Video Game / Splatoon 3

Spoilers from Splatoon and Splatoon 2 are left unmarked.

Back into the ink.

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

Splatoon 3 is a Third-Person Shooter for the Nintendo Switch 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 roguelike campaign that released on February 22, 2024; taking place in what has become of Inkopolis Square after Splatoon 2's Final Fest, the mode follows Agent 8 and Pearl (the latter of which who has, one way or another, transformed into a small drone-like robot). Together they must ascend the thirty floors of the Spire of Order, an odd structure that has replaced Inkopolis Square's Deca Tower, with the aid of the mysterious DJ Dedf1sh.

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Back into the Tropes:

Tropes shared with the franchise

• Anti-Frustration Features
• Metagame
• Scavenged Punk

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.
• Adventurous Irish Violins: The plucky, upbeat Baby Chicks vs. Li'l Bunnies vs. Bear Cubs Splatfest adds equally plucky, upbeat violins to the battle intro theme, and "Anarchy Rainbow" gets a full step-dance remix.
• 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.
• 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, the Wave Breaker, which generates up to three shockwaves, and the Triple Splashdown, which generates two ink-fists alongside the player, totaling three smashes.
  • 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.
  • Side Order sees the return of the number 8 from Octo Expansion, including the balls you use in the levels having the infinity symbol on them (effectively a sideways eight) and Pearl's Killer Wail repeatedly doing 8888 damage to the final boss.
• 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.
• Auto-Kitchen: The stage Robo ROM-en is a ramen shop that's largely staffed by machines with jellyfish supervision. Robots chop various ingredients used for the noodles, prepare ladles full of soup, and bring the dishes to customers.
• 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.
  • One of the challenges is "Making It Rain... Here?" which adds the Rainmaker to Turf War. There's no benefit to picking it up, for the weapon fights and paints poorly, broadcasts the wielder's location to the whole enemy team, and isn't necessary to win the game. As such, both teams are incentivised to ignore the entire point of the challenge and essentially play normal Turf War.
• 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" and "Into the Light" are used for the same purpose in Inkopolis Plaza and Square, respectively.
• 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.
  • The Splashdown proper was also retooled into the Triple Splashdown for Chill Season 2023. While it still retains the weakness of being able to be shot at during the wind-up, it now compensates for this by summoning two ink fists that deal additional Splashdown explosions near the user. This gives it several edges over the original: enabling it to hit from further away or safely do so upon low-ground enemies, making it so that the Special can still have some effect even when the user is taken out, and reducing how viable it is to simply shoot down the user (to fully negate the Special, that'll need to be done three times, which just isn't possible for some weapons). It's also a major beneficiary of the Tacticooler, which enables the Triple Splashdown's landing attack in more situations.
• 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.
• Bedsheet Ghost: The October 2023 Splatfest had unique costumes for each member of Deep Cut for the spooky Halloween season. Shiver and Frye got appropriately ghoulish, gothic ensembles to wear. Big Man wore a giant pale green tablecloth with holes cut out for his eyes, mouth, and gills. Naturally, he was Team Ghost for the Splatfest.
• 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.
• Boring, but Practical: The Snipewriter 5H is unique in the Charger category: instead of dealing out a One-Hit Splat, fully charging the gun gives it multiple weaker shots that it can fire in rapid succession. This isn't quite as exciting as shooting enemies and killing them with one shot, but the Snipewriter gains quite the edge in painting this way, being able to coat a solid rectangle from a distance and very rapidly once it's allowed to set up; for this reason, the weapon is the ultimate backline/support hybrid, not doing anything too thrilling alone but enabling teammates to jump back into the fight quickly and fight with a potent turf advantage.
• 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 Splatsville is 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 giving as many uses as the duration permits and doesn't shoot an existing bomb type.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: Purchasing the Expansion Pass 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. Likewise, completing your first run of Side Order lets you return to Inkopolis Square, bringing back all of the shopkeepers who had yet to appear in the game.
• 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.
  • Many of the remixed Special Weapons have a rough, unsophisticated appearance. The Trizooka for example is made out of pipes, duct tape, and a air vent filter, while the Triple Inkstrike trades out the Inkstrike's sophisticated tablet targeting system in favor of having the user manually mark missile targets by throwing things.
  • 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; dead ends cut off any path to the greater city, the side walkways are winding and disorderly, and the shop placements are disorganized (Naut Couture is on the second floor of Ammo Knights' building, Crush Station is underground, etc.).
  • On a wider scope, Splatsville's location in the middle of the desert gives it a golden, yellow/brown-skewing color palette, which aligns with Team Chaos' ink colors in Splatoon 2's Final Fest.
  • 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 Sultry 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. In a similar fashion, using Inkopolis Square as your hub replaces the color scheme with the second game's pink and green.
• 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:
  • When entering Hotlantis from the street, 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.
• 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.
  • The S-BLAST '92 is patterned on the SNES' Super Scope peripheral. Its palette-swapped S-BLAST '91 repaints it to use the SNES' violet and light-grey colors.
  • 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. Initially, any weapon types that didn't exist in that game just use their regular win animation. Fresh Season 2024 adds new animations for said weapon types for the emote. The Square Show-Off emote does the same for Splatoon 2's win poses.
    • 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 with clean, wide-open designs. This game takes place in Splatsville, a traditionalistic and more rural city with taller, more claustrophobic buildings and a messy tangle of streets, alleys, and walkways.
• 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.
• A Day in the Limelight: The trailer for Chill Season 2023 features a new Chirpy Chips song. Appropriately, the visuals are very Harmony-centric, and borrows her likeness for many flairs for its duration.
• Death from Above: Just like the original, the Triple Splashdown has the user rising into the air before smashing the ground with a gigantic ink explosion to pulverize foes. The Triple Splashdown improves on this by adding a pair of ink fists that spawn next to the caster and create their own ink explosions on impact, making it less safe for enemies to attempt to shoot down the caster lest they miss the additional explosions and get themselves splatted. The Triple Splashdown can also be used from a Super Jump like the original, creating a much bigger explosion at the expense of giving up the ink fists.
• 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. Allies also need to be near the cooler to get the buff rather than it being automatically applied.
• 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.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • The Trizooka launches ink blasts that are a One-Hit Kill on a direct hit. With their massive range and ability to arc through the air to hit behind cover, they exert a very threatening presence on the field, but if they don't hit directly, they won't kill instantly. And the user only gets three of them, so they need to be very wise about how they use their shots.
  • The Zipcaster does not give some crazy uber-weapon, unlike other Specials in the game. Instead, the user's sub weapon is temporarily replaced with the ability to grab surfaces and rapidly pull yourself towards them. This enables crazy mobility and the ability to attack from otherwise-impossible angles, but the user needs to be able to aim well while jumping all over their enemies in order to make use of this Special. This is exemplified by the New Squiffer, which demands the user to be able to make extremely precise air-trickshots with a Sniper Rifle, but it can be a real menace in the hands of a crack shot.
  • 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 Kraken Royale, which has a number of nerfs to reduce how dominant its origin was in Splatoon 1. It's slower and can't be sped up with gear abilities, so you need to position yourself close before using it. Its One-Hit Kill now requires that you commit to a Charged Attack. It is still invincible, but a short animation that plays before it's active prevents you from using it to instantly decide a fight, and a cooldown animation when it ends means you need to splat the whole enemy team or retreat before the duration expires. All that said, it still has the potential to clean house if you use it when the enemies are grouped up, or if you coordinate Kraken usage with your team — but if you can't get good use from it, you're picking a special that won't do anything except get kited by a single enemy player.
  • The S-BLAST '92 has a gimmick where grounded shots have extended range, the projectile traveling 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.
• Disney School of Acting and Mime: Character animations in Splatoon 3 are noticeably more detailed and theatrical than the previous two games, with a tendency toward the exaggerated body language and sweeping arm movements associated with this trope. This is most easily seen when comparing Off the Hook's Splatfest dances from Splatoon 2 with the newly reanimated ones.
• 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-Induced Plot Hole: In the dialogue for Splatoon 2's North America-only Unicorn vs. Narwhal Splatfest, Marina mentions that her landlord is a narwhal — something Splatoon 3 makes clear shouldn't be possible, since mammals in general are extinct outside of the Judds and Mr. Grizz. Sea creatures aren't granted an exception, as the Salmonid Field Guide implies that dolphins are extinct by saying the Flipper-Flopper's mask is modeled after "a creature said to have flourished in ancient times."
• 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. ^note The live version of the song is slightly rewritten to have Shiver and Frye come down on Big Man for allowing Off the Hook to perform during their concert without telling them first, but otherwise plays out the same. 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)

• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • For unclear reasons, the first and third update seasons (Drizzle Season 2022 and Fresh Season 2023) had no accompanying season trailer. Of the first twelve update seasons, these two are the only ones that lack trailers at all.
  • Because Splatoon 3 launched slightly into September, Drizzle Season 2022 is the only season that is shorter than three months.
  • There are (as of the the 2024 SpringFest) three post-launch Idol Splatfest battle songs: Liquid Sunshine, Big Betrayal, and Suffer No Fools. The first of these songs to be released (Liquid Sunshine) is the only one to not have a partial translation and the only one to not be unveiled alongside a music video of the Idols performing (it is instead played over Tricolor Turf War gameplay).
• 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. Pearl and Marina will also still wave and pose for you if you peep into their studio in Inkopolis Square, with their "Octoling pose" from Splatoon 2 returning once you clear Side Order with every palette.
  • 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, which itself requires you to defeat them three times on each of the lower two difficulties, meaning at minimum 540 Tableturf games pre-DLC or a whopping 936 post-DLC 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 - there are two banners that require 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.
  • During the Frosty Fest, the camera has frost forming on it due to how cold the environment became.
• Fatal Fireworks: The Fresh Season trailer advertises a new Splatfest feature: the Fizzbang. Taking the form of traditional ball-shaped Japanese fireworks, the user can throw them, and upon landing, they float up into the air before exploding into a sphere of sparks. They'll paint the area around them in your color, and while they don't deal too much damage individually, you can throw a lot of them in a short period.
• 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.
• Fog of War: One of the new Challenge modes causes Salmon Run fog to appear in a Turf War match. This limits players' vision to only stuff that's nearby.
• 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.
• Fragile Speedster: The Recycled Brella 24 Mk I. Its shield launches really quickly and enables the user to move forward very often. However, it has really low shield HP, as one might expect from something made out of seaweed.
• 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.
  • Two waiter robots can be seen on a side passage in Robo ROM-en repeatedly bumping against each other in an attempt to pathfind forwards. Also, beneath the stage, a jellyfish chef feverently chases a haywire waiter robot as it escapes without a bowl of ramen.
• 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 dialogue for new seasons, 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 and Inkopolis Square 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's Grizzco locations, which are not only depicted as only having ground floors 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".
• Getting Crap Past the Radar: As part of the Side Order DLC, Jelfonzo's infamous Wingdinglish "Fuck You" shirt returns unchanged from Splatoon 2, although he now wears it on Sundays instead of Tuesdays.
• Glass Cannon: The Recycled Brella 24 Mk I has incredibly high damage at all ranges and the default kit comes with Angle Shooter to quickly finish off weakened opponents. However, the umbrella canopy shield that it has is far weaker than that of the other Brella weapons.
