jebmo’s posthaven

Bless the sound designers and Foley artists who worked on Splatoon 2: the hypercolored team-based shooter boasts a squish-per-minute count that has got to be the highest in videogame history. In one illustrative sequence, I sink into the ground and burrow along a path of luminescent purple ink of my own creation—then burst back to the surface in the middle of an industrial arena and start firing my gun. Globs of that same ink cover the ground, the walls. Every shot delivers a hollow-but-not-entirely-dry plahh as it exits the barrel, and then a wet shloip! as it splats against a surface. I fling them toward my opponent, who bursts into their own shower of ink. It's like a deathmatch designed by mess fetishists.

The sequel to Splatoon, the Wii U's surprise 2015 hit, is effortlessly witty, light, and fun. It cloaks its premise—a world dominated by children who can transform into adorable cartoon squids—in a broad pastiche of punk and skater subcultures. It takes more joy in style than perhaps any other contemporary game, revelling in music and fashion; its in-universe heroes are pop stars, not warriors. And beneath that style is a thrilling, frantic competitive shooter reworked into a party game worthy of the Nintendo pedigree. These kids shoot ink, not bullets, which somehow transmogrifies the game's violent impulses into youthful mischief.

Of course, all of the above is also true of the first Splatoon. When the squid shooter hit the Wii U, it singlehandedly ushered in a brief revitalization of Nintendo's misunderstood console. No one ever really got the Wii U, and it never fit comfortably into the ecosystem of videogame consoles, but a game like Splatoon, with this much verve and originality, had the potential to save it.

That didn't happen; the Wii U withered, and the Switch (a much better console by all accounts) seems here to stay, leaving fans of the first game in an odd situation. Splatoon 2, which comes out on Friday, is a sequel that feels more like a reboot, refining and re-introducing what works in the series without changing much. The additions—including a more fleshed out single-player mode—are welcome, and the Switch's portability is an excellent match for the game's quick, dynamic matches. But if you spent time with the original, don't expect to be surprised.

Repetition isn't entirely without merit in this case. Splatoon's brilliance is in its pedagogy, the way its multiplayer maps worm into your brain. In any multiplayer shooter, the stages in which you play are everything, and determine your experience and your performance; if you're cartographically minded enough to internalize these arenas, you'll be better prepared to respond to your enemies. It's so ingrained in the culture of shooters that we don't call them "levels" anymore, or "arenas." We call them maps, and you need to learn them if you want to be a part of the conversation.

But Splatoon makes this learning process central to the in-game action. Competitive matches here aren't won by killing—or "splatting", as it's called—your enemies. Instead, they're won by covering the arena itself in ink; the team that covers more of the map wins. That means a meaningful part of each match is spent shooting at, and keeping track of, the scenery itself: Making sure every wall, floor, and environmental obstacle is covered with your ink, and attacking opponents for the sole purpose of creating more space to mark your territory. (You travel via those ink-pools in squid form to get places quickly, as well as to reload your weapons.)

Nintendo

This has the crucial side effect of teaching you the maps quickly. What this means is that anyone playing is going to become conversant in the game's language fast. Cleverly, the game also limits online multiplayer to two maps per day, feeding them to players via a slow drip of new environments over their first few days of play. This structure makes Splatoon 2 an accessible entry point for players who aren't familiar with shooters—and a fun diversion for those who are. There's depth in these matches, if you want it, but they sing as lighter fare, a candy to munch on for a few minutes every so often. Splatoon 2 is wise to leave that core unchanged, to avoid the temptation to try to make itself more elaborate to satisfy returning fans.

If only the Switch's online infrastructure was as intuitive. Don't get me wrong, getting online and playing is easy—pre-release, I've even been able to get a stable, playable connection via tethering my Switch to my cell phone's 4G—but playing with friends is considerably harder. To do so easily requires a separate phone app. That phone app is also the only means of in-game voice chat, engendering absurd solutions to game audio like this branded splitter, meant to let you get in-game sound and voice chat in the same headphones. The phone app wasn't available before launch, so I haven't had a chance to try it out yet. But even if it works swimmingly, it's still a terrible solution. Nintendo has been framing the use of cell phones as part of the Switch's online infrastructure as a common sense measure; after all, everyone owns a phone, right? But everyone playing Splatoon 2 online also owns something else: a frickin' Nintendo Switch.

That gripe aside, Splatoon 2 subtly refines its predecessor, glossing it with a fresh coat of ink and adapting it to the flexibility of the Switch. If the Wii U was a successful console, with a big user base, that might not be enough. But chances are, most people who have the chance to play Splatoon 2 never played the original. And for those players, it's absolutely worth the dive.