarians with an explosion of ink. Unlike the previous game, it is exclusive to the Hero Shot in this game, making it unusable in multiplayer modes.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Fuzzy Ooze in the overworld will mutate your character on contact, rendering them helpless. Fortunately, you'll respawn shortly afterwards with none the worse for wear and they can be eaten by Smallfry with enough Power Eggs.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • If you turn on Color Lock and go to the Site 2 boss in Alterna, not only will Frye's ink be blue instead of yellow, her tentacles and clothes will be too.
  • Characters will often make unique comments for certain player actions and accomplishments, from Cap'n Cuttlefish asking if you lost your wallet if you backtrack to a previous kettle in the Crater, to Callie and Marie praising you if you manage to beat the level "Conserve Ink-Splat Sustainably" without firing any ink at all.
• Disc-One Final Boss: DJ Octavio shows up to fight you shortly after you complete a few missions with Captain Cuttlefish, clearly emulating his Final Boss fights in the past games. The fact that you fight him as the first boss is a clear indication that he's neither the Final Boss nor the true Big Bad of the campaign.
• Disney Death: In the final area, Mr. Grizz caps off his Motive Rant by drying out Cap'n Cuttlefish, leaving his dehydrated corpse on the ground for the NEW New Squidbeak Splatoon to discover just before they meet him in person (well, meet him in bear). Thank goodness the new Captain has Swiss-Army Tears to rehydrate him!
• Eldritch Location: Alterna seems to be an abandoned subterranean civilization that was once the last refuge of humanity, but as you play through the story mode, you'll find that this place is... strange. For starters, everything in Alterna is artificial, from the landscape to the snow to the sky itself. Second, it's absolutely enormous, even for a place built underground. It seems to go on staggeringly deep beneath the surface in spite of the immense temperatures at such depths, and some of the levels are set in cities that seem to defy gravity itself - including cities built inside of giant cylindrical structures and cities with another cityscape above them.
• Enemy Mine: In the final boss fight of Return of the Mammalians, DJ Octavio shows up to help New Agent 3 take down Mr. Grizz, and is elated to join the Squid Sisters and Deep Cut in performing a remix of Calamari Inkantation.
• Evil Versus Oblivion: DJ Octavio (the evil) recognizes Mr. Grizz's (the oblivion) plan to transform all surface-dwelling life into mammalians would be bad for him, too, and swoops in at the last moment to help New Agent 3 defeat him.
• Exact Time to Failure: During the final battle, you are given exactly 3 minutes and 33 seconds before Mr. Grizz impacts the Earth. There is no difference whether you clear with 3 seconds or 30 seconds left, despite the fact that inertia should almost certainly be in effect.
• Fastball Special: You start with Smallfry as your subweapon. Smallfry can be thrown at enemies or any object that can be shot at to attack it, upon which Smallfry will latch onto the target and bite it repeatedly, dealing damage in regular intervals. Smallfry can also be used to distract foes by throwing it at empty space, but if it gets splatted it will need to respawn. Additionally, by feeding it Power Eggs, you can send Smallfry to devour the Fuzzballs connected to large patches of Fuzzy Ooze, destroying them.
• Faux Furby: One of the locker decorations are the "Squid Friend" dolls. They are Furby-like robotic squid dolls that can sing when interacted with. There is an elongated variant that resembles the "Long Furby" memes.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In The Stinger of this trailer, New Agent 3 gets caught by Fuzzy Ooze and mammalified. Shortly after, a soundbite sampled from the Grizzco HQ theme plays, indicating who is responsible.
  • When Cuttlefish gave you your Hero Suit, he comments it's a bit baggy on them than he imagined. Sure enough, Agent 3's jacket and boots are seen being easily removed when they fall into Alterna after the first boss.
  • One of the Sunken Scrolls discusses Inkling mummification, which hints at the fate Cuttlefish ultimately encounters.
  • Inside Salmon Run, there's a large neon sign depicting a salmon, poised almost as if it's aiming for Mr Grizz's statue. At the end of Return of the Mammalians, Mr. Grizz gets into a fight with your smallfry buddy, turned into a giant salmon.
  • When the player arrives in Alterna, Callie can remark on the weird snow lying around everywhere and how strange it is that you can ink it. As it turns out, that's because it's not snow but the remains of some of the crystals on Alterna's walls and ceiling, shattered into dust when the humans tried to escape with their rocket.
  • During the Site 6 boss fight, Big Man's And This Is for... during the fight with him is a hint towards Deep Cut's true motives: They want to sell the treasure to raise money for those less fortunate in Splatsville.
• First-Episode Twist:
  • One happens after beating the Crater's boss. Until that point, Return of the Mammalians appears to be another recreation of the Hero Mode of the first two games. However, after beating the first boss, the floor cracks open, and you're taken into the real Story Mode, more akin to Octo Expansion.
  • The game pulls a second twist at the end of Site 1, still early in the progression: Deep Cut finally shows up... but their actions indicate them as antagonists rather than allies.
• Game-Breaking Bug: At launch, if the player disconnected from the internet at any point after the Point of No Return, the game would throw up a communication error when the game went back to the title screen and throw the player into the lobby, forcing them to replay the last leg of the game again. This was fixed in the Version 1.1.1 patch that came out a week after launch.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • After clearing the story, Mr. Grizz's little radio shaped like a bear eating a salmon in Grizzco is replaced with one shaped like a giant salmon eating a bear, indicating his death resulted in his company falling under new management, implied to be Lil' Judd (though all the dialogue in the mode is still from Mr. Grizz, due to being pre-recorded lines). Deep Cut also waves at you more enthusiastically when they notice you in front of the Anarchy Splatcast studio, with Frye directly mentioning your work as Agent 3 when you best her at Tableturf Battle.
  • Also after clearing the story, the Captain's one line of "voiced" interaction with New Agent 3 is a "Booyah!" signal, reflecting how player characters in the series can only communicate with "This way!" and "Booyah!".
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Your player Inkling or Octoling clearly treats their "little buddy" Smallfry more as an invaluable partner instead of a mindless beast, but nothing is stopping them from indiscriminately slaughtering thousands of their potential relatives in Salmon Run. Similarly, even after completing Return of the Mammalians, Deep Cut shows no remorse over shooting down armies of their friend's pet's species when discussing their Salmon Run escapades.
  • Peeking into Deep Cut's window in the Splatville square will cause them to give you a friendly wave and a smile. This is still the case after you've met them in Return of the Mammalians, even though they serve as your rivals throughout most of the campaign. Notable because completing Return of the Mammalians does change how they greet you.
• Gratuitous English: In a game series where everyone speaks Inkling, actual, spoken English is audible in Alterna, from a rocket ship's PA announcement. This is the second appearance of an actual Earth language in the series (Splatfest Tees notwithstanding) after the Ruins of Ark Polaris in Splatoon 2, and it feels just as strange and alien. It's in English in the other translations as well.
• Gratuitous Animal Sidekick: Your Player Character is accompanied by a Salmonid Smallfry, which will aid you throughout the single-player campaign. They can eat Fuzzy Ooze, attack enemies, and activate items from a distance, among other things.