• Golden Snitch: Of the five categories in a Splatfest, the three Turf War categories are worth the most points, especially Tricolor. In fact, winning Tricolor (only available in the final 24 hours) and one of the other Turf War categories will ensure victory, even if another team won the other three categories; exactly this happened during the Handshake vs. Fist Bump vs. Hug Splatfest, in which Fist Bump secured the pre-Splatfest categories and won the open matchmaking category, yet Handshake was able to win in a sudden upset by getting Tricolor and the solo matchmaking category.
• Grappling-Hook Pistol: The Zipcaster special allows players to grapple onto objects and zip across the stage for a short period of time.
• Grenade Spam: The Super Chump's modus operandi is scattering a large number of bombs across a designated area. Already, it's enough to qualify for this trope, but the N-ZAP '85 doubles down on it, pairing it with the cheap Autobomb. Use enough Ink Saver (Sub) with it, and that weapon can throw four bombs to add to the explosive spam Super Chump gives.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • 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 never 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.
• Handshake Substitute: The November 2023 Global Splatfest topic discussed this: "What's your go-to greeting?", featuring teams for fistbumps and hugs against the classic handshake. In the end, the ol' traditional won out.
• 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.
• Holiday Mode:
  • For October 28-30 2023, a Halloween-themed Splatfest was active. The theme of this fest was for who would make the best friend: zombies, skeletons, or ghosts, colored the classic green, orange, and purple that represent the holiday. Also, Splatsville and Inkopolis Plaza received a spooky Splatfest makeover, with skull-ish paintings decorating various surfaces, some characters donning slightly more festive gear, and both Deep Cut and the Squid Sisters wearing Halloween costumes.
  • January 12-14 2024 had a winter-themed Splatfest. During the fest, Splatsville and Inkopolis Plaza were so cold that the screen had frost forming on it, while Deep Cut and the Squid Sisters wore winter-themed costumes.
• 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.
• Inconsistent Dub: Damp Socks, the band Off the Hook collaborates with, is called "Busy Vacation" in the Japanese version. Usually this is kept consistent in-game, but a poster of the groups performing together that was added in the Fresh Season 2024 update was only half-localized as the "NKSQ-BVOTH poster."
• Interface Screw:
  • One of the side effects of the giant tornadoes summoned by a Triple Inkstrike is that they create a lot of visual noise. Using a Triple Inkstrike to screw with an opponent's sightline long enough to sneak in a close-range ally can be a viable strategy.
  • The Splattercolor Screen deploys an opaque wall of ink that slowly moves forward and inks the ground while obstructing vision for all players unless passed through. Opponents who attempt to pass through it will take 30 damage and be inflicted with temporary colorblindness as the colors onscreen fade to a monochrome palette. The sound is also heavily muted with a strong white noise overlay.
• Interface Spoiler: Promotional materials for Side Order tried very hard to hide the fact that you unlock Inkopolis Square as a new hub after completing your first run through the Spire of Order. And it would have been a pleasant surprise... except the Tableturf Battle rivals you can unlock through the campaign are visible from the Dojo as soon as you buy the DLC and include the Square's shopkeepers, and the jukebox lists the Off the Hook version of Inkopolis News under "City" (like the Squid Sisters version, which is part of the lobby rotation in the Plaza) instead of "Other". The biggest giveaway is the addition of the Square to the train station menu, though for story reasons, it will take you to the Order Sector instead until you clear the Spire of Order for the first time.
• 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.
• Japanese Ranguage: The "BFD-OTL deco" locker decoration should probably be "BFT-OTR" instead, because it's a sprite of an Octorock from Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.
• Keep It Foreign:
  • In the Sunken Scrolls, one of the "Staff" goldfish's multiple aliases is Poisson Rouge from Rue de [redacted]. In the French version, this identity goes by "Goldfish" and comes from [redacted] Street instead.
  • Acht, whose name means "eight" in German and Dutch, got a Dub Name Change in those languages — the Dutch version renames them to Smarachne, while the German version transliterates their given name as "Ahato."
  • The El Rey Calamar item (a lucha libre mask) is renamed the "Máscara Squid King" in the European Spanish translation.
• Lame Pun Reaction: Shiver makes a particularly groan-worthy pun during the results announcement of the Drums/Guitar/Keyboard Splatfest. Frye and Big Man are not amused.
  Big Man: Ay! Ay? (Yeesh! Good thing the power of keyboards saved us all, huh?)
  Shiver: Yes. You might say that they were the "key" to our prosperity.
  Frye: BOOOO!
  Big Man: Ay... (And on that note, we're done here...)
• Later-Installment Weirdness: The first 11 Splatfests were all worldwide themes, suggesting that this would be a universal trend in this game. The 12th Splatfest is region-specific: Kaiten-Yaki vs Ōban-yaki vs Imagawa-Yaki in Japan, Handshake vs. Fist Bump vs. Hug everywhere else.
• 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. And it didn't stop there — in one of the stage dialogues for Hagglefish Market, Frye brings up a merchant to whom Deep Cut often sells the treasure they plunder from the Crater.
  • The opening dialogue for the Baby Chicks vs. Li'l Bunnies vs. Bear Cubs Splatfest has Big Man comment that the round ears of bear cubs look oddly familiar, a comment which Shiver appears uncharacteristically perturbed by — because it's referencing Mr. Grizz, the Big Bad of Return of the Mammalians.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: During the Anarchy Splatcast, you may get this exchange when Bluefin Depot (a returning stage from the first Splatoon game that features the addition of moving elevators in 3) is listed.
  Frye: Did you know that Bluefin Depot used to be a bit dilapidated?
  Big Man: Ay! Ay. (Well, now it's practically a tourist attraction! The remodel really worked.)
  • The conclusion of the Japanese-exclusive Kaiten-Yaki vs Ōban-yaki vs Imagawa-Yaki Splatfest in 2023 had Big Man remark that their next concert was booked for where the Splatfest's topic originated from. The sentence makes sense In-Universe, but out-of-universe, Big Man was referencing Nintendo Live 2024. While the event in question was canceled, it was planned to take place in Tokyo (where Ōban-yaki were first sold) and feature a holographic Deep Cut/Off the Hook concert.
• 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.
• Lost in Translation:
  • Off the Hook's world tour is more divisive among international players because Pearl's dialogue announcing it after the FinalFest was made much less explicit. In the Japanese dialogue, Pearl says that the two are about to "move out into the world"; in the English one, she just says Off the Hook is "GONNA TAKE OVER THE WORLD!" (and some languages don't have an equivalent line at all). Not only is this vaguer, the international scripts otherwise place more emphasis on the two exploring other genres of music — in fact, the "take over the world" line comes right after a sentence about breaking into new genres, so many players didn't realize it was supposed to mean they were going on tour until Marina's Dev Diaries spelled it out. As a result, Off the Hook's tour plot in Splatoon 3 had almost no foreshadowing outside of Japan and wasn't built up as important, causing uninformed fans to bash it before Side Order's release as a sloppy writing cheat to keep Pearl and Marina out of the picture until Side Order was ready, rather than the key part of their character arc it was intended to be.
  • Inkopolis Plaza wasn't formally called that until Splatoon 2 — before then, it was just "Inkopolis." The similar name to Inkopolis Square caused many international fans to assume that they were just different boroughs of the same city. In Japanese, the former has always been known as High-Color City, and it is treated as a distinct town in the same metropolitan area as the Square. Apparently the team working on Splatoon 3 didn't get the memo either way, because Inkopolis Plaza was usually just called "Inkopolis" (on the Splatoon world map, for instance) until Side Order released and a distinction was suddenly necessary. This had the side effect of making Inkopolis Square's return in the DLC a bit more of a surprise for international players.
• 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.
• Mêlée à 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 for Nothing: Sheldon Licenses originally had no use after the player obtained all the weapons, so people who have would just continue to acquire more despite having nothing to buy them with. Chill Season 2023 would subvert this by letting anyone who has bought all the weapons redeem Licenses for free Shell-Out Machine pulls.
• 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.
• Newbie Immunity: To start an Anarchy Battle series, you normally have to pay an amount of Rank Points that scales based on your current Anarchy Battle rank; how many points you get back after completing the series depends on your performance. However, at the game's lowest rank of C-, which is the player's starting rank unless they imported data from Splatoon 2, the entry fee is free, meaning there's no penalty at all for losing the series.
• 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, Splatsvillains, and Inkopolis inhabitants take on a cute Super-Deformed appearance on Tableturf cards... except for the Inklings and Octolings on the cards that represent brands and the Octoling enemy card, 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".
  • After completing Side Order, players gain the ability to return to Inkopolis Square from Splatoon 2, with its introductory cutscene once again being lifted shot-for-shot from Splatoon 2's opening. All of the square's old residents return (except Sheldon, who's still busy with his Splatsville store) — even Off the Hook, who finally have a chance to unwind now that their world tour is over.
• No OSHA Compliance: In-Universe, Bleufin Depot apparently doesn't meet the regulatory standards of ORCA, the in-universe stand in for OSHA. To be clear, that's the Occupational Regulatory Commission for Accidents, not the Omniscient Recording Computer of Alterna.
• 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. Similarly, if you use the Reefslider while holding a Power Clam, you drop it when the Reefslider explodes, so you can't abuse its invulnerability to approach the basket and throw in a Power Clam without the enemy being able to interfere in some way.
  • 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.
  • If a Tacticooler is used, each player will only get one drink each even if there's one or two remaining and can't be used like if someone disconnected or you're playing as the attacking team in a Tricolor Match.
• 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 new store called Crab-N-Go in the lobbies, Shrimp Kicks in Inkopolis Plaza is instead run by Fred Crumbs, and the Crust Bucket is missing from Inkopolis Square due to having been scrapped in Mincemeat Metalworks at some point before the game began. 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 came back in a big way with 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, Inkopolis Plaza or Square, Alterna, the Order Sector, 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.
• Public Domain Soundtrack: In keeping with the holiday theme, the FrostyFest variation of the victory theme "Ego Overboard" works in the first eight notes of "Joy to the World."
• 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.
• Reading the Stage Directions Out Loud: When promoting the Chirpy Chips' newest song, Harmony reads a letter from Orion, accidentally reciting the instructions they left for her for two lines.
  "Harmony, you better be reading this word for word, because I put a lot of time into it." Oh, maybe I wasn't supposed to read that part. "Be sure to tell 'em about your dope random humming. It's what we based the whole song on."
• Recurring Riff:
  • The main theme of this game, Clickbait, can be found quite often. In addition to its normal position as a multiplayer track, it's the tutorial theme, plays from the terminal at the lobby, is the main Tableturf Battle theme, and has two separate remixes for Big Runs.
  • 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.
  • Inkopolis Square still has little bits of "City of Color" and "Ebb & Flow" as part of the background ambience.
• 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.
• Retraux: To fit the chiptune music overlaid onto it, part of the Chill Season 2023 trailer uses highly pixelated gameplay footage to emulate old videogame sprites.
• 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.
• Sensory Abuse: The Splattercolor Screen is intended to wash out colors to shades of white and grey and replace sound with white noise on enemy screens. Unfortunately, the original version worked too well on some players, which led to an update altering the effect so that the screen becomes darker instead of lighter.
• Separated by a Common Language: The Japanese-exclusive Splatfest of November 2023 was about what people call certain red bean paste-stuffed cakes — Kaiten-Yaki vs Ōban-yaki vs Imagawa-Yaki — reflecting how the dish has multiple different names in various Japanese dialects. To highlight this, Shiver repeatedly states that it makes no sense to argue in favor of teams based on how the dishes taste (they're all the same dish), each Deep Cut member describes the dish identically ("Red bean paste tightly bound in a warm and crumbly crust"), and all three Splatfest team symbols are the same with exception to a small text bubble on them.
