YMMV / Splatoon 3

The series in general
Splatoon | Splatoon 2 | Splatoon 3

YMMV with their own pages (shared with the franchise page):

• Fanon
• High-Tier Scrappy
• Low-Tier Letdown
• Memetic Mutation
• Scrappy Mechanic
• That One Level - Salmon Run (shared with Splatoon 2 only)

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• Abridged Arena Array: Western top-level competitive has traditionally been gamemode-agnostic and played on all Ranked Battle modes, however late 2023 saw a shift in mindset in this hemisphere of the playerbase. Metagame differences in Splatoon 3 have caused the other three Ranked Battle modes to be less favorably viewed (among other things, poor attacking routes make stalling with lead on Tower Control and Rainmaker too viable, and Clam Blitz is extra-susceptible to Cheese Strategy in this game) and as such top Western players have debated employing a Splat Zones-focused or Splat Zones-exclusive map list in tournaments.
• Accidental Innuendo: Given the unignorable lesbian tones of Pearl and Marina's relationship in the DLC, at least a few viewers might be left giggling:
  • One of the elevator dialogue exchanges sees Marina saying that Pearl is "adorable on top". Calling someone a "top" is slang in LGBT circles to mean that person is dominant in bed.
  • Another one has Pearl celebrate the end of Off the Hook's world tour so the two can have some alone time and "go have some REAL fun", making it look like Pearl really wants to have sex with Marina.
• Adorkable: As hard as they try to seem like a dangerous group of desert bandits, Deep Cut are really a bunch of lovable dorks: Frye is goofily easy to excite, Shiver has plenty of Not So Above It All moments that ruin her noble persona, and Big Man is a sweetheart who doesn't even try to be evil. This might just be intentional, going by Callie's response to their introductory cutscene:
  [smiling and clasping her hands together by her cheek in adoration] "I... I love them."
• Angst? What Angst?:
  • Since Callie's Brainwashed and Crazy episode in the previous game was clearly played for laughs and never meant to be taken seriously to begin with, it's possibly Played for Laughs in Return of the Mammalians, with her response to Shiver asking what's wrong with the New Squidbeak Splatoon members for giving up treasure.
    Callie/Agent 1: Plenty! But don't worry about that.
  • At the end of the Alterna rocket center, Captain Cuttlefish apparently dies by being dehydrated. Callie and Marie look sad, but more of a "disheartened" sad and less "their family member who they've been trying to rescue died" kind of sad.
• Annoying Video Game Helper:
  • The map rotation notice kicks you out of any drop-in squad you might be in. Found a team you liked playing Turf War or Anarchy Battle with? Too bad, now the team is broken up. It's even more annoying in Salmon Run, which rotates maps and weapons much less frequently but still kicks you out into the lobby when the non-Salmon Run maps change.
  • While the Homing Shots chip in Side Order can be very useful for taking out nearby enemies when your fire rate is low, it can occasionally veer your shots off-course to attack low-priority foes, or decide to attack Jelletons when you would rather be painting the ground instead.^note One or two Homing Shots on the Charger are fantastic for easily sniping the Parallel Canon enemies during that boss fight, though. Marina points this out in her commentary on the chip.
  Marina: If you struggle with aiming, this is for you. But it can be hard to ink turf when the shots would rather hit enemies.
• Anti-Climax Boss: Fans have speculated that the Site 6 boss — the last boss most players would fight before the endgame — may be an intentional Breather Boss considering that Big Man is a Nice Guy who didn't even want to fight you in the first place. Ironic, considering that the fight is a reference to a notoriously difficult boss from Super Mario Sunshine, Phantamanta. There are multiple factors that make this boss pitifully easy, primarily the facts that they don't actually attack you directly until the third phase, and the Get Sensor makes them incredibly vulnerable thanks to always marking their position..
• Ass Pull: For the final battle of "Return of the Mammalians", Smallfry becomes Hugefry out of nowhere thanks to the power of "marine-life energy", and then returns to normal afterward as if nothing happened. Shiver and Frye paraphrase Sunken Scroll #2 during the transformation, making it seem like that was supposed to foreshadow this moment. While it's implied that the "three lights" depicted in the scroll are in fact Deep Cut themselves, they aren't stated to power up any individual — Salmonid or otherwise — with marine-life energy to consume the disaster, instead simply appearing and uniting to end the great flood on their own. It comes off as a stretch to justify having an Astral Finale Behemoth Battle. That said, the transformation is pretty awesome.
• Base-Breaking Character: With time, Shiver has cemented herself as this within the Western fandom. There are those who adore her cool androgynous design and her composed yet vicious personality. That same personality, combined with her winning the majority of Splatfests, whether dominating the popular vote or her teams winning "unexpected" fests, puts off and frustrates the other half of the fanbase.
• Breather Boss:
  • Consider yourself lucky if an Xtrawave pits you against a Horrorboros instead of a Cohozuna or Megalodontia. Because it flies, it can't block access to Golden Eggs or problematic Boss Salmonids, and it's low enough to the ground that most weapons can reach it without jumping. Its Booyah Bomb-esque attacks are moderately dangerous… but that's if it can get one off, because destroying the bomb in its mouth (which is what players tend to focus on since it's the only way to deal any real damage to it) will immediately cancel the attack and force it to start recharging from scratch. The bomb's explosion also deals damage per tick and expands outward instead of being a one-hit splat in a large radius like the Cohozuna's stomp or Megalodontia's bite, so it's easy to escape from it relatively unscathed. The Horrorboros never jumps up and out of attack range like the Cohozuna or remains invulnerable for extended periods like the Megalodontia, and it follows a predictable path, so most of the challenge comes from staying in front of the serpent to target its bomb while avoiding Boss Salmonid attacks rather than anything the king itself does.
  • The Asynchronous Rondo might be the most imposing of the three main Side Order boss fights, but once you figure out how it works, it's the easiest by far. It has large weak points unlike the Pinging Marciale, and it's a single entity unlike the Parallel Canon, so it can't gang up on you. It lacks a means of immediately putting Eight in danger mode under most circumstances, and while it has a fair variety of attacks, it massively choreographs its most dangerous ones, giving you plenty of time to prepare and get out of the way. You don't have to go behind cover to avoid the searchlights that trigger some of its attacks either, as you can simply hide in your ink or underneath the boss itself. Speaking of, staying underneath the boss is probably the safest and easiest way of fighting it, as while you'll have to contend with it sending waves and the occasional enemy horde at you, that's all you'll have to contend with. And this is all without getting into the fact that if you don't even have to defeat every layer of the boss. The fight will end as soon as the lit-up layers are destroyed, regardless of any other damage you inflict, so you can end the battle ridiculously quick if you have a enough range on your weapon.
• Breather Level:
  • While Salmon Run is as challenging as ever, not all waves are as tough as others thanks to certain events such as the new ones below.
    • The only difficulty in Mudmouth Eruption waves comes from the Lesser Salmonids spewing from the eponymous creatures' maws (which still aren't enough to overwhelm a team with the slightest bit of coordination, and Cohocks only appear from the gold ones). Otherwise, it's just pitting the crew against a series of large, stationary enemies that don't attack and have massive weak points.
    • Giant Tornado is widely agreed to be extremely easy. It's a low-tide wave where all Golden Eggs spawn from crates spit out by a large tornado. The tornado also tosses Salmonids onto the stage, but only Chums, Smallfries, and Cohocks — no bosses appear during the round. While the challenge is supposed to come from the fact that the low tide basket is blocked and players are forced to haul Golden Eggs to the main one instead, all Eggs count for two instead of one, making it easy to quickly hit your quota provided your team knows what they're doing — chaining throws will get eggs close to the basket very quickly, allowing teams to get the haul to the basket without having to go all the way back and forth, and staying in one place makes enemy spawns more predictable and less chaotic to detail with. Finally, it's the only event in Salmon Run where no Snatchers spawn, so a competent team could theoretically haul every egg in the wave to the basket with enough coordination.
    • Big Run's debut at Wahoo World is surprisingly easy. Getting surrounded and overwhelmed is harder because the Salmonids spawn single-file from Gushers instead of along the length of a coastline; retreating from the Salmonid spawn points to the basket is easier because the map is designed to have the high ground near the edges of the map instead of the other way around; and both high and low tide variations of the map have a ton of space with not much actually dangerous water for players to move around. In fact, the only real challenge comes from the reduced event pool; while Mothership is trivial and fog and Grillers are doable, Rush is a nightmare, and the lack of other easy events like Mudmouth Eruption, Goldie Seeking, or Giant Tornado is felt. It might pleasantly surprise you to get promoted above your usual pay grade during Big Run, then unpleasantly surprised to get demoted back down when the rotation returns to standard Salmon Run maps.
    • While the Big Run at Um'ami Ruins was fairly challenging, getting the usually tricky Griller round instead became laughably easy due to the presence of certain platforms that the Grillers could not climb up, meaning that targeted players could simply camp on top of them while the other players dealt with the Grillers themselves.
    • The Big Run at Eeltail Alley is generally regarded as one of, if not the easiest version of the event to date thanks to one key factor: there is absolutely no water on the stage at any point. Even on what's suppose to be Normal and High Tide you still have access to the entire swath of the map without any fear of being knocked into