• #HashtagForLaughs: The description for Gnarly Eddie and Nails's Sunken Scroll is a comically long parade of hashtags, showcasing the latter's energetic, breezy personality.
• Heel Realization: After his defeat, Mr. Grizz realizes that the survival of his kind is not worth the destruction of all life on Earth, and calmly accepts that mammals simply have no place in the world anymore and that the future is the only way forward.
• Hijacked by Ganon: Inverted. It's not DJ Octavio despite the fact he was the mastermind behind the Great Zapfish thefts in the past. Instead, it's Mr. Grizz, a character who was established in Splatoon 2 and hinted to be a villainous character given that he's a Bad Boss with an agenda involving all those Golden Eggs players have been collecting in Salmon Run.
• Infinity +1 Sword: Smallfry becomes this once you get the final upgrade from the skill tree. You need a ton of skill points and all the Sardinium in the game to reach the upgrade, meaning you can only buy it right before The Very Definitely Final Dungeon unless you Sequence Break to search out all that Sardinium. The upgrade massively buffs Smallfry's damage output, letting it instantly splat every single enemy it hits, including Mr. Grizz's weak spots and the Octolings in After Alterna.
• Humanity Is Infectious: As the Alterna logs reveal, this is the case for all of the inhabitants of the Splatoon verse. After the failed escape attempt by the humans destroys them for good, the crystals they used for their screen technology, infused with humanity's wants and desires, ends up seeping into the water, causing marine life to mutate, and turning squids and octopuses into the Inklings and Octolings we play as today.
• Informed Attribute: A funny bit of dialogue hangs a lampshade on a recurring informed attribute of Inklings and Octolings. Mr. Grizz, a grizzly bear from tens of thousands of years ago who is unfamiliar with the current dominant species, expresses confusion over whether or not Cuttlefish is in fact boneless.
• It's a Wonderful Failure: Fail during the final battle against Mr. Grizz, and you're treated to a cutscene of Earth getting bombarded with Fuzzy Ooze, turning every Inkling and Octoling in existence into a furball and covering the planet in hair. Capped off with a final line of dialogue from O.R.C.A. to drive it home:
  O.R.C.A.: On that day... A massive Fuzzball was born in space.
• Kaiju: Mr. Grizz's second phase sees him become gigantic, as well as the Smallfry buddy turning into the Hugefry to duel him.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler:
  • The fact that the series takes place in Humanity's Wake was treated as a secret in earlier games. In 1, you have to find one of the 26 Sunken Scrolls in a lategame level to learn that, and in Octo Expansion, the reveal is an endgame story event. 3 starts you off on the right foot by showing a wrecked Eiffel Tower in the background of the tutorial, and in case that's too subtle, the first Alterna Log you unlock is titled "The Fall Of Humanity".
  • Splatoon 3, like 2, makes little effort to hide the fact that Agents 1 and 2 of the New Squidbeak Splatoon are really Callie and Marie. This time it's little more than a formality - the girls introduce themselves by their codenames during their first on-screen appearance, they occasionally refer to each other by name throughout the stages and discuss collabing with other musical acts, their Tableturf Battle cards use their proper names, and the base where Marie and the Captain hang out for most of the campaign is actually called "Squid Sisters Camp". It's easy to forget Splatoon 1 treated their military double lives as a surprise reveal.
• Legacy Boss Battle: DJ Octavio returns yet again, with a new outfit and an upgraded Octobot King. Unlike the last two games, however, Octavio is actually the first boss you face and it becomes clear he's really a Disc-One Final Boss, with Mr. Grizz being the true Big Bad and Final Boss of the Return of the Mammalians.
• MacGyvering: The campaign has three objects giving out Cuttlefish's signal, each object being what looks to be a part of a helicopter: a frame, propeller blades and other pieces, and a motor; once rebuilt into a helicopter, the Squidbeak Splatoon can use it to get to the top of the rocket. Shame they don't actually figure it out that much; the Hard-Work Montage actually turns it into some sort of oversized lawnmower, which gets used to shave away the Fuzzy Ooze covering the rocket's base.
• Money Sink: After getting 100% Completion in Hero Mode, the Shel-Drone appears in Alterna. At the hefty price of 999 Power Eggs (you're not spending them elsewhere anyway), it'll get you treasure from Alterna, with a chance to receive a food ticket, ability chunks, gold, or a locker decoration object. This is the only way to get duplicates of the Hero Mode-exclusive locker items.
• Mook Promotion: Starring alongside New Agent 3 is a friendly Smallfry Salmonid that has seemingly bonded with them. You can upgrade it throughout the campaign to become increasingly more powerful than your average Smallfry, and by the final boss, ascends into the titanic Hugefry to do battle with a kaiju-sized Mr. Grizz.
• Mutagenic Goo: In the Return of the Mammalians Story Mode, much of the environment is infested by Fuzzy Ooze that causes cephalopods to take on mammalian traits, namely the growing of fur seen on this game's Octotroopers. Touching Fuzzy Ooze is immediately fatal for the player as it transforms them into a mammalian. Fortunately, the player's Smallfry is immune to Fuzzy Ooze and can clean it up for the player by devouring massive Fuzzballs. Mr. Grizz intends to spread Fuzzy Ooze across the planet and bring mammals back into existence.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The final boss of Return of the Mammalians wouldn't have been able to terraform the Earth into a fuzzball if he didn't get a constant supply of Golden Eggs from players doing Salmon Run shifts for special rewards since Splatoon 2. That's right, you've been fuelling Mr. Grizz's hairy apocalypse that would have doomed all of Earth, and all for meager special rewards in capsules. Whoopsie-daisy!
• No-Gear Level: The first level of the Alterna Space Station strips the player of their gear except for your starting grenade, Smallfry. All the challenges in it are oriented around throwing Smallfry around.
• Not Me This Time: Cap'n Cuttlefish suspects DJ Octavio of having stolen the Great Zapfish, after having done so twice before. However, after defeating Octavio's Octobot, he denies having stolen the Zapfish, and Cuttlefish notes that his Octobot being weaker than before (being the first boss) would support this.
  Cuttlefish: But if it wasn't you, then...who was it?!
• Not So Stoic: New Agent 3 is extremely deadpan even by the Heroic Mime standards of previous playable characters, but at the end of Return of the Mammalians when Smallfry jumps back into their pack, they finally crack a smile.
• Offscreen Crash: During the cutscene that plays after Alterna Site 1, when Frye tosses her mask away, you can hear it land, with Smallfry gurgling in pain immediately after.
• Orc Raised by Elves: A Sunken Scroll details how a Smallfry separated from other Salmonids can display atypical behavior from them due to not being socialized. This explains the player character's rapport with their little buddy.
• Our Lawyers Advised This Trope: Parodied. The Big Bad and Final Boss of the Return of the Mammalians campaign, Mr. Grizz, doesn't want people calling his plan to bathe the planet in Fuzzy Ooze, restoring mammals as the dominant lifeform on Earth "Hairmageddon," because Grizzco Industries' HR Department doesn't like it.