• 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. Agent 8 would eventually become the player character in Side Order, but Agent 4 is still absent, only referenced in dialogue and serving as the basis for a Palette.
  • 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). Even more strangely, the other idols do get mentioned during Off the Hook's focus campaign Side Order. The two wouldn't get another nod in the base game until their new Splatfest song "Suffer No Fools", over a full year and a half after Splatoon 3 released.
• 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 ruin that may have once been a Turf War battle site.
• Ship Tease: Side Order already laid on the Pearl/Marina subtext pretty thick, but it doesn't end with the campaign — part of the choreography for Off the Hook's new Inkopolis Square song "We're So Back" involves Pearl and Marina giving a Meaningful Look into each other's eyes before Marina puts her arm around Pearl's waist for a suspiciously long time. Promotional art for their Splatfest song "Suffer No Fools" likewise features Marina heavily leaning against Pearl while putting an arm around her shoulder, something that might not read as intimate if it weren't for everything surrounding it.
• Short-Range Shotgun: All the Brellas maintain poor damage at a distance. Except with the Recycled Brella 24 Mk I, which has a very narrow shot spread that enables it to do significant damage even at the edge of its range.
• 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.
  • The Swim Reaper mask, debuted for Splatoween 2023, mimics Ghostface's mask from the Scream films.
  • In the trailer for Chill Season 2023, an Octoling falls off the stage which then briefly freeze-frames with a "To Be Continued" arrow from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure in Inkling language.
• 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.
• Stance System:
  • The Stringer class is unique for one mechanic: shooting a Spread Shot of three darts, the spread is horizontal while grounded and vertical while in the air. Vertical shots are better for nailing its One-Hit Kill since player hitboxes are taller than they are wide; horizontal shots are capable of nailing enemies with chip damage better since they cover more ground.
  • The S-BLAST has two firing modes likewise activated by if the player's in midair or not: while grounded, the shots are long-range but have minimal explosion size, and while airborne they have massive explosions but tiny range.
  • Dualies maintain this ability from the previous game, and Fresh Season 2024 adds a new Dualie that really exemplifies this trope: the Douser Dualies FF. When shot normally, it reaches far, but has somewhat poor accuracy and fire rate. Rolling with it will vastly increase the fire rate and improve the accuracy, but in exchange it loses a significant amount of range and prevents the user from moving for a significant duration.
• 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.
• Superweapon: The Modded Rainmaker Test-Fire challenge soups up the Rainmaker weapon, giving it a three-way Spread Shot and granting its wielder a Tacticooler buff. This turns the weapon from a liability that has to be struggled with to a really potent long-range backline weapon that can bombard wide-open spaces with explosive shots and make it hazardous to move through. And even when the user is focused down and splatted, the Tacticooler buff ensures they can make it back into the fray very quickly.
• 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.
  • Since Sheldon is now running the Splatlands branch of Ammo Knights, the Inkopolis Plaza and Inkopolis Square branches are filled by the tadpole shrimp twins Shelly and Donny (respectively), 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.
• 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 various branches of Ammo Knights having testing ranges 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, menacing antagonist. 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 has a helmet to protect against the vacuum, and the Octobot King L3.Gs 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. Deep Cut also get in some variations should you fail during the final boss.
• 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, with Triple Splashdown replacing it for the 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: 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: The land of Alterna features an abandoned subterranean civilization that was once the last refuge of humanity, but as you play through the story mode, you might find that it's a place where physics goes to die. For starters, everything within this place is artificial, from the landscape to the snow to the illusion of sunlight itself. Even with the existence of advanced technology in mind, Alterna is absolutely massive, to the point its true size and extent cannot be ascertained, and the snow you see throughout this place doesn't melt in spite of the tremendous temperatures at the depths Alterna is found. Gravity also seems to work differently than it does on the surface, as some of the levels are set in cities lining the insides of vast cylindrical structures or seemingly regular 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.
• 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.
• The Greatest Story Never Told: True to form for the series, the player character, DJ Octavio, the New Squidbeak Splatoon, and Deep Cut are the only ones who know about all the adventures you had in the crater and beyond. Shiver is all too happy to declare her undying allegiance to Marie and "her assistant lady" on air, though. Marina also hints that she's learned about the new Agent 3's exploits after you beat her in a Tableturf Battle.
• #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 Mean 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.
• 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."
• Precision F-Strike: Lightly implied to have been done by the captain; we don't hear it out loud, but Marie says that they "had some CHOICE things to say about Deep Cut" after you defeat Big Man and collect the last treasure.
• 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: Return of the Mammalians 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.
• 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 Line: After the first boss against DJ Octavio, Cuttlefish notes that it didn't feel like Octavio was using the Great Zapfish's power. In response, Octavio says something that shows just how different the story mode will be from the first two games:
  DJ Octavio: Mute it, fool! I didn't steal the Zapfish this time!
• 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.
• Antepiece: 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. The Steelhead dummy in particular is raised up in the air to simulate its shape and weak spot when charging a bomb, so you can practice shooting upwards and learning which available weapons are best suited for it.
• 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.
  • 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.
  • Introduced in the Chill Season 2023 update is a system using the Eggsecutive VP stage badges that allows you to start at higher rankings in the corresponding stages (ex. Having the Bronze Sockeye Station Badge, obtained at EVP 400, will allow you to start at EVP 200 when the rotation switches to said stage). This makes it much easier to grind for the higher rank badges.
  • In the same update, due to the large pool of specials the game can pick from, you are now guaranteed at least two long range specials to be allocated to players, ensuring your team always has a way of dealing with out of range Boss Salmonids.
  • Unlike in Splatoon 2, the two offline training missions can be replayed at any time by opening the manual, and the second mission has been reworked so that you can choose which Boss Salmonid(s) to practice fighting.
• 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).
  • Like the previous game, a triumphant boat horn is played at the end of a successful shift which signals the employees to jump back to the vehicle they arrived in. However, it makes slightly less sense here since the boat from 2 was replaced with a helicopter.
• 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.
• Cool, but Inefficient: The Grizzco weapons are all extremely powerful and impressive, but all of them carry high ink costs, resulting in many unattentive trigger-happy players suddenly running flat in less than 10 seconds.
• 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.
• Foreshadowing: If you complete a run at 333% Hazard Level, Mr. Grizz mentions the "boundless cosmos" as a nod to the Return of the Mammalians campaign's Astral Finale.
• 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.
  • Originally, Big Run rewards were handed out based on how high any given participant's score was relative to those of all players, with only the top 20% getting a silver decoration and only the top 5% getting a gold one. Due to competitive Salmon Runners driving the required percentages for each level of figurine higher with each successive Big Run, casual players were effectively locked out of any level higher than bronze and maybe silver by the fifth one. To combat this, the 6.0.0 update changed this so the thresholds required for each were always fixed and announced at the beginning of the Big Run. Players rejoiced at the news that gold figurines were no longer out of reach — and then despaired as they realized that (with no clear pattern) some players were rewarded based on the new system, and some players were rewarded based on the "top percentage" system. This means that, through no fault of your own, it was entirely possible to clear the given threshold for a certain color of figurine by a significant margin and still get one of a lower level. A lot of angry players who were shooting for gold cleared the 135 mark only to end up with silver figures instead. Making matters worse, the 6.0.1 update, which was supposed to fix this error, didn't actually work for everyone.
• 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.
  • Snatchers are much more helpful than in Splatoon 2. Since they now pilot flying machines, they can appear from any direction and from anywhere on the map to seize unclaimed eggs. This sounds like it would be annoying, but if their flight path takes them past the Egg Basket, you can splat them as they hover by for a convenient delivery of faraway eggs. Proper Snatcher management is essential at higher levels of play.
• 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".
• Instant-Win Condition: Salmonids and their attacks don't instantly disappear once time is up or the King Salmonid is defeated, but the wave is counted as clear if sufficient eggs are in the basket when time is up or the King Salmonid runs out of HP. Particularly if Flyfish are involved, it's not unusual to see a team of four rescue rings being congratulated on clearing a wave.
• 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.
• 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 two golden banners that are tied for the priciest items in the game. They cost 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 banners must be unlocked before you can buy them, which requires spending an additional 450 bronze, 50 silver, and 4 golden scales.
• No Endor Holocaust: Your average Big Run should at least cause heavy amounts of water damage due to the shifting tides, and possibly more due to Salmonid vandalism (the most obvious instance being the giant hole in the glass dome ceiling of Barnacle & Dime). Once the event ends, though, the stages return to the regular rotation no worse for wear. This was carefully avoided with the Big Run on Eeltail Alley, which is set in a heavily populated area of Splatsville; the water level was fixed at a level far below the map itself and any of the buildings on the side, meaning Salmonids could only enter the stage through Gushers.
• 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.
• Noodle Incident: The Big Run in Barnacle and Dime has the Grizzco Chopper enter through a massive hole in the roof of the mall. It goes completely uncommented on with no explanation as to who made it.
• Notzilla: One of the King Salmonids which may show up at the end of a Salmon Run game is Cohozuna, a Godzilla-esque Salmonid.
• 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.
• 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 bombs 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: The King Salmonids.
  • Cohozuna is a massive Godzilla-esque Salmonid who towers over almost everyone, Boss Salmonids included, and it's the tiniest of the bunch.
  • Horrorboros is a dragon-esque salmonid who flies over the stage, and is long enough to be hit from practically anywhere on the map.
  • Megalodontia takes the cake, and it does so in a single bite. It takes up entire sections of a stage with its girth, and its bite is strong enough to devour even its fellow Salmonids.
• 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.
• Skewed Priorities: Despite the ongoing infestation of Salmonids, dialogue by Deep Cut during the Big Run reveals that Barnacle and Dime is only closing most of its shops for the event.
• 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.
  • Dualie Dodge Rolls get more use outside of simply being a step for entering turret mode thanks to Slammin' Lids. The Dodge Rolls let them quickly enter and exit the Lids force field, allowing for them to safely induce slams without the need of inking the ground.
• 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 Mean 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™."
• The Thunderdome: Bonerattle Arena is a former penal colony transformed into a battle arena. Salmonids do battle here day and night to figure out who's the tastiest among them, with salmonids visible in the background of the stage watching as you work your shifts.
• 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...

• 100% Completion: Clearing the Spire of Order for the first time constitutes a fraction of the entire game. After the first clear, you are expected to clear the Spire with every Palette to see everything the story has to offer and obtain every Dev Diary to get Stickers for your Locker. Beyond that, there is also the Chip catalog and the bestiary, both of which require hours of additional grinding to complete and reward Prlz and Titles respectively for completion, as well as cleaning out an additional shop that sells Locker cosmetics and Gear for Prlz.
• 11th-Hour Superpower: During the final fight with Order, 8 manages to get ahold of the palette chips in large quantities, turning 8 into an absolute powerhouse with insane attack power, greatly increased speed, and empowering Pearl's drone. In the end, after 8 grabs all of the Palette chips, this creates the Color Wail which Pearl uses to utterly decimate Order.
• Action Prologue: The game begins with Pearl and Eight storming the Spire of Order to save Marina. After they do so, Order corrupts the Spire even further and kicks off the main part of the story.