• Pacifist Run: Level 6-04, a limited-ink level, will recognize pacifist runs and reward players with an extra packet of Power Eggs and special dialogue if they get through without splatting any Octarians. It'll also recognize doing the exact opposite of that, with special dialogue and a similar Power Egg reward if the player splats every Octarian with their limited ink.
• Peninsula of Power Leveling: As far as Power Egg farming goes, there's nothing faster than "What Caused the Big Bang? YOU!", Mission 8 in Site 1. Like most levels, it rewards 300 every subsequent completion after the first, but what makes it stand out for farming is that it can be cleared in less than 10 seconds per run since all it needs you to do is to aim an E-Liter 4K's shot at a balloon in the center of a rotating sphere. Play the level enough times, and you'll master the timing to the extent that you'll be spending more time on the loading screen than the actual level.
• Play as a Boss: While taking on the Final Boss, you get to pilot DJ Octavio's mech, more specifically control the Ink Vac he used on you in the Crater to attack Mr. Grizz' fuzzballs.
• Play Every Day: Once you have achieved 100% Completion in Alterna by mapping every single tile, you can spend 999 Power Eggs on the Shel-Drone, which will give you a random multiplayer goodie once per day. These can range from duplicate Hero Mode cosmetics to Food Tickets and Ability Chunks.
• Plot Archaeology: The plot gets kicked off by the Zapfish being stolen again and New Agent 3 being sent into the crater to retrieve it back for Splatsville. And then that gets forgotten for a while when Agent 3 falls into Alterna, at which point the story shifts to focus on saving Captain Cuttlefish, figuring out Mr. Grizz's motives, and clashing with Deep Cut in pursuit of them. When it appears as a level decoration in the final stretches of the game, it being low priority compared to everything else gets lampshaded by Marie:
  Agent 2: "So this is where it's been. We need to bring it back! But y'know... later, or something."
• Previous Player-Character Cameo: The original Agent 3 of Splatoon (now known as Captain) has ascended to the rank of the New Squidbeak Splatoon's new commander, complete with Commissar Cap, coinciding with Cap'n Cuttlefish's retirement. They're stationed at the Squid Sisters base camp alongside Marie for the duration of the single-player mode, and just like in Octo Expansion, their appearance can be customized using Cap'n Cuttlefish's sketchbook; though if the player imports their save data from Splatoon 2, the appearance chosen for them there will be carried over automatically.
• Recurring Element: Splatoon 3 marks the fourth time a single-player campaign in the series has featured a variation of Octostomp, the first boss of the original game. There's a twist with it this time, though—the Octostomp is actually just an abandoned metal shell which Frye uses in her boss fight as a nest for her swarm of eels.
• Respawn Point:
  • If your Smallfry gets splatted while thrown, they'll eventually respawn back inside your backpack, with the respawn sound effect as well.
  • Two of the bosses get splatted in-between their phases, with Shiver and Frye having respawn points on their allies.
• The Reveal:
  • The Alterna Logs surprisingly give us one in regards to the series-wide meme of "Are you a squid or a kid?" Turns out, it's both. The Inklings and Octolings aren't simply just evolved squids and octopuses but were descended from mutations of marine life created when mind-reading crystals carrying humanity's wills and desires seeped into the oceans, which when combined with the radioactive waters, explains how they and other sea-life managed to evolve so drastically in thousands rather than millions of years. The crystals in particular establish that the marine species throughout the Splatoon world aren't unconnected new species which emerged After the End, but the true successors to humanity, casting the motives of Commander Tartar and Mr. Grizz in a very different light.
  • The story campaign also reveals the truth behind Grizzco Industries and Mr. Grizz himself, following up on those loose plot threads from Splatoon 2. Grizzco is actually a front for Fuzzy Ooze production, since Golden Eggs are a key ingredient for the formula. Mr. Grizz is actually a hyper-intelligent grizzly bear and the last survivor of the doomed Ark Polaris (the wreckage of which is a Salmon Run stage from the previous game), and he wants to use said ooze to restore mammals as the dominant lifeforms on Earth.
• Recurring Riff:
  • As usual, "Onward" is reused for a song to represent the Octarian army, playing at the start of every Crater level.
  • Meeting the Squid Sisters plays a remix of their song "City of Color" from Splatoon 1.
  • The song that plays during the cutscene at the end of Alterna Site 1 involves a segment that remixes Deep Cut's Anarchy Splatcast background theme.
  • The jingle that plays after collecting a treasure from the various Alterna bosses gets remixed for The Spirit Lifter.
• Retirony: Downplayed and subverted. Captain Cuttlefish had already retired by the time Mr. Grizz dehydrates him, and he is brought back to life shortly after.
• Running Gag: Frye screaming something every time Deep Cut enters in Return of the Mammalians.
• Self-Parody: The beginning section of Return of the Mammalians, set in the Crater, is an intentionally watered-down rehash of the first two games' Hero Modes. Even the music in these stages is goofier!
• Shockwave Stomp: One of the new enemy types in Hero Mode is the Amped Octostamp, a headphone-wearing Octostamp that sends out shockwaves similar to the ones the Wave Breaker and the Big Shot's cannonballs send out.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Captain strikes the GunBuster pose, complete with a dramatic low-angled camera shot, near the end of the single-player campaign before using the treasures to cut through the massive swarm of Fuzzy Ooze at the center of Alterna.
  • In the “Conserve Ink-Splat Sustainably” mission, if you make it to the end without firing a shot, Captain 3 will paraphrase Sun Tzu.
    Marie: Wanna know what the Captain says? “To Win Without Fighting, now that’s victory!”
• Space Is Noisy: In the Astral Finale, the cast has no problem communicating in space. Or, for that matter, playing music in it. This can be justified via the player character and Octavio likely having speakers in their helmet and mech, respectively, but Mr. Grizz has no such explanation.
• Squick: In-Universe. One of the Sunken Scrolls has the writer's notes express this reaction to the subject matter of the page, specifically the "sample" concerning said subject: a mummified squid that's been flattened and attached to the page.
• Stealth Pun: In Hero Mode levels with restictions (such as a timer or ink use), failure causes O.R.C.A. to pinpoint the player with a targeting laser before dumping a torrent of enemy ink on Agent 3. In military parlance, Agent 3 is painted, then gets painted in a more literal fashion.
• Super-Fun Happy Thing of Doom: Alterna's islands all have insanely saccharine names (like "Landfill Dreamland" and "Cozy & Safe Factory"), despite the location being a dangerous place full of Fuzzy Ooze. It kind of evokes the feeling of someone being forced into staying there and desperately trying to cheer themselves up with delusional names for their surroundings, which would align with Alternan humans wanting to escape to the surface even if it meant their death.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Since Sheldon is now running the Splatlands branch of Ammo Knights, the Inkopolis Plaza branch is filled by tadpole shrimp twin children Shelly and Donny who are just as obsessed with weaponry. Also, because Crusty Sean is on his bike tour, Shrimp Kicks is run by another tempura-fried seafood, Fred Crumbs.
• Swiss-Army Tears: The old Agent 3's Single Tear revives Cap'n Cuttlefish, who had earlier been dried out completely. It is moisture, after all...
• A Taste of Power: You get to enjoy a fully upgraded Hero Suit at the beginning of the game's single-player mode, before losing all of its enhancements early on. The only way to get those upgrades back permanently is to upgrade it with Sardinium and Upgrade Points.
• Terrible Trio: Deep Cut, which consists of Big Man, Shiver and Frye, who all act as bosses, albeit due to (mistakenly) believing the New Squidbeak Splatoon was out to get treasure first.
• The Good, the Bad, and the Evil: The New Squidbeak Splatoon are the "Good" of the game, actively trying to save the Splatlands from the Fuzzy Ooze. DJ Octavio is once again the "Bad", appearing towards the beginning of the story to attack you because he believes the New Squidbeak Splatoon has something to do with his missing army. Deep Cut also fulfils this role for the bulk of the campaign, being antagonistic towards the NSS due to viewing them as rival treasure hunters. As for the "Evil", there's Mr. Grizz, who wishes to destroy the world by coating it in Fuzzy Ooze. Doing so would kill most of the marine life outright, and Grizz clearly doesn't care as long as mammals can finally return and become the dominant species of Earth again.
• Theme Song Power Up: Invoked by the Squid Sisters, Deep Cut, and DJ Octavio, who start performing Calamari Inkantation 3MIX, which powers up Smallfry into his Super Mode.
• Tiny-Headed Behemoth: Mr. Grizz, who is a massive, hulking bear with a teeny-tiny head.
• Title Drop: The final phase of the Final Boss has the name of the base campaign ("Return of the Mammalians") as its Boss Subtitles set against the Earth itself. If Mr. Grizz succeeds, Mammalians will finally return to Earth.
• Token Heroic Orc: It is acknowledged by the Squid Research Lab that the Salmonids are considered to be a dangerous species, and thus they are intrigued by the seemingly symbiotic relationship between the new Agent 3 and their juvenile Smallfry pet. One of the Sunken Scrolls would imply that they likely met after the latter strayed too far from their original school during a run and became lost, becoming attached in the process.
• Took a Level in Badass: Not in anything new, but rather revelations made for the setting as a whole with how this entry has expanded upon it: namely that inking-based battles and encounters aren't exclusive to Inklings and Octolings/Octarians^note aside from possibly Salmonids, if their trails could be considered ink in the first place. As demonstrated in the game's Hero Mode, other marine life can get in on the action as well, whether they're wholly sapient people like the ones back in Splatsville or otherwise. This changes matters heavily, showing that the two predominant races who seemed the only ones physically able to do so aren't the only ones capable of getting their ink on.
• Uncommon Time: The Final Boss' first phase song makes use of polyrhythms; a percussion beat gets added early in, which is slightly off-tempo from the rest of the song. This sounds normal enough when it's first added, but the longer it stays around, the weirder it sounds, something that represents said final boss Mr. Grizz being an alien lifeform compared to most of the Splatoon cast.
• Under New Management: After you thwart the final boss' plan and blow Mr. Grizz up, the radio in Grizzco changes from a bear eating a salmon to Hugefry eating a bear. While the grizzly still provides guidance and commentary during a shift via prerecorded messages, it's heavily implied that Li'l Judd has taken over operations now that his fellow mammal is indisposed; he starts wearing a headset after you complete the story, and his Tableturf Battle deck is themed around the mode, boasting many Salmonid cards and having card sleeves with Grizzco signage on them.
• Unique Enemy: Just like in Octo Expansion, Tentakooks only appear in one level of the single-player, "Don't Tease with the Keys", a level dedicated to chasing down five of them for keys to reach the goal.
• Unwitting Pawn: The Deep Log reveals that the reason why Mr. Grizz wanted Golden Eggs was to create Fuzzy Ooze to convert all marine life into mammals. This means that the Inklings and Octolings taking up Salmon Run jobs have been unwittingly fuelling a hairy apocalypse the whole time...and if your Inkling or Octoling also took part in Salmon Runs, you've also contributed to it.
• Variable Mix:
  • As usual, all the bosses have different versions of their boss themes that play with new variations as you progress the fight.
  • In Alterna, you can find vinyl records near turntables scattered across the various islands. Uncovering them will change the music of the island you're currently on, with the music starting out scratchy and ambient, which each record improving the audio quality and adding new instruments.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: All of Alterna's main levels surround the giant rocket in the middle of the underground dome, the rocket's floored with a ton of spikier Fuzzy Ooze, it's smack dab in the middle of the loading screen with higher detail than all its surroundings, and the game gives you a very gratuitous pause to watch it when you take the pipe to get from island to island, so it's not much of a shocker that the final stretch takes place on the launchpad.
• Villainous Rescue: Near the end of Return of the Mammalians, Mr. Grizz destroys his rocket, hurling New Agent 3 into space, only for DJ Octavio to fly in and pick them up, setting the stage for the final battle.
• Weapons That Suck: DJ Octavio has a huge Ink Vac built into his latest Octobot King, but it's distinctly vulnerable to getting clogged up by Smallfry. Amusingly, it ends up saving the world at the end of Return of the Mammalians, after being modified with a brush suitable for sucking up fur.
• Wham Shot: After the final level of the last dungeon, seeing Mr. Grizz in person and discovering he is one of the last mammals on Earth.
• Where It All Began: On a series-wide scope, Alterna. Alterna Logs 3-6 detail how a surviving faction of humanity manufactured crystals from the bodily fluids of squids that could output images of someone's deepest thoughts. Their leaders grew restless and tried to launch a rocket to the surface, but the energy from the boosters overloaded the crystals and brought the colony down... causing the crystals, suffused with humanity's desires, to contaminate the water. These would be absorbed by the marine life, inducing rapid evolution, and eventually calling them to leave the cavern, establish the Splatlands, and spread over the rest of the planet. 5,000 years later, a squid capable of taking a humanoid form was born, and civilization was re-established, primarily by what would become the Inklings and Octarians. Long story short, human ambition and desires, combined with mind-reading color-changing crystals and radioactive water, induced the evolution of cephalopod sapience.
• Yellow/Purple Contrast: The distinct highlighter yellow of the main protagonist and their allies contrasts with the Psycho Pinks and purples of the Fuzzy Ooze that the Big Bad intends on using to create an Apocalypse How.
• Yo Yo Plot Point: You'd think that the characters would wisen up and stop enabling Grizzco's raids on Salmonid territory after Mr. Grizz almost causes a fuzzy apocalypse with the eggs he's collected, but nobody gets the point. Deep Cut will continue to announce Grizzco shifts on their Splatcasts and the player can still fetch Golden Eggs for the unknown somebody who's running Grizzco in Mr. Grizz's place (implied to be Li'l Judd), setting up the possibility of all of this happening all over again.

Salmon Run Next Wave

Fighting Salmonids just got Xtra intense.

• Amusement Park of Doom: The first Big Run takes place in Wahoo World, infesting the amusement park with Salmonids coming from all directions. Although according to Big Man, the rides were already unsafe before the Salmonids showed up.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Unlike in 2, Salmon Run shifts are always open, though you still need to wait a day or two for the stages and weapon loadouts to change.