• 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. The prologue even has you break Marina out of her mind-controlled situation similar to Callie, and Off the Hook is reunited right at the start. And unlike the Octo Expansion (which is more about Agent 8's escape from the Deepsea Metro and defeat of Kamabo Co.) or Return of the Mammalians (in which the Squid Sisters and Deep Cut play relatively minor roles), the story of Side Order is intrinsically tied to Off the Hook. To a lesser extent, Dedf1sh — real name Acht — makes their first genuine appearance here after they spent the Octo Expansion writing music in the background, never actually seen.
• Advertised Extra: Cipher appears on the key art for Side Order right next to Acht, giving the impression that it would be an important figure in the game's story. It is actually an extremely minor NPC that simply trades locker decorations and banners for Prlz, and doesn't even appear until after you've completed your first run through the tower and seen the credits.
• Alien Sky: Being a virtual world, the skies of the Order Sector are quite different from the real world. When first seen, it's a blank and pale white-pinkish solid color all around, matching the colorlessness of the ground, with subtle circuit board patterns. Once the Spire of Order has been cleared for the first time, it turns to a more heavenly-looking appearance with a cloudy orange and pink horizon transitioning to blue skies overhead, with constellations with visible lines between the stars in the distance.
• All or Nothing: After clearing the Spire a second time, Marina will offer a "Risky Rewards" hack which will give you a large bonus of Prlz after clearing the Spire with the reward increasing with the less hacks you have. However, losing will kick you out with no Prlz at all.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Part of the pile of rewards you get for finishing your first run in the Spire of Order are replicas of the suit, boots, and earring that Eight wears in the Order Sector.
• Animate Inanimate Object: Close inspection of the fish-like things swimming in the air outside the Spire of Order will reveal that they're really minimalist fishing lures.
• Antepiece:
  • One level unique to the tutorial version of the Spire of Order requires that you scale a wall, but the wall isn't inkable. You'll need to wait for a Springing Spiccato to spawn and bounce up using its spring, as a mini-tutorial that some Jelletons will do something helpful if you KO them.
  • The Warm-Up Boss battle serves as one for the Final Boss, in that both are stationary Mook Makers surrounded by a barrier that can only be destroyed by eliminating portals scattered throughout the arena and sync their attacks to the beat of the background music. The final boss has far more health and a more varied attack pattern than the tutorial boss, who mostly just summons Jelletons.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Each color chip on the Palette 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.
  • Because this mode lacks multiplayer functions, the Booyah Bomb automatically charges without the player needing to mash "Booyah!".
  • The disc pieces. Low drop rate, but collecting 3 will launch away all enemies and temporarily prevent more from spawning. They exist largely to prevent prolonged stalemate situations, in which the Jelletons are unable to splat you, but you're too busy dealing with them to actually progress the floor's objective. The reprieve that the step-off song gives will almost definitely give you enough time to effortlessly hit a checkpoint on the objective. If a Danger floor disables Pearl, though, they won't do you any good at all — you need her around to play the Step-Off Song, after all.
  • Unlike in Octo Expansion, 8-Balls (or Infinity Balls, in this case) can never be bounced off the stage, something lampshaded by Pearl and Acht the very first time Eight plays an 8-Ball stage.
  • The Pearl Drone, if you decide to invest in combat chips for her, will usually help you out in the floors objective, like inking the Splat Zone or shooting the Turbine Tower. She won't, however, help with the 8-Balls, which require careful shooting to maneuver into their sockets, and which her reckless shooting could knock in the wrong direction.
  • If you're playing with multiple lives and have lost some of them on your way up, the next Vending Machine Corner you visit will be prioritize extra lives as one of its wares.
  • Unlike almost any other roguelike, you can unlock the ability to restart a failed run by talking to Marina, though at a hefty Prlz cost.
  • Certain bonus challenges ask you to keep yourself from using a particular ability for the floor, like not gliding with the drone or using your sub weapon a set amount of times. These aren't instantly failed if you use the ability, but rather drains the Membux reward you would receive by completing the floor. It gives just a bit of leeway to perform the ability if absolutely necessary.
  • Some of the bonus challenges offer some leniency in what you can do:
    • The "Don't Move in Octoling Form" and "Swim Form" challenges don't penalize you for falling, and the former won't penalize you for using weapons that don't move you.
    • The "Don't Jump" challenge won't penalize you for bouncing off a Springing Spiccato's spring, pressing B to climb a wall faster, or using the Dualies' dodge roll.
  • The lights over each Color Chip indicate how well-researched you have them in your Color Chip notes; 1 light for just Acht's commentary, 2 for Marina's and 3 for Pearl's. Also, if you open the Color Chip list while selecting a level, the chip you will get from the level will be the one where the cursor appears, for easier comprehension of Color Chip effects.
  • If your Palette is full, the Color Chip rewards from levels are replaced with Prlz rewards.
  • If the Pearl Drone has access to Splat Bombs and throws them at the Turbine Tower during Tower Escort stages, they'll land on a hidden lip at the bottom and usually stay there if the tower isn't moving, which helps considering they're affected by gravity and if the tower isn't near the ground.
  • Regarding the unique final palette, because Eight's Palette reduces its Color Chip slots based on your hacks and you can't retry any failed runs with it, you have access to a Floor Skip function, which simultaneously helps make up for lost time and lets you avoid picking bad Color Chips, in case you don't have the Floor Reset hack.
  • As Pearl herself states in one of her Color Chip notes, Pearl Drone won't activate any of her attacks until she has a target in her sight. Since all of her Actions are Cooldown based and take a while to charge, it makes sure she doesn't waste any charge blasting thin air.
  • The Continue hack allows you to restart a floor with all your lives restored for a hefty membux cost, and you can retry any failed run by paying Prlz, although high floor ones can be very pricey.
  • If you don't like a floor you're on after you've already picked it, you can turn around and walk back to the elevator and go back to the floor select screen, though it costs the equivalent amount of Membux as the floor's reward.
  • Because a Color Chip Saturation bonus is random, it could grant a Drone Chip Saturation in an instance where most of the appropriate chips are locked (either because the hacks for them haven't been unlocked or have been deactivated) or not available (if the drone action slots are limited). If this should happen, all of the drone chips are activated and the Pearl Drone is given five action slots, but only for the Drone Chip Saturation level.
  • If you attempt to visit a vending machine while carrying less than 500 Membux (the cost of a first purchase of a Color Chip with out discount hacks), Marina will remind you that you might want to stock up on cash before visiting a machine, which should help prevent accidentally visiting a machine when you don't have enough to buy a single thing.
  • Being in swim form prevents you from using the Pearl Drone's hover. This extends to the Kraken Royale form, which can't switch back to humanoid form to hover to safety... unless it falls off the stage. If that happens, Eight's Kraken Royale mode ends immediately to ensure you can safely return back to solid ground.
• Arc Number:
  • In addition to Agent 8 returning as a protagonist, Dedf1sh's real name is Acht, which is Dutch and German for the number 8. During the final boss, collecting all of the color chips gives Pearl enough power to unleash an attack which deals 8888 damage to Order per hit. The Pearl Plushie headgear item from Cipher's shop costs 888 Prlz to buy. And the songs for the three midbosses contain words with the O's in them replaced with the Greek letter Theta, which is eighth in the Greek alphabet.
  • The number 3 manages to sneak in from the main game too. The last upgrade you unlock costs 333 Prlz to buy, three of the headgear items from Cipher's shop cost 333 Prlz, floor selection and vending machine purchases have three options each, the Spire of Order has 30 floors and 3 boss encounters, and all the music tracks for the levels incorporate the numbers 1 to 3 in them.
• Ascended Extra: Dedf1sh, formerly a background character for Octo Expansion whose existence was only hinted at in outside materials, is a major character in Side Order.
• Ascended Meme:
  • Since the release of the base game, many fans have mocked Agent 4 for not showing up in Splatoon 3 at all, apparently being forgotten by the Squidbeak Splatoon, the Splatoon world, and Nintendo themselves. The devs got in on the fun too; Pearl has to be reminded who Agent 4 is once you find their Palette.
  • Octo Expansion's 8-Balls make a return in the form of ∞-Balls, and Pearl reacts to their debut with alarm, heavily mirroring the community's exasperation with how finnicky they are to control. Acht notes that these ones don't fall off the stage, though.
• Attack Drone: The Pearl Drone can fight alongside Agent 8, having her own meter that fills to bring out a single Killer Wail speaker. Certain color chips allow her to use other specials like Inkstrikes, or even drop sub weapons.
• Awesome, but Impractical: While stacking multiple of one type of Color Chip can give you some absurdly overpowered results, a few can actually be outright detrimental to stack without other color chips to mitigate their drawbacks:
  • Homing Shot is an aimbotters dream, especially if you max it out... until you need to ink an escape route or aim at something else and find all your shots veering off where you don't want it to go. Acht and Marina both aknowledge this, advising you to just take one or two of these chips to help your aim and no more.
  • Main Firing Speed will outright triple your firing speed on most weapons (except for the Order Blast, which dectuples it), but each shot is still consuming the same amount of ink it does normally. You'll drain your weapon of ink in just seconds of firing, so it's advisable to add some ink recovery chips in order to make up for the ink consumption.
• Blackout Basement: One "Danger" factor involves blacking out the surroundings, but certain objectives like Portals and 8-Balls will have a visible aura to help you see them.
• Blown Across the Room: The appropriately named Knockback chips, which amplify the knockback for explosions and rush attacks (like the roller and the brush), or add them for normal attacks. The Knockback chip (for normal attacks) is the strongest, which culminates in a 2000% knockback for each shot, at which point it's often easier to beat Jelletons via Ring Out.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • One of the Color Chips just increases your main, sub, and special damage by a small amount. It's not a particularly exciting upgrade, as the more specialized Power chips will give you a much larger damage up, but at the same time, you can never go wrong with dealing a little more damage. Marina even states such, that it's good for if you can't decide on more specialized chips.
  • Any of the gains for movement chips, for filling ink, special, or drone gauge, tend to put on a lot of work for any weapon just because of how much you need to move. While some weapons like it better than others all of them benefit, especially ink refill since it ignores refill cooldown from things like throwing your sub weapons.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: For the first run of the Spire, Marina is corrupted into a vessel for Order, as the first boss who Eight faces.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: Danger floors can have several effects, including disabling item drops from enemies, disabling the Pearl Drone, and disabling item drops and the Pearl Drone.
• Breaking Old Trends:
  • For the first time in a single-player campaign, Octostomp does not make an appearance as a boss.
  • This is the first time in the series where an idol character directly helps you in the main campaign thanks to Pearl's Drone form turning her into an Assist Character: Previously, Idols simply stuck to helping out through the sidelines.
• 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 Dedf1sh from Octo Expansion, now in a far larger role as a major character and ally. Clearing a first run of Side Order unlocks Inkopolis Square as an alternate hub with Pearl and Marina chilling in the same studio as always, emphasizing that yep, they're so back. Agent Eight returns as well, once again taking up the role of the Player Character. Their absence in the base game is explained by them having been brought on Pearl and Marina's tour.
• Call-Forward: In Marina's eighth Dev Diary entry, written seven months before the start of the campaign, she talks about placing her own Memverse avatar at the top of the Spire of Order as a system manager, while Pearl guides sanitized Octolings up the tower to help restore their memories to their soul. Marina compares this to herself being a "storybook princess" who "brave Pearl" must rescue. This recalls a considerably less romantic event from the start of the campaign, where the ultimate goal of the tutorial sequence is to save Marina from a mind-control device forced onto her by Order.