  • Like the multiplayer lobby, Grizzco HQ has a practice area with fish-shaped dummies for you to practice on. The three dummies closest to the Golden Egg represent the Smallfry, Chum, and Cohock health values, and the other dummies have stickers attached to them that indicate the Boss Salmonid whose health they're imitating.
  • Salmon Run shifts have a random chance to spawn an "Xtrawave" against a superboss Salmonid after the third wave is done, when the shift normally ends. Unlike a normal wave, where the shift ends in a loss if the player's team is wiped or don't meet the quota before time runs out, in an Xtrawave, the game still counts it as a win regardless of whether your crew beats the superboss or not, with Mr. Grizz acknowledging that your crew was stuck in an unexpected situation and still accomplished the main task.
  • Normally, the team wiping out in Salmon Run results in your Rank Progress decreasing. Dying has decreasing punishment the further into the shift you get, up to having no rank decrease if you die on the third wave. Also, if a teammate underperforms by a significant margin or disconnected mid-game, the punishment for losing is further halved to make up for them.
  • You can now throw eggs at the cost of some ink. Meaning not only do you not have to run up directly to the basket if you want to drop off eggs, but you can also drop them for another player to pick up if you can't afford to make the trip yourself. Additionally, if you throw an egg into the water, it will bounce back to the land, preventing the egg from being lost.
  • The Egg Throw deals splash damage around you that's strong enough to splat Chums and Small Fries, so you won't be left defenseless while throwing and you won't be wasting your ink that could be used for your weapons.
  • If you find your current Salmon Run rank too difficult, you can now manually demote yourself to get easier runs by pressing ZL at the matchmaking menu. You can only demote down to Profreshional Part-Timer this way, however.
  • In a Giant Tornado wave, which takes place in the Low Tide area, the Egg Basket will still be located in the main body of the stage, unlike in other Low Tide variations where it's placed in the Low Tide area. Fortunately, Mr. Grizz will count each Golden Egg captured as 2, to compensate for the extra distance. Also, Snatchers do not spawn during this event so you're free to throw the eggs as far as you want without worrying about them getting stolen, which you will have to do to quickly get the eggs from the sea to the basket.
  • Opening the wrong gushers during Goldie Seeking no longer spawns additional enemies, meaning players are free to open every one in sight with no drawback. This makes finding the Goldie much faster than it was in the previous game.
  • Salmon Run shifts don't end in defeat until all bombs have exploded, all specials have gone off, all ink has stopped flying... until there is no way a player could possibly be revived.^note The sole exception is the Wave Breaker: it lasts a long time and can revive its own user if they throw it right before getting splatted, which would be exceedingly broken if it were always popped last to easily revive everyone. Relatedly, the countdown before a wave ends will pause after it hits 1 if there are any thrown Golden Eggs still in the air, allowing last-second clutches to happen.
  • Flyfish in Salmon Run Next Wave have been nerfed so they can only shoot eight missiles total and knocking out one of their launchers actually slows down the firing rate, which had happened before, but now also reduces the number of missiles to four. This makes them easier to deal with compared to 2 where they always acted as if they were using the Tenta Missiles special, which made cleaning them up as soon as possible the only viable option.
  • Flipper-Floppers are made easier to take down by painting their landing zone to your color, then shooting them after they impact the floor. If you do successfully paint their landing zone, any other enemy Salmonids won't be able to reverse it until the Flipper-Flopper hits the ground.
  • At the beginning of an Xtrawave, you will be given another, singular use of your special weapon. This provided special is separate from the two you are given at the beginning of the shift, meaning that you aren't punished for using specials before a randomly occurring Xtrawave.
  • If a crew member disconnects during the Xtrawave, the King Salmonid will lose a chunk of its health to compensate for the loss in firepower.
  • Big Runs have a feature where the players will always Super Jump to the basket's location at the start of a wave, since basket locations are atypical for normal Salmon Run maps.^note Wahoo World has the same basket position for high and low tide variations and a different position for neutral tide, Inkblot Art Academy has different basket locations for all three tides, but the players get Super Jumped to the normal and high tide positions, Undertow Spillway and Um'ami Ruins Super Jumps players to all three different basket positions; this is in opposition to traditional Salmon Run maps having the different positions at low tide, while high tide and neutral tide have the same position.
  • Didn't play Salmon Run for a month and happened to miss the monthly item bonus? The pink capsule rewards are slightly reworked to always provide gear different to whatever gear is currently in rotation for rewards, so you have a better chance at picking gear you missed.
  • If a season adds a new Salmon Run stage, the first two loadouts of that season will be set on that stage, letting players get accustomed to it before it enters the regular rotation. Likewise, if it adds new types of weapons (alternate kits excluded), those first few loadouts will feature at least one of them.
  • On the same note, weapons that have had received buffs or nerfes at the beginning of the season will also appear in the first few rotations, allowing players to test them out as soon as possible and see what's different.
  • Certain Big Run stages have the Egg Basket located on elevated terrain, like the dividing ledge in Undertow Spillway, or on the elevated platform of Um'ami Ruins. To make it so that you don't have to climb up to the basket every time, eggs can be deposited in the metallic base of the basket.
• Anti-Grinding: Downplayed. The reward system for Salmon Run Next Wave functions identically to the previous game, where capsule rewards top out at 1200 points per rotation (increased to 2400 during Big Run events) and every 200 points afterwards just gives a copy of the monthly gear reward. However, you can still swap out your gear reward if the new copy has a more favorable main ability or exchange it for ability chunks.
• Apocalypse How: Big Run is a phenomenon were Salmonids stray out of their usual routes to invade the multiplayer stages. This event was depicted as a biblical apocalypse in a Sunken Scroll in Splatoon 2, with the seven rings depicted in the scroll visible in the distance of any invaded stages.
• The Artifact: Stingers, like several other Boss Salmonids, are enemy personifications of the series' special weapons; in their case, the Sting Ray. However, the Sting Ray is one of the specials that was removed between games (with its role effectively taken by the Killer Wail 5.1).
• Ascended Extra: Gushers in regular Salmon Run are only really functional as spawnpoints for Goldies and Mudmouths during their respective waves. During Big Runs, however, they play a key role in distributing the Salmonid armada, acting as additional spawn points in the Salmonid-infested multiplayer stages as an alternative to Salmonids spawning from the coastline.
• Background Music Override: If a Big Run is going on, then Anarchy Splatcast's background music is turned to a Grizzco-ified version, incorporating the warped acapella and Evil Laugh included in the theme that plays at Grizzco HQ.
• Boss Warning Siren: If a King Salmonid interrupts the end of a round, a loud klaxon will interrupt the victory jingle (which itself will be distorted) and the word "EMERGENCY!" will flash on the screen.
• The Cameo: Jammin' Salmon Junction takes place near a broken down interstate bridge transformed into a massive concert venue by the Salmonids. Said venue bears the logo of ω-3, the Salmonid band in charge of the music for Salmon Run, implying the venue belongs to them.
• Central Theme: Chaos, like with everything else in the game:
  • Upon conclusion of a Salmon Run, there's a random chance that the run will continue into a bonus "Xtrawave" that focuses your squad to deal with a large King Salmonid. When playing with randoms, you can't accurately predict if one will show up, since the chance is based on how full everyone's Salmometer is and you only get to see your own.
  • The Salmonids will occasionally start invading Inkopolis and Splatsville during Big Runs, repurposing the normal multiplayer maps as locations to defend society from.
• Comically Small Bribe: Your reward for participating in a Big Run, which essentially amounts to working two days of back to back Salmon Run shifts in order to avert a biblical apocalypse!... is a decorative statue for your locker. Makes sense if you remember that Mr. Grizz doesn't really care about society's destruction, only about securing egg profits.
• Continuity Nod: The song the Smallfry sing after they install their Fish Stick is an interpolated version of "Completion", the song used by the blender in the Octo Expansion.
• Contrived Coincidence: The tornado waves will always drop the boulder onto the low tide egg basket every single time they appear, never anywhere else despite the egg basket's platform being a relatively small target. Also, no Boss Salmonids spawn during the wave, but the tornado will compensate by always throwing a chest full of Golden Eggs somewhere onto the low tide region. Nobody acknowledges how impossibly unlikely it would be for a random force of nature to do this every single time.
• Crippling Overspecialization: All Grizzco rotations can fall victim to this, even more than in Splatoon 2 due to the added Grizzco Stringer and Grizzco Splatana. Because over half of the Grizzco weapons are themselves overspecialized, it's possible for the game to roll a team combination that flat-out doesn't work at anything other than splatting. Beating Salmonids is the name of the game, but it's very difficult to make any meaningful progress without the ability to quickly cover turf, which only some Grizzco weapons are capable of.
• Cultural Cross-Reference: The Grizzco-exclusive special gear featured during 2022's Drizzle Season is based on pieces of clothing from the Back to the Future series. The Bream-Brim Cap is Marty McFly, Jr.'s hat from Back to the Future Part II, the Low-Vis Visor is Doc Brown's visor from the same movie, and the Brain Strainer is 1955 Doc's ill-fated "brainwave analyzer" from the first Back to the Future. The Astro Helm is a Captain Ersatz version of an X-Wing pilot's helmet from the Star Wars series, and the Astro Wear is the corresponding suit.
• Dark Reprise: The main theme of Big Run, "Bait and Click", is a distorted cover of "Clickbait" performed by the Salmonid band ω-3 in their usual chaotic style, fitting the theme of Salmon Run shifts on regular battle stages. It also has comparatively darker version that plays in the Grizzco lobby. Anarchy Splatcast's theme also gets a sinister remix courtesy of Grizzco.
• Dash Attack: All Splatanas have this feature if the user holds forward while releasing a charge, but the Grizzco Splatana takes this to the next level. Its lunge is easily the fastest and furthest-reaching one in the game.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • There's unique dialogue if you let the time run out in the tutorial without hitting the egg quota (something you have to intentionally do). Mr. Grizz jokes about rethinking your future at the company before automatically bumping you up to the quota and ending the tutorial.
  • Mudmouths have a unique icon and "splatted by" text in case you manage to get yourself killed by their Collision Damage. You have to go out of your way for this to happen, considering they are completely stationary and harmless except for the Lesser Salmonids they spit out. The same goes for Chinooks, which appear during only one event type, never directly attack players, and can only deal Scratch Damage.
  • Mr. Grizz has a unique line of dialogue if the crew wipes or runs out of time without putting even a single Golden Egg in the basket, which is extremely unlikely to happen even on higher Hazard Levels.
• Doing In the Wizard: According to the Salmonid Field Guide, this happened in-universe at some point with Mudmouth Eruptions. In the distant past, locals believed the title creatures were malicious ghosts who haunted the depths of the sea in the Splatlands, until brave kids started throwing bombs in their mouths and discovered they were just regular (though large) Salmonids who got stuck in pipes and covered in mud and garbage.
• Do Not Touch the Funnel Cloud: A certain event in Salmon Run Next Wave features a tornado spawning just offstage. It seems to be reasonably close to shore, but the only things it ever picks up are Lesser Salmonids (which are completely unaffected by the fall), a few crates full of Golden Eggs, and a single boulder to block the low-tide egg basket. The tornado should be whipping your crew around and flinging them miles away, but because the funnel cloud is in the distance, safely out of reach, you're completely unaffected — there doesn't even seem to be any wind.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: If a session of Salmon Run has an Xtrawave at the end, the victory jingle will sound slightly distorted just before the King Salmonid arrives.
• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • Salmon Run in Splatoon 3 is very prone to slowdown on higher hazard levels, particularly when multiple Boss Salmonids that create particle effects (e.g. Fish Sticks, Slammin' Lids, and the notorious Flyfish) are active at once. Frustratingly, while all slowdown is processed on the players' side, the timer is handled on the client end — meaning it will continue to tick down at the same speed while everyone else is lagging.
  • Very rarely, during a Mudmouth Eruption wave, two Mudmouths can spawn from the same Gusher. This causes the frame rate to dip into the single digits as the game struggles to process what's happening.
• Gold-Colored Superiority: As a Cosmetic Award for finishing a Big Run, anyone who participated a Grizzco shift during that time will get an exclusive locker figurine to commemorate it. Each participant has a high score golden egg count that determines the reward, and participants who scored in the top 5% of all scores got a golden version of that figure.
• Helpful Mook:
  • Slammin' Lids create barriers around whatever is underneath their lid, but swim underneath them and they'll slam it down in an attempt to crush you, instantly splatting any Salmonid that's underneath it (even ones that are normally invulnerable like Steelheads and Flyfish).
  • If you let Fish Sticks plant their tower (which is pretty hard to prevent), it will remain even after you wipe out the Boss Salmonids that carry it in. This gives ranged weapons, such as Chargers and Splatlings, the possibility of high points in new areas of the map, which are safe so long as certain Boss Salmonids aren't present.
  • Big Shots will leave behind their cannon if you splat the Salmonid working it, which can be used to launch Golden Eggs near the basket very rapidly and for no ink cost.
• Incredibly Lame Fun: According to the Undertow Spillway Big Run dialogue, the location (an abandoned underground flood bypass) attracts a weirdly high number of tourists, calling themselves "drainspotters".
• Interface Spoiler: In Salmon Run, if the current shift's ending is about to be interrupted by the entrance of a King Salmonid, the "Final wave clear!" jingle will be slightly distorted and off-key until the "EMERGENCY!" alert kicks in. Qualifies as Five-Second Foreshadowing, since that's about the amount of time you have to register the difference. In the earliest versions of the game, however, a final wave that would be followed by a King Salmonid would be referred to as "Wave 3" at the beginning, making it easier to see it coming before this behavior was patched.
• It's Raining Men: During a Giant Tornado wave, Salmonids will spawn by falling from the sky due to being picked up by the tornado and flung ashore. These Salmonids are completely unaffected by this event; they take no fall damage and immediately go about their squid-splatting duties as they would any other wave. The Salmonid Field Guide does acknowledge that the tornado is responsible for a lot of Salmonid casualties, though.