• Character Customization: Agent Eight's appearance can be customized. Unlike Captain 3, they have the whole suite of new head/hair options added into the game since their debut.
• Central Theme:
  • As is evident by the name of the expansion, Side Order focuses on the other theme of Splatoon 2's FinalFest, Order, contrasting with the main game's theme of chaos. Visual design in the Splatoon series generally follows a colorful, graffiti-covered, sticker-punk attitude. Not so in the Order Sector: nearly everything is a uniformly-colored white, if not a contrasting black or a pastel tone. Furthermore, hard, seamlessly perfect edges are a common fixture of architecture, from the blocky layouts of the Spire of Order's towers to Agent Eight and Pearl forming from straight-edged low-poly abstractions.
  • Unlike Return of the Mammalians, which barely touched upon the theme of Chaos textually, Side Order explicitly discusses Order Versus Chaos, and ultimately concludes that a balance between both sides of the spectrum is ideal - while order and stability is comforting, an unchanging, stagnant world is also not one worth living in. However, large-scale change can be intimidating, and when change forces people to give up something of great value to them, this can lead to resentment and negative consequences. This is demonstrated by the creators of Order - the Octarian engineers who helped Marina create the Memverse - who accidentally created Order due to their resentment towards the mass exodus of Octarians to the surface ^note which was caused by what was implied to be a fairly authoritarian regime and poor living conditions underground, which was why Octolings took the risk to seek refuge on the surface, which effectively destroyed what was left of the Octarian nation. It's implied they wanted, on some level, for things to go back to how they were before, but most of all a return to the stability of the old status quo, which caused the creation of Order, who attempted to bring their dream to life by creating a world of perfect order.
• Challenge Run: In lieu of a Brutal Bonus Level or Superboss, Side Order instead offers the final Palette as the ultimate challenge. Here, the gimmick is that Eight's Palette capacity is reduced by 6 for each Hack you have active, down to a minimum of 6 Chips. Playing through the Spire of Order one last time with this Palette unlocks three additional Dev Diaries containing texts from Acht to Marina about their relationship and Marina's life in the Octarian army, and doing it with 4 Hacks or fewer active rewards you with a Splashtag badge.
• Chekhov's Gun: The Splatoon 3 Direct takes a moment to highlight the fact that Inklings and Octolings now regularly carry phones, which is reflected in-game. Initially, this seems like an unimportant aside to diegetically explain how the player can listen to the Anarchy Splatcast while walking around Splatsville; Side Order makes this a plot point by one of the Dev Diaries revealing that Order can suck people into the Memverse via phone connections, meaning that almost every Inkling and Octoling is in danger.
• Color Contrast: Most of the environments are bleached white, while the Jelletons have white body parts coated in black ooze that's used as their ink.
• Console Cameo: The mind control goggles Marina Agitando wears, which you can later unlock to wear in multiplayer battles as the Controller VM, resembles a Virtual Boy — the sides are two halves of its controller and part of the stand. Appropriate, since the Memverse was originally a VR game made by Marina.
• Continuity Nod: Eight's Palette is uniquely accessorized with the lime-green leg strap that they wore during the events of Octo Expansion.
• Cooldown Manipulation: The Pearl Drone has a number of unlockable abilities activated by Color Chips. Normally they're on a cooldown, but you can obtain various Color Chips that let you reduce the cooldown by doing certain actions (like splatting Jelletons, painting the floor, or moving).
• Costume Evolution: Slotting enough chips of the same group will result in result in Agent 8's appearance be augmented by holographic elements matching their paint color for the rest of the run. For example, enough movement chips will put wing-like fins on their boots, enough drone chips will give them a targeting reticle, and both range and power chips will put hovering wire frames by part of your weapon hinting at what's been enhanced.
• Cosmetic Award: In addition to the other rewards for clearing a run, the first successful run using a given palette also unlocks a replica of that palette's weapon for your arsenal for PvP. Similar to the Hero Replicas in Splatoon 2, these are all just reskins of weapons otherwise available at Ammo Knights in the main game, all of which are available by level 15 (though a new player who wants access to the Luna Blaster or the Splatana Stamper may find it faster to get the Order Replica versions rather than raise their level enough to get the originals from Sheldon). The reward for completing a run of the Spire of Order using Agent 8's Palette with 4 hacks or less activated, meanwhile, is just a badge to put on your Splashtag.
• Crippling Overspecialization:
  • Lucky Chips and Drone Chips can be very powerful, but investing too much in them can leave you severely weakened on Danger floors that disable one or both of them.
  • Sound-Wave Damage is the most potent damage-enhancing Color Chip. However, the sound-based damage it boosts is very rare; you can only get it from the Wave Breaker, Killer Wail, breaking a Turbine Tower checkpoint, and the Step-Off Song.
• Cute Machines: Pearl is still as cute and cuddly-looking as a drone, if not more so. She's a little flying ball!
• Cyberspace: In reality, the Order Sector is a VR game developed by Marina to rehabilitate the Sanitized Octolings from "Octo Expansion" such as Acht, but it got heavily corrupted by Order.
• Dash Attack: The Lunge Attack Chip exclusive to the Order Splatana enables the ability for your Charge Attack's forward movement to strike foes, knocking them out of your way and dealing equal damage to your Sword Beam.
• Damage-Increasing Debuff: The Hindrance Damage color chip increases damage dealt to enemies when they're either bogged down in Eight's ink or snared in their Toxic Mist.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!:
  • Considering the special is named after it, you'd be forgiven for still pressing the "Booyah!" button when using the Booyah Bomb even though it charges up automatically this time.
  • After playing this mode for too long, players often find themselves trying to use the Pearl Drone's glide in other modes.
• Darker and Edgier: Compared to the majority of the series, Side Order is very somber and creepy. Most of it is set in a monochrome, deathly quiet, mostly unpopulated version of Inkopolis Square and the Deca Tower, contrasting heavily with the generally colorful and fun main game. Pearl and Marina's usual quips take some of the edge off, though.
• Deliberately Monochrome: Most of Side Order has an eerie, sterile appearance, enhanced by its use of mostly shades of white or black. The Order Sector is completely white, Pearl and Marina have contrasting light and dark color schemes, and Eight has white clothes and dark hair. The only color that appears nearly as often as black or white is red, which tends to otherwise be avoided in the series since it looks like blood. Even allied ink is colored in muted pastels, leagues away from the brighter tones the series typically uses 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. Much of this is explained by the expansion taking place in a virtual world; said "zombie" has had their will and memories restored thanks to the program, which was designed by Marina to help the Octarians who were "sanitized" by Kamabo Corporation before and during the events of Octo Expansion.
• Deprogram: Marina's intention behind creating the Memverse was restoring all the memories taken by Kamabo Co., particularly of the Sanitized Octolings.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • The game expects you to use the Color Wail to defeat the Overlorder during the climatic final fight, but this isn't strictly necessary since Overlorder's HP is not infinite. If you choose to simply shoot it until it dies, you will get alternate dialogue from the cast acknowledging your choice to tough it out.
  • You can get splatted by the Portals, something you'd have to go out of your way to have happen. If somehow this ends a run, Marina and Pearl will comment in disbelief on how that was at all possible.
• Didn't Think This Through: In Marina's Dev Diaries, she bemoans her decision to start working on the Memverse project while in the middle of her World Tour with Pearl, which became very difficult to balance the two out.
• Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: Downplayed, for each successive time you fight Smollusk, it progressively gets more and more passive. You're still fighting it each time, but eventually, it's content with Agent Eight's ascent up the spire, and — after they reconfigure their own Palette — Smollusk is earnestly inviting them to come "play" with it again.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • At the start of each floor, you're given a selection of three challenges to accomplish. Harder challenges give better rewards, if not in Color Chips then definitely in Membux.
  • Bonus challenges can be this, especially on harder floors. They can be outright debilitating depending on your loadout, but succeeding at them can double the heftier Membux rewards of tough floors.
• Diminishing Returns for Balance: Zigzagged, as some Color Chips are a little more potent per-chip if you only have one. Others avert this trope by always providing the same bonus regardless of how many you have.
• Discard and Draw:
  • Vending machines can stock up on random Sub and Special Weapons, allowing you to purchase replacements for your current kit at your discretion.
  • "Homing Shots" Color Chips boost your attacks with varying degrees of auto-tracking, helping shots connect even with inaccurate aim. However, as noted by Acht and Marina in the chip's information, this can be a double-edged sword when you're trying to paint escape paths or shoot specific targets within a crowd, as your weapon quickly develops a mind of its own the more you invest in this skill.
  • "No-Launch Brella" does exactly as advertised, removing your ability to shoot out the canopy to plow through enemies and paint paths ahead of you. In exchange, you effectively have a stronger Undercover Brella, with fully automatic shotgun blasts and a permanent riot shield protecting you from all frontal damage.
  • "Shot-Spread Reduction" is a lesser example; it tightens the accuracy of your weapon's bullets, making them more precise and consistent at destroying targets at a distance. However, this type of fighting buff is also a painting nerf, as your shots will cover less floor space unless you manually sweep your aim.
• Dueling Hackers: A silent duel happens between Marina and Order after she joins you. She mentions that she has to accompany you in order to maintain the hacks you purchased since Order is actively trying to override them.
• Dungeon Shop: Certain floors have a Vending Machine Corner available, where you can buy new Color Chips, replenish lost lives and switch out Sub-Weapons/Specials with Membux. Marina can hack it to gain discounts and shuffle the available products, though the amount of Membux required for this increases exponentially each time.
• Easter Egg:
  • If you rotate the control stick outside of the Spire to spin around, Pearl will do a flying pirouette for as long as you do.
  • Stay idle in outside the Spire long enough, and Pearl will turn back into an Inkling and hang out on a random perch in the area.
  • If you manage to reach the odd pillar in the far right corner of the Spire Lobby which has a platform lip at the bottom, you can find ASCII art versions of Pearl, Marina, Smallfry, and an Octotrooper on the back of the pillar alongside a Dash Track. You can use the Dash Track to return back to the main platform, or cross over to the opposite side to view more ASCII art on the back of the elevator (Harmony, Nails, and a few other shopkeeper characters) or the opposite-side pillar (Callie, Marie, a Flooder, and an Elite Octoling).
  • Each color chip produces a specific sound when you press A while it is selected on the palette screen, allowing you to use it like a real synth sampler. This leads to a huge one where playing all the color chips you get from the final boss phase in order results in the "Ebb & Flow" melody.
  • After completing a run of Side Order, the lights in the foyer will occasionally dim and a large glowing polygon will appear over the center platform. Hovering in the middle of it adds the melody of the final boss refight theme, "Short Order", to the background music.
• Eldritch Location: The Order Sector looks a lot like Inkopolis Square but bleached completely white, with giant ghost coral decorating the area and the surreal sight of apparently sentient fishing lures "swimming" through the air. The inhabitants of the Sector are no less weird, most of them resembling five-foot-tall planktonic lifeforms. The centerpiece of it all, the Spire of Order, is full of impossibly vast landscapes with flying polygonal fish and occasional glitchy-looking holes in the environment. It turns out this is because the Order Sector is a virtual world recreating Inkopolis Square that has been corrupted by an entity desiring perfect order above all else.
• Elmuh Fudd Syndwome: Smollusk talks in this way, which further emphasizes its bratty, toddler-like personality.
• Evil Counterpart:
  • The Asynchronous Rondo creates Wave Breaker shockwaves if the player is standing beneath its rings and throws Toxic Mist, Torpedos, and Inkstrikes if it sees them in its searchlights.
  • Pinging Marciale has an attack where it winds up, charges the player, then explodes — kind of like a Reefslider, but that it's rolling towards the player before exploding brings to mind the previous game's Baller weapon, which had the exact same modus operandi.
  • The Final Boss can use warped black-and-red versions of several multiplayer specials to attack, like the Super Chump, Reefslider, and (unavailable in Splatoon 3) Sting Ray.
• Evil Tower of Ominousness: The Spire of Order is a bleached-white, cubic version of the Deca Tower. Just like the surrounding eerie paleness, it too is offputting and ominous... not to mention swarming with bizarre, warped Jelletons. After Order corrupts it further after the prologue, it warps into a deranged vertical factory-like structure that's even taller.
• Fission Mailed: After seemingly defeating Order for the first time, they end up doing a mass greyscaling which take cues from the bad endings of both Octo Expansion and Return of the Mammalians, leading to the screen turning completely grey. However, with some help from Spectrum Obligato, Eight is able to use their vibe to break ffree and counter Order.
• First-Episode Twist: Since each run of Side Order is only 30 smallish floors long, the reveal that it's set in a virtual reality world created by Marina comes fairly early — just after the first climb, in fact. Previews for the campaign tried their damnedest to hide this fact regardless by turning Marina into Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Trailer.
• Flat "What": More accurately, Flat "Why". After Marina and Acht begin playing "Spectrum Obligato" during the first encounter with Overlorder, its arms begin to move on their own to the music. Its mundane reaction is nothing but one of dumbfounded confusion.
  Overlorder: My limbs are self-animating. Why.
• Flying Seafood Special: In the Order Sector, fish-shaped flying entities moving through the air together like they're schooling. (Look closer — they're actually fishing lures.) Certain rooms inside the tower also feature large polygonal sea creatures, such as sunfish and great white sharks, swimming in the distance.
• Foreshadowing:
  • One example for the whole DLC: during Nintendo Live 2024 Tokyo when Pearl and Marina wrap up their Damp Socks songs, Marina references "that side project [Pearl] said [she'd] help with". As revealed in Marina's Dev Diaries, the Memverse was that side project.
  • The enemies you'll encounter have musical terms in their names, like Languendo, Andante, and Arpeggio. Sounds oddly specific, right? What's their connection to music outside of that? Well, being programmed by pop musician Marina, for one thing.
  • There are 36 lockers to open in total, just as each Palette has 36 slots for chips. Opening the final locker reveals that Eight's Palette took the form of these lockers.
• Forced Transformation: Pearl finds herself in the form of a drone at the start of the game. She doesn't know why, but she doesn't have a problem with it. After the prologue is cleared, Marina reveals it was part of her Memverse VR project which affected Pearl in reality after it bugged out. She then fixes it to restore Pearl to her Inkling form, letting her change into her drone form anytime she wants.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • Each of the weapons you receive is tied to the soul of a major character. When a character has expressed a preference for a weapon in the past, that is the weapon their soul takes the form of—for example, Pearl and Marina expressed a preference for Dualies and Brellas respectively in Splatoon 2, while Callie and Marie use Rollers and Chargers respectively.
  • The common color tones alongside the palettes reflect their personalities. For example, you wouldn't normally think of a Stringer as a mobility-favored weapon but Shiver has a need for speed, or Big Man having a supportive personality and primarily getting Support chips.
• Gameplay Protagonist, Story Protagonist: While Eight is certainly the character you play as, and gets some focus in the Dev Diaries, the story revolves around Pearl, Marina, and, to a lesser extent, Acht more than it does around Eight. A prime example would be the Palette notes you get after beating a run with it: while other Palettes' notes give you more background on the other characters, such as Big Man being raised by a loving family, Eight's Palette's notes are simply Smollusk asking them to come play with it once more.
• Game Within a Game: An unusual case. The Memverse is a VR game designed by Marina that gamifies a process that will help the test subjects of Kamabo Co. regain their memories.
• Get a Room!: Acht's reactions whenever Pearl and Marina exchange cutesy and/or protective remarks toward each other are far less enthusiastic, with them commonly making not-so-subtle aside remarks to Eight.
• The Ghost: The Octoling developers that helped Marina built the Memverse. They're mentioned a few times in the post game, mainly in regards to their role of accidentaly creating Order and nearly causing all life on Earth to lose their free will, all due to secretely resenting Marina and Eight for disrupting the status quo of the domes.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: Marina intended for the Memverse to restore the identities of the octolings sanitized by Kamabo Co., but the collective desire for order in those it touched, including her own, coalesced into an entity calling itself Order, who took over Marina's body and hijacked the Memverse to enforce order by erasing everyone's individual identities.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Commander Tartar. It's long dead by the time of Side Order, but the sole reason the place exists at all is to try and undo the damage it did to its test subjects in the Deepsea Metro.
• Guide Dang It!: One of the damage types supported by Color Chips are "Rush" attacks. The game only lists moving rollers/brushes, the Reefslider, and (with the right upgrades) Squid Rolls, Splatana lunges, and dodge rolls as examples of Rush attacks, implying that the Color Chip bonuses affect "movement" attacks. In actuality, Rush attacks benefit anything that involves hitting things with a solid object — so Brella shields, Roller/Brush/Splatana swing collision damage, and Splash Walls all benefit from the chip as well.
• The Greatest Story Never Told: Like every other Splatoon story, knowledge of the events of Side Order is limited to a small handful of people. Outside the Order Sector, people are just getting a bit spaced-out for no apparent reason. The closest that the general public comes to knowing is at the end, when Pearl and Marina announce that "they'll keep fighting" in allusion to the Spire of Order, but even then this is left quite vague (and Deep Cut has no clue what they're talking about).
• Helpful Mook:
  • Many Jelletons can provide some assistance to the player in various ways. Towering Nobilmentes, Spawning Accordos and Portals explode on death to kill nearby Jelletons. Springing Spiccatos and Whirling Accelerandos leave behind helpful items on death. More broadly, every Jelleton will charge your Lucky meter if they're killed, which will increase the rate of item drops from enemies.
  • Battering Lentos can be this, of the "Accidentally Assisting" variety due to Artificial Stupidity. On most levels, they can be baited into using their headbutts on other Jelletons, clearing space for you and even knocking some foes off the stage for you. In addition, their AI has them focus on knocking infinity balls in the direction they're facing - if positioned right, they can be tricked into knocking the balls into the goal.
• Hard Levels, Easy Bosses: The primary difficulty of Side Order lies in the fact that the non-boss floors are constantly swarming you with Jelletons, to the point it's easy to get surrounded if you're not careful. It's very comparable to Salmon Run, but with more mook variety and fewer dangerous long-range foes. While bosses can also release enemy mobs, they usually only do so at set intervals or in response to certain actions, and their other attacks are generally easier to avoid as long as you know what to look out for. One of the few exceptions is the Parallel Canon, the mode's counterpart to enemy Octolings (and the sanitized Agent 3 to a lesser degree), which scale in difficulty the more chips you have.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Downplayed. Floors are classified with the normal categories of Easy, Normal, and Hard, in addition to the more esoteric Rigorous.
• Instant-Win Condition: Like in other modes, the second that the final objective is registered complete (e.g. the turbine finishes its path or the last second), it doesn't matter how close Agent 8 is to being splatted; the level is over and Agent 8 gets to run safely back into the elevator.
• Irony: A mode titled "Side Order" is a Roguelike, one of the most chaotic styles of gameplay.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: Played With; Cipher and Smollusk are referred to with "it" pronouns, but generally not in a disrespectful way during the postgame. On the other hand, in Smollusk's "top-secwet notes" on the various Palette owners, Frye is referred to as a "chaotic mess" and "it", indicating she's so chaotic in appearance and personality that the order-obsessed Smollusk considers her more animal than person.
• iPhony: Some entries in Marina's Dev Diary show her desktop computer, which looks like an iMac with an octopus in place of the Apple logo.
• It's All My Fault: Said verbatim by Marina after breaking her free from her mind control. As the creator of the Memverse, a virtual reality realm she plans to use to save Sanitized Octolings, she feels extremely guilty that the Order entity has taken it over and perverted it to suit its own whims, using it for almost the opposite of its intended purpose. She doesn't mope for long, though — after Pearl encourages her, Marina bucks up and joins the climb up the tower from then on, hoping to confront Order directly and help set things right.
• It's All Upstairs From Here: The standout landmark in the Order Sector is the Spire of Order, a warped version of Deca Tower that the DLC is oriented around ascending.
• Level Limiter: You can choose to disable the hacking perks you obtain during the game at any time. This is most relevant when running Agent 8's Palette; this Palette has less space for Color Chip upgrades if you have any hacks enabled.
• Limited Loadout: Each Palette can hold up to 36 chips. This may seem like a generous limit, but if you go after double-chip floors and chained Vending Machine purchases too often, you'll rub against the cap sooner or later. Hit that limit, and any extra Color Chips you find will be replaced with Prlz. Exaggerated by Agent 8's Palette, which decreases in slot count the more hacks you have active — to a minimum of six!
• Lost in Translation: In Marina's fifth Dev Diary, she mentions a Significant Name Shift — Agent Eight being simply called Eight now, since the previous name seemed a bit too formal. In Japan, Hachi (meaning "Eight") is a common name; them getting a new moniker in this way and being ecstatic over it reads as them being excited over carving out a little more identity out for themselves. The number-to-name shift isn't really communicated by the literal translation of Agent Eight becoming Eight in most other languages, so outside of Japan it simply reads as Eight being happy that they're considered a close friend.
• Luck-Based Mission: Unlocking each Color Chip's full notes require you to collect at least 5 of them during a single run, which can only be manipulated by refreshing the available challenges and Vending Machine wares or using the Color Chip Bias hack, which might even hinder you if unique chips only available for certain weapons like "Splatling Barrage" don't match the preferred colors of their intended weapon.
• Luck Manipulation Mechanic:
  • The suitably-named Lucky Color Chips will increase the drop rate of items from beating enemies. There's also the Lucky Chain system that further increases the drop rate depending on how many enemies you can beat in a certain timeframe.
  • The Color Chip Bias hack will change what Color Chips will appear, generally preferring whichever chips your Palette uses as common tones.
  • There are hacks that let you reset the items on offer at vending machines, as well as reroll your current options for floors (and the color chip rewards from them).
• Magikarp Power: Par for the course of a Roguelike, the weapons you choose all start out weaker than their multiplayer counterparts, a few outright lacking key features (like the ability to store a charge while using the Splat Charger, or ). With the right color chips, you'll be able to progressively strengthen the weapons to some truly astounding levels of game break that can make even the Grizzco Weapons look like children's toys. Individual chips themselves also count - slotting a single copy of a chip may have negligible effect, depending on what palette you're using, but slotting many copies (whether it be by pushing past a certain threshold to be useful or bonuses ramping up with each subsequent chip can result in a single type of chip single-handedly clearing floors.
• Matrix Raining Code: Some shots feature glowing gold kana-like glyphs in the Splatoon "language" scrolling down the screen vertically. Each floor of the tower is generated out of them, moving outward from the elevator.
• Meaningful Name:
  • "Side Order" is an appropriate name for a "side" campaign focused on "order".
  • The Parallel Canon boss squad is appropriate considering that they're robotic, Order-aligned Inklings, which would have been close to the norm had Team Order won the last game's FinalFest.