• Kaiju: The Cohozuna from Salmon Run's Xtrawave, a massive Godzilla-esque Salmonid who towers over almost everyone.
• Let No Crisis Go to Waste: Mr. Grizz's dialogue throughout a Big Run makes it pretty clear that defending the city from the Salmonid invasion is just a paper-thin excuse for boosting his Golden Egg count.
• Money Sink: The Grizzco shop has the single priciest item in the game: a gold Grizzco banner. It costs 333 Golden Scales to purchase, and you can only get Golden Scales from fighting a King Salmonid, which spawn randomly. In the best case scenario where you beat it when there are 30 seconds or more on the clock (which is insanely difficult), you'll get 13 scales. If you're at the maximum hazard level for that shift (which makes it even more difficult and requires you grind your rank high enough), then on average, 3% of those scales will be golden, making golden scales ludicrously rare. Oh, and this doesn't take into account that the golden banner must be unlocked before you can buy it, which requires spending an additional 450 bronze, 50 silver, and 4 golden scales.
• One-Hit Kill: The Egg Cannon is mainly designed to deal massive damage to the King Salmonid, but you can just as easily use it against other Boss Salmonids instead to instantly deal 800 damage to them, one-shotting most of them. You can even take out Flyfish in one shot if you aim it correctly.
• No Ontological Inertia:
  • Once the Salmonids start retreating, all the Golden Eggs spontaneously pop and become unretrievable if not already in the Egg Basket.
  • Giant Tornado waves feature a giant tornado that throws a massive boulder lands on the low tide egg basket and makes it unusable. Once the wave ends and the tornado dissipates, the rock spontaneously shatters for no obvious reason.
• Obvious Rule Patch:
  • Salmon Run shifts don't end early until there is absolutely no way for anyone on the team to get revived: all flying ink bullets must land, all grenades must detonate, and all active specials must expire... except for the Wave Breaker. The Wave Breaker lasts exceptionally long and has a massive area of effect to revive teammates with, so if the exception wasn't in place, throwing down a Wave Breaker to cause a full-party resurrect would be hideously overpowered.
  • The top of a Slammin' Lid would make an incredibly good camping position for long-ranged weapons like Chargers, Splatlings, and Stringers... so if you linger up there for too long, the pilot will pull out a ladle and smack you off.
• Play Every Day: The Salmon Run bonus item tracker resets every 40 hours, encouraging you to return every so often to get the plentiful rewards.
• Powerful, but Inaccurate: Downplayed; The Grizzco Stringer can deal a maximum of 1,350 damage at point-blank range, but the reticles are all visibly misaligned. This is in line with Grizzco Weapons insane damage at a severe cost to something else.
• Proj-egg-tile: As an emergency provision during Xtrawaves, Grizzco provides Egg Cannons to use against King Salmonids. They allow players to weaponize the Egg Throw, now eschewing the ink cost, and fire Golden Eggs as explosive glowing golden projectiles that deal much greater damage than regular weapons. They're meant to be used on King Salmonids, but they can be turned on any salmonid, including bosses to splat them more quickly for more ammo.
• Purposefully Overpowered: The Grizzco weapons make their return in All Random rotations in Salmon Run Next Wave, being obscenely broken weapons designed to make Salmonid life a living hell. In addition to the returning Grizzco Blaster, Grizzco Charger, Grizzco Brella, and Grizzco Slosher, this game introduces new Grizzco weapons, such as:
  • The Grizzco Stringer, first introduced in the October 1st, 2022 All Random rotation, is a Great Bow that fires nine darts at a time. Uncharged shots give it unmatched turf-inking power, while charged shots fire explosive bolts that have very wide spread and obliterate nearly anything they hit on direct contact. Get close enough to a large Boss Salmonid and you can unload multiple bolts at once into the foe, dealing enough damage to One-Hit Kill anything short of a King Salmonid.
  • The Grizzco Splatana, introduced in the December 2nd, 2022 rotation, is the Splatana Stamper with Crippling Overspecialization turned up to eleven. The weapon is extremely slow to swing, even slower to charge and loses the ability to shoot Sword Beams, giving it even shorter range than the Brushes and rendering it nigh-incapable of painting anything. In return it gets some of the most horrifying damage ever created, dealing 200 damage per basic swing. And if that's not enough, its charged attack deals 1,200 damage — which the Salmonid training dummies fail to fully register — and pierces armored enemies like Steelheads and Flyfish.
  • The Grizzco Dualies, added with Drizzle Season 2023's first Big Run, bears all the bullet hose goodness of all Dualies when it dodge rolls, in addition to the ability to explode every time it dodge rolls. Each explosion is about the size of a Suction Bomb's and it can do 9 in a row before a short rest moment, so it has an option to eviscerate crowds with a bunch of deadly somersaults, given a Collision Damage enemy like Steel Eels or Scrappers doesn't block it. The tradeoff is that it has pitiable range on its shots; less than the already short-range Dapple Dualies, although the range does improve significantly if you stay in combined fire mode after rolling.
• Rare Random Drop: Gold Scales from King Salmonids. Even if a team manages to beat one at the highest possible difficulty, Hazard Level MAX 333% (or Eggsecutive VP 865), they only have a 3% chance of dropping.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: In Salmon Run, the eyes of the Salmonids will turn bright red during Glowfly waves and attack much more aggressively, rushing down whichever unfortunate player the glowflies are gathering around.
• Red Sky, Take Warning: The sky in Splatsville's town square will turn red during a Big Run event.
• Rent-a-Zilla: One of the King Salmonids which may show up at the end of a Salmon Run game is Cohozuna, a Godzilla-esque Salmonid.
• Scoring Points: At the end of a Big Run, everyone who participated gets a reward based on their highest score of Golden Eggs secured during a run. The top 5% of high scorers get a golden decoration, the top 20% get a silver version, the top 50% get bronze, and everyone else gets green plastic.
• Simple Solution Won't Work: During a Big Run invasion at Undertow Spillway, Shiver may suggest to use it as it was originally intended by opening the sluice and washing away all the Salmonids with the ensuing flood. Big Man points out how it won't work, since the valve that enables such has rusted over and the city won't bother fixing it.
• This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman:
  • The Brush class of weapons, normally considered to be among the worst to get in a Salmon Run shift due to the complete lack of range they have, can shred through Big Shots like paper since not only is the boss slow moving (meaning rapid brush strokes will rapidly cause damage), they also can't directly attack players, meaning there is nothing wrong with getting up close.
  • Exploshers get additional use outside of just splatting Flyfish during Mudmouth Eruptions. The explosive properties of the weapons shot applies to the Mudmouth as well, and its ability to pierce through Salmonids give it an extremely easy time splatting them.
• Took a Level in Kindness: It seems that Grizzco's HR department had a word with Mr. Grizz over the way he talks to his employees in the previous game. Compared to back then, his dialogue is far more friendly and personable, sometimes sharing odd musings and anecdotes, and replacing some of his more cruel quotes with more corporate friendly ones. He's still the same old Bad Boss forcing you to risk your life for his profits and paying you in gachapon, but he's at least nicer about it
  Grizz's Mothership quote in Splatoon 2: "A Mothership. You'll need to organize to bring it down. But don't even THINK about starting a union!"