• Macrogame: Once the tutorial is over, Side Order is as challenging and unforgiving as you'd expect from a roguelike. Even unsuccessful runs, however, will net you a special currency called Prlz, which you can give to Marina to get her to hack in some special bonuses — ranging from more extra lives to increased maximum armor levels to new chips for the Pearl Drone — that will tip the scales in your favor. Still tough, though.
• Mind-Control Device: The boss of the first climb, Marina Agitando, wears a gadget called a "Controller VM", which looks like a VR headset mixed with a pair of headphones and a Virtual Boy controller. After completing enough runs of the Spire of Order, you can buy a replica to wear for yourself in ink battles.
• Minimalist Cast: Due to its virtual-reality setting and most of the rest of the cast being busy with Return of the Mammalians, Side Order has the fewest main characters since the original Splatoon. It features only Agent 8 as the player character, with Pearl, Marina, and Acht as the focus of the story and Order as the Big Bad. Besides them, the only NPCs you'll encounter are a few unnamed, silent protozoans roaming the Order Sector. And Cipher, but it's just a shopkeeper. It adds to the general feeling of eerie loneliness that permeates the campaign.
• Missing Secret: Upon clearing the Spire of Order for the first time, and having presumably met every Jelleton along the way, the Jelleton Field Guide will be left with a single blank spot on the bottom-right corner. One might believe that there is a Superboss waiting to be challenged, similar to the endgame of Octo Expansion, but such a boss doesn't exist and that spot never gets filled.
• Money Is Experience Points: Prlz are obtained from various methods, mainly from your Color Chips being converted to them after dying in a run or obtaining new ones and checking your collection. They can be given to Marina to hack the Memverse to give you buffs, or used as money to buy stuff from Cipher.
• More Dakka: The Splatling Barrage Chip is an exclusive Color Chip for the Order Splatling that increases the amount of bullets you fire per charge.
• Morphic Resonance: Pearl's drone form has a Sprinkler shaped like her crown on top of her head and wings in the shape of her tentacles. It even has a small hole under the eyes to imitate her mole.
• Musical Gameplay: The attacks of the Warm-Up Boss and Final Boss are all synced to the background music. Lucky Bombs also explode to the beat of the background music on all stages.
• Musical Nod: A number of Splatoon 2 songs play during this story:
  • Muck Warfare plays while Agent 3 boards their first train to Inkopolis Square.
  • "Acid Hues", an Off the Hook song from the previous game, is sampled during scenes between Off the Hook, Eight, and Acht in the Order Sector.
  • Pearl's Step-Off Song, which plays whenever you obtain 3 disc pieces, plays the first few notes of Off the Hook's Inkopolis News theme.
  • #0.1 style is a remix of #0 shell from the previous game's Octo Expansion.
  • Several songs, most notably the themes for most of the bosses, implement the signature five-note Octarian jingle into their melodies.
  • The lyrics to Ebb & Flow are sampled for the cries of the bosses. It also gets remixed for the climax fight.
• Mysterious Past: Each of the Palettes belongs to a Splatoon character in the waking world, and beating Order with it will unlock its notes on that character, usually discussing their motivations or history (such as Big Man being raised by a loving family). The final Palette you unlock — Agent 8's Palette — has no such character elaboration, instead being a memo addressed from Smollusk to Eight, promising that it will behave and asking that they visit sometime.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Order's plot to assimilate all minds into the Memverse is possible due to a security flaw in the Sea-Cucumber Phones that Marina found out about during development of the Memverse... and forgot to fix.
• Nintendo Hard: For an In-Universe example: incidental dialogue has Marina mention she once made a rhythm game. It was really hard, and Acht — the only person to beat it — says that the timing windows were extremely narrow, there were too many notes to hit, and that it ran at 888 BPM (for comparison, breakcore, an already-quite-fast genre of music, generally clocks in at a bit over one-third that tempo). The mere mention of this game is enough to make Acht feel queasy. Marina made an even harder sequel game, which Pearl aced first try.
• No-Damage Run: On certain floors, you can earn bonus Membux by avoiding damage. You don't have to completely avoid getting hit, but the bonus will decrease each time you are (including just by standing in enemy ink).
• No Item Use for You: Certain "Danger" factors affecting a floor include barring the use of Pearl Drone and/or Item Drops. If you've balanced your build around either and have been relying on them to make up for your main weapon's weaknesses, this can easily be a run killer.
• "No More Holding Back" Speech: At the end of a first run, Marina counters Order's Motive Rant with one of these. She admits that change can be scary and uncertain and that the familiar is comforting, and mentions how there were times when she was afraid of change and wished everything could stay the same forever (a Call-Back to her dialogue for Splatoon 2's FinalFest). But Pearl's go-get-'em attitude and all the new sights they'd seen together on Off the Hook's world tour helped Marina realize that both chaos and order are necessary to make life worth living — and if Order is going to erase one of those things from existence, she'll do whatever it takes to stop it.
• Non-Lethal Bottomless Pits: Pits will bounce Eight up and break their armor. If they fall into a pit when they don't have armor, on the other hand, they'll lose a life.
• Obvious Rule Patch: One of the chips you can insert into Palettes lets the Pearl Drone spawn items underneath her once a gauge fills up. To keep Pearl from being able to recharge herself forever, she can't drop Drone Batteries this way.
• Oh, No... Not Again!: Pearl does not react with joy when she sees one of the 8-Ball levels for the first time.
• Old Save Bonus:
  • If you have Octo Expansion data, the design you made for Eight will serve as the default during the character creation process.
  • The leader of the Parallel Canon ordinarily resembles a warped version of Splatoon 2's default female Inkling, but if you have Splatoon 2 save data on your Switch, it draws from the last Inkling character you played as there. In context, this is because Marina hired Agent 4 to work on security for the Memverse, and modeled its appearance after them.
• Ominous Music Box Tune: The first few seconds of "New World Order", the final boss theme for the player's first run of the Spire of Order, sound like they're being played on a broken-down music box. In this case, it's to hint at Order's true nature as the Psychopathic Manchild Smollusk.
• Ominous Obsidian Ooze: The ink used by Jelletons is pitch-black. Bizarrely, it's somehow translucent to their stark white body parts.
• One-Steve Limit: Played with in regards to Eight and Acht, 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, as it's a literal entity who seeks to bring order to the rest of the world at the cost of free will.
• Perfection Is Static: The Big Bad is an AI named Order who was born from the unconscious desires of its Octoling creators for a world that never changes as well as their resentment towards people like Marina for causing such a massive shift by leaving the underground. To this end, Order plans to "grayscale" everyone who is connected to the Memverse in order to create a perfect world of order where everything stays the same and nothing has to change. Both Pearl and Marina argue against this line of thinking, pointing out that while change is scary, it's needed for people to grow and that a world of pure order is boring.
• Permadeath: You still have Video-Game Lives, but unlike other Splatoon single-player campaigns, Game Over means Game Over. Run out of lives and Agent 8 is splatted for good, forcing you to restart the climb from Floor 1. And unlike other single-player campaigns, your remaining lives carry over between floors. Luckily, one of the upgrades you can get allows you to increase your stock of lives, and one hack you can unlock lets you continue with a full stock of extra lives from where you were splatted (though at a hefty Membux cost).
• Player Nudge: After you complete your first run through the tower, an Anarchy Splatcast announcement reports that there are still some 'lings spacing out in the Inkopolis Square area. You didn't think you were done with Side Order just yet, did you? Time to go back to the Order Sector and stop Smollusk for good!
• Power at a Price: Agent 8's Palette, the final one you can gain, has a restriction that the more hacks which are active, more slots of the palette are locked, leaving you with less room for Color Chips.
• Public Domain Soundtrack: Rematches against Order will play snippets of "Also sprach Zarathustra" as it enters the arena.
• Random Drop: Unique to Side Order, Jelletons will occasionally spawn pickups when splatted. Ink Bottles recover some of your ink, Canned Specials fill up your Special Meter, Drone Batteries increase Pearl's charge meters (if she has any), Armor Cases give you armor, and collecting three Disc Pieces will cause Pearl to play a Step-Off Song that greatly knocks back nearby foes and temporarily disables all portals in the area. There are color chips that increase the chances of each pickup dropping, and in the Drone Batteries' case, they need to have their respective chip slotted in order for them to start appearing.
• Random Drop Booster: Most Lucky (yellow) chips focus on boosting the rate at which items drop from slain Jelletons. As Acht, Pearl, and Marina point out in their commentary, slotting in enough of these can easily result in a game-breaking synergy — especially Ink-Bottle Drop and Canned-Special Drop.
• Random Event: As you climb the tower, certain floors can have special events attached to them.
  • Bonus floors can either offer bonus Membux for completing extra challenges, or fill up the remaining slots in your Palette with random chips of certain colors (frequently with the effect of making you Purposely Overpowered). The latter is more common on earlier floors and floors with lower difficulty levels.
  • Danger floors, in contrast, provide a negative effect that you'll have to deal with as you progress toward the clear condition, like the entire floor being covered in enemy ink, Jelletons moving faster and hitting harder, or preventing Random Drops from spawning. You can ignore these floors if you want an easier time, but the chance they'll appear goes up the more you skip.
• Recurring Riff:
  • The boss themes for the tutorial boss, Pinging Marciale, and Asynchronous Rondo all incorporate the Octarian army's "Onward!" riff to varying degrees of explicitness. Fittingly, the tutorial boss is former Octarian Army engineer Marina, and the entire DLC's events are a direct result of the subconscious resentment carried by ex-Octarian engineers living in Inkling society.
  • The sequence of notes when Marina is freed from Marina Agitando repeats when clearing normal rooms and during the 11th-Hour Superpower moment.
  • The jingle that plays after clearing a boss level is reused for the intro to Off The Hook's "We're So Back", played during Splatfests.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: The primary color scheme of Side Order's enemy characters is black, with white skeletal structures visible inside their bodies and usually red eyes to go with them. Some of the higher rooms in the tower have glitchy holes in the scenery with black and red pixels visible inside.
• Replay Value: Various trailers and pre-release marketing materials emphasize that the DLC is designed to be enjoyed when replaying it. Indeed, in Side Order itself, each palette (effectively its own weapon) you use while climbing the tower will give you a new key for the lockers at the base of the Spire of Order, helping you unlock new content and put together the Story Breadcrumbs of Marina's development diary. While one successful run will roll the Expansion Pass's credits and unlock the DLC's biggest rewards, you'll need to come back to the Spire several times (at least 11 more, and more than that if the RNG isn't in your favor) to see everything the story has to offer.
• Resources Management Gameplay: Besides the usual need to keep your eye on your ink tank, part of the strategy in tackling the Spire comes from your selection of Color Chips. You can only pick one (occasionally two) per floor, and chances are you'll get a choice of two chips that would synergize very well with your current weapon and build on any given floor, or have to clear a Rigorous floor to get your hands on an indespensible one. The presence of Vending Machine Corners also plays a factor — you have to decide whether it's worth passing up a potentially very useful chip for at least three guaranteed ones.
• Ring Out: Jelletons are knocked back by explosions, making it possible to defeat them by knocking them off the stage. The Knockback, Explosion Knockback, and the Rush Knockback chips all facilitate this style of play.
• Robotic Undead: Inside the inky outer coating of each Jelleton is what looks like a fish skeleton, but made from hard-edged pieces, reflecting their status as Cyberspace constructs.
• Roguelike: Early previews for Side Order emphasize the replayability of the campaign, noting that the Spire of Order has a different layout each time it's entered. If Agent 8 fails to complete an objective for a floor, they'll be sent to the very bottom of the tower, regardless of how much progress they've made. Any Color Chips they've found on the way up will be lost; however, they'll be converted into a currency called Prlz that Marina can use to permanently upgrade Agent 8 and the Pearl Drone.
• 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, Marina, and Agent 8, while the inverse is true for SO.
• RPG Elements: Damage numbers are displayed when Jelletons and bosses take damage, which can be enhanced by equipping color chips.
• Running Gag: After defeating the Final Boss for the first time, each subsequent encounter will give it new Boss Subtitles with a Punny Name based on the number of times it's been fought. This continues up to 10 times, after which the 11th time onwards drops the naming scheme entirely and sticks to a generic subtitle.
• Score Multiplier: In the final score tally, you get a Tone Bonus for having at least 2 Chips from the same Tone in a row on your Palette, starting from an additional 100 points. Each subsequent Chip grants another round of Tone Bonus equal to the previous bonus +100 points, so 3 Chips would give you 300 (100 + 200) points, 4 Chips would give you 600 (100 + 200 + 300), and so forth. This makes crafting a build made entirely of a single Tone an incredibly lucrative way to rake in Prlz, as filling the entire Palette with one Tone will give you by default 81000 points!^*Some Tones do not have enough Chips to fill the entire board, however; Drone Chips only take up 35 out of 36 possible slots, for example.
• Scoring Points: At the end of a run (win or lose), the Color Chips set in your Palette, Membux remaining, and number of lives remaining if the run was a success are tallied up into your final score. You'll earn bonus points for extending tone chains, formed by picking chips that belong to a Palette's Common Tones multiple floors in a row. It's more than just for bragging rights - after each run, you receive 1/100 of your score (rounded up) in Prlz, a currency that you can spend with Marina (and later Cipher) in the Order Sector.
• Self-Deprecation: Upon reaching the first 8 Ball floor (which were all considered to be That One Level during Octo Expansion), Pearl yells out "Aw man! Not THESE things again!", no doubt mirroring the player's thoughts about seeing them again.
• Sequel Episode: Unlike Return of the Mammalians, which was a largely self-contained story, Side Order acts as a direct sequel to the events of Octo Expansion, with Marina creating the Memverse to help the sanitized victims of Kamabo Co.
• Set Bonus: As an inversion to Diminishing Returns for Balance, some color chips given a higher increase to their modifier for the last chip in the set. Notably, both Ink Damage (with the last chip providing an additional +35% to all damage) and Explosion Damage (providing a massive +110% to any explosion damage) are in this camp... but are also two of the chips that require nine copies to max out. In several cases, this crosses over with Magikarp Power where the effect of just one copy of the chip is minimal (like Ink Damage, which only gives a +5% boost with only one copy).
• Ship Tease:
  • While Splatoon 2 had some shippy moments and lines of dialogue of its own, Side Order is filled to the brim with Marina and Pearl being totally into each other, even to the point of Pearl wanting to "find a quiet spot together" and spend some "us time" with Marina once their tour is over. One of the least subtle hints is Marina having an... interesting photograph of Pearl as her desktop wallpaper, though Marina acting jealous towards Acht when she thinks they're flirting with Pearl comes close.
    • Here's a memorable remark after Eight unlocks Locker #18:
      Pearl: We can't stop until the other half are open too, Eight! I wanna see what happens next in Marina's Dev Diary!
      Marina: Pearl, don't drool over my diaries. I'm right here!
    • In one of the elevator dialogues, Pearl admits she found Marina's mind-controlled "Agitando" form far scarier than any of the bosses in the tower because she was worried it was permanent and that she would never get the old Marina back, something Marina is touched enough by to break out the "Pearlie" nickname over. Acht reacts as if they're witnessing two Sickeningly Sweethearts going at it — and they very well might be.
      Acht: Uhhh. Times like this, Eight... I'm glad you're here.
  • For a non-Pearlina ship, there's a brief bit of dialogue that implies that Shiver gets jealous of any girl who talks to Frye, based on how she reacts to Pearl doing so.
• Shout-Out:
  • After the prologue when Marina is saved, she reveals that the current mess was her Memverse VR project being hijacked by Order. Her laptop showing it in development resembles the layout of the Unity editor.
  • The white laboratory-esque design of the Spire of Order's interior is comparable to the Test Chambers from Portal, as well as the Asynchronous Rondo bearing a heavy resemblance to the upper half of GLaDOS.
  • If the sketches in Marina's laptop are any indication, she's a fan of The Rose of Versailles (or the Inkling equivalent of it).
• Simple, yet Awesome: The Squid Attack color chip, which turns your Squid Roll into a damaging move. That's all it does, yet it's extremely useful for practically every build. Mobility builds will get a ton of use out of it for having swim speed to use the Squid Roll more often and rush attack to make it deal more damage. Ink-hungry weapons love it since it requires no ink to use (in fact the player can still regenerate ink while Squid Rolling). Charge-reliant weapons will appreciate having a quick close-range attack that only needs one Color Chip to be useful. Weapons with poor multi-hit capabilities will enjoy that one Squid Attack can nail multiple fodder enemies with a single use. The high base knockback makes it viable for builds with weak main weapons like Lucky and Drone for holding back a swarm of Jelletons or eliminating them via Ring Out. It's generally hard to think of a situation where Squid Attack won't enhance a build.
• Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Trailer: Despite the September 2023 trailer heavily featuring Pearl, Marina is noticeably absent. Even the initial teaser features artwork of a scene that features both Pearl and Marina in the final product, yet it shows only Pearl. However, the Canned Specials in Side Order have her face on them, and Dedf1sh/Acht mentions knowing her. Marina would later officially appear in the final promotional art for Side Order, and while she still isn't directly seen in the February 2024 trailer, she appears in a hologram projected by the Pearl Drone, and her icon and voice are present on the upgrade screen. In the game proper, she's rescued after the tutorial boss, and becomes part of your Mission Control and the provider of permanent upgrades. This is because it's difficult to talk about what Marina actually does in Side Order without giving away her role as the creator of the Order Sector, and thereby spoiling its nature as a location in cyberspace. Notably, the overview trailer crops Marina out of the Prlz upgrade screen because she's holding her laptop on it, indicating she grants you upgrades by hacking the virtual world you're in.
• Skill Scores and Perks: Side Order mixes and matches both varieties.
  • Marina's hacks are closer to skill scores. They provide special benefits to Eight and Pearl as they climb the Spire of Order, like reducing the damage enemies deal or making doubled chips appear more frequently, and can be turned on or off freely.
  • Color Chips are more along the lines of perks. Slotting them into your Palette will grant one of many different minor benefits, like increasing the hitbox radius of your attacks or increasing your speed in Octoling or octopus form.
• Spin Attack: The Squid Attack turns your twirling Squid Roll into an offensive attack.
• Splash of Color: Acht's neon green skin, red and blue tentacles and pure black dress and shoes makes them stand out strongly against the chalky white of the Spire of Order, barring the hint of white coming from the bandage on their right arm. Once Pearl and Marina are reunited at the beginning, they wear their new colorful outfits which heavily stand out as well.
• Squee: Marina lets one out when admiring Pearl's "take-no-prisoners" attitude following the fourth confrontation with the Overlorder.
• Stealth Pun:
  • By defeating bosses in the Spire of Order with different Palettes, you gain keys that open the doors of a locker at the base of the Spire of Order, which provide goodies like entries in Marina's Dev Diary or banners to use in the base game. You're unlocking them.
  • The Jelletons' innards have a simplified, injection-molded plastic aesthetic, similar to Order weapon variants. You can also see plastic "runners" used in model kit building in the background of Parallel Canon's arena. Combined with the fact that the Memverse is, more or less, a virtual therapy game: they're literal game models.
• Suspend Save: Like most roguelikes, you can save your run midway through and return to the hub so you can continue later. To prevent Save Scumming, doing this in the middle of the floor costs one of your Video-Game Lives.
• A Taste of Power: Color Chip Saturation bonus levels effectively function like this, particularly at lower floors - for just that level, all remaining empty slots in your palette are filled with chips of the designated type, and Agent 8 can lay waste by seeing just how well chips of the same type synergize. In addition, a few of the chips gathered on the tutorial run are more effective than in subsequent runs - one Poison Ink chip will cause your opponents to take 400% damage going through your ink (it ordinarily takes two to hit that amount), and two Ink Saver (Main) chips halve the ink consumption of your main weapon (while the player needs four of the chip outside this mode).
• Teacher's Unfavorite Student: In one of the final Dev Diaries, Acht writes to Marina about a particular instructor they had in engineering school who constantly berated and lectured them for slacking off and cutting class.
  Acht: I got to know the inside of the instructor's office pretty well. Every lecture was the same. "You should be diligent and dedicated, like a true Octarian!" I heard it so many times that it turned into white noise. I wonder how she's doing now.
• Theme Music Power-Up: As is Splatoon's wont with final bosses, the featured musicians (Off The Hook, as well as Dedf1sh) deliver a compelling remix of the idols' signature song - in this case, Spectrum Obligato - Ebb & Flow (Out of Order).
• Time Skip: After Order has been stopped, Off the Hook continues their tour with Agent 8 and Acht by their side. When we go back to Inkopolis Square, Deep Cut announces in the Anarchy Splatcast that the tour has reached its end.
• Violation of Common Sense: The Stringer's bullets only explode if they stick in the ground first. Because of this, you're going to be incentivized to shoot the ground in front of enemies instead of hitting them directly, since this will spread damage across large groups better.
• Wave-Motion Gun: Pearl's ultimate attack against Order is the Color Wail, a massively upgraded Princess Cannon/Killer Wail 5.1 combo that weaponizes every single Color Chip at once, combining their powers into an iridescent beam that obliterates the Overlorder.
• Whole Episode Flashback: Both in-game and in a meta sense, Eight's entire first run through the Spire of Order takes place in the middle of Off the Hook's world tour. Various in-game tidbits and lore details ^note Side Order starts about a month after the tour's midway break, which is dated as having occurred four months in. This translates to Off the Hook's tour being nine months long total (four first half, one break, four second half). Sunken Scroll 22 implies their tour started either on Splatoon 3's release date in September, or shortly before. add up to Side Order taking place not when the DLC released, but exactly one year earlier in the Splatooniverse equivalent of February 2023 — when the campaign's first teaser trailer was unveiled. On a first run, Pearl and Marina underline this by talking about how they need to escape the Order Sector so they can continue their tour; after the credits roll, though, it's already over and has been for a while.
• Yet Another Stupid Death: With the Jelletons Zerg Rushing you, some rather foolish deaths can occur, especially if you have a low-fire-rate weapon like a Charger or Slosher equipped. Knockback damage around ledges is a particularly hilarious killer, especially from Battering Lentos. Especially especially if you forgot you had the Broken-Armor Jump hack active and accidentally pilot Eight off the stage instead of landing somewhere safe. You can get sniped into critical status by a Towering Nobilmente from afar and then flecked by a single drop of ink from a Gushing Trionfale for the coup de grace. And if the Stronger Jelletons effect is active for a floor, all bets are off...
• Your Size May Vary: The tutorial boss features a towering Marina, multiple times the size of Agent 8. Once Marina Agitando is taken down, Marina instantly shrinks back down to normal size so Eight can catch her.
• Zerg Rush: The basic gameplay loop of Side Order is akin to that of Salmon Run, where the player fights a horde of fishlike enemies.

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

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