  Grizz's Mothership quote in Splatoon 3: "A Mothership? Everyone, just go after it together. You'll be fine. Probably."
• Tradesnark™: The letter Deep Cut receives at the end of a Big Run thanks all participants for joining "an official Grizzco Big Run™."
• Wallbonking: Big Shots are quite bulky and have a limited number of valid spawn points per wave, depending on where they set up their launcher. Because of this, if too many Big Shots spawn at once, they can get stuck walking into each other until one of them dies. It almost looks like they're making out.
• Wanted Meter: Doing Grizzco shifts will slowly fill out the Cohozuna-shaped meter (known as the Salmometer) in the top right of the screen, while you're at Grizzco HQ. The higher the team's Salmometer is combined, the more likely they are to fight an Xtrawave, with it being guaranteed if everyone's Salmometer is filled full.
• Your Size May Vary: All Smallfry are, well, small, but the Smallfry that attack on foot (fin?), Agent 3's "little buddy", the Smallfry that pilot Flyfish, and the Smallfry that hover around Fish Sticks^note listed in rough order from smallest to largest are all different sizes from one another.

Side Order

Ascend the Spire...

• A Day in the Limelight: Like in the Octo Expansion, Off the Hook takes the spotlight in Splatoon 3: Side Order after Return of the Mammalians was focused on the Squid Sisters and Deep Cut. Humorously, the first thing revealed about Side Order, before even the name, was that it was about Pearl and Marina; given how badly Out of Focus the two are in the base game, it comes across as the devs trying to avoid another "Bring Callie Back" situation.
• Ascended Extra: DJ dedf1sh, formerly a background character for Octo Expansion whose existence was only hinted at in outside materials, makes a physical appearance in the September 2023 Direct as a major character.
• Attack Drone: The Pearl Drone is shown fighting alongside Eight in some shots of the trailer, and one of the color chips featured in the second trailer is titled "Drone Splat Bomb", and describes that it enables the Pearl Drone to use Splat Bombs.
• The Bus Came Back: After sitting out the main game and simply appearing as vocalists for a new band, Off the Hook returns as the focus of the DLC... and so does DJ dedf1sh. Agent Eight returns as well, once again taking up the role of the Player Character.
• Central Theme: As is evident by the name of the expansion, this campaign will focus on the other theme of the Final Fest, Order, contrasting with the main game's theme of Chaos.
• Colorblind Mode: The second trailer shows the Palette mechanic; each Color Chip is associated with a certain color, but so that the UI is still understandable to colorblind players, each color also has abstract art on its surface to distinguish them even when seen through greyscale.
• Cute Machines: Pearl is still as cute and cuddly-looking as a drone, if not more so. She's a little flying ball!
• Darker and Edgier: Compared to the majority of the series, Side Order is very somber and creepy. The first trailer alone emphasizes a much more ominous tone, with strange cryptic imagery flashing quickly and a quiet atmosphere desolate of any other life, contrasting heavily with the generally colorful and fun main game.
• Deliberately Monochrome: Inkopolis Square is completely white, the imagery that flashes throughout the first trailer emphasizes white and black, Pearl and Marina have contrasting light and dark color schemes, and Eight has white clothes and dark hair. Side Order gains a sterile and eerie appearance from this in its first trailer, especially with how the only color that appears nearly as often is red, which tends to otherwise be avoided in the series since it looks like blood. Even allied ink (shown in the second trailer) features as a muted, faint pastel color; leagues away from the brighter tones the series has typically used, and just barely colored enough to clearly distinguish itself from the white paintable surfaces while still giving off that same deathly blankness.
• Denser and Wackier: Despite being much bleaker visually than the main game, Side Order ramps up the outlandishness of the setting quite a bit, bringing in surrealist imagery and a major supporting character who is a zombie — and while Inklings and Octolings have always been able to transform into cephalopods, this is the first time we've seen one turn into a robot. It manages to be both Denser and Wackier and Darker and Edgier at the same time.
• Difficult, but Awesome: The second trailer shows a "floor selection" screen. The harder floors are listed as giving a higher reward.
• Eldritch Location: The first area seen in the DLC is Inkopolis Square... bleached completely white, with tons of ghost coral decorating the area, and the surreal sight of fish swimming through the air. The flashing images depict even stranger, more disturbing areas as well, with one depicting a field of spikes resembling hostile nuclear warning architecture that appears to be covered in growing veins. A look inside the titular Spire of Order shows it to be full of impossibly vast landscapes, pocked with glitched out holes in the environment.
• Evil Tower of Ominousness: Shown in the first DLC trailer is Inkopolis Square, with a bleach-white version of the Deca Tower. Just like the surrounding eerie paleness, it too seems offputting and ominous. It is given the title of "Spire of Order" in the official trailer.
• It's All Upstairs From Here: The most standout landmark in the first trailer is what appears to be a warped version of Deca Tower. Referred to as "The Spire of Order" by the second trailer, the gameplay of this DLC is oriented around ascending the tower.
• Matrix Raining Code: Some camera shots in the second trailer feature landscapes made out of this stuff. Glowing gold kana-like glyphs, in that same Splatoon Inkling language, scrolling across the black surfaces they reside on.
• Meaningful Name: "Side Order" is an appropriate name for a "side" campaign focused on "order".
• Morphic Resonance: Pearl's drone form incorporates her crown and tentacles into its shape, and even has a small hole under the eyes to imitate her mole.
• Muck Monster: The trailer shows various enemies, and each is coated with a thick membrane of black goop.
• One-Steve Limit: Played with in regards to Eight and Acht (aka DJ dedf1sh), with the latter being German and Dutch for "eight".
• Order Is Not Good: The main theme of Side Order is order, and it's portrayed as a vapid wasteland that comes off as unnerving, as shown by Inkopolis Square being completely bleached white and seemingly abandoned. "Order" taken to its logical extreme, and it's obvious something has gone horribly wrong.
• Robotic Undead: The September direct for the game shows a number of enemies designed this way. Each resembles a fish's skeleton, but made from hard-edged pieces that suggests artificial, non-organic construction.
• Rotating Arcs: Side Order focuses on Off the Hook, whereas Return of the Mammalians stars the Squid Sisters and Deep Cut. This isn't quite comparable to the Octo Expansion, which was more devoted to shining a spotlight on some underutilized characters; Splatoon 3's campaigns work by Cast Herd rules, with ROTM bringing Callie, Marie, and Deep Cut to the fore while sidelining Pearl and Marina, while the inverse is true for SO.
• Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Trailer: Despite the September 2023 trailer heavily featuring Pearl, Marina is noticeably absent. However, the Canned Specials in Side Order appear to have her face on them, and Dedf1sh/Acht mentions knowing her.
• Splash of Color: Acht's neon green skin, red and blue tentacles and pure black dress and shoes makes her stand out strongly against the pastel colors of the Spire of Order, barring the hint of white coming from the bandage on her right arm.

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"From Splatsville, that's a wrap. Catch ya later!"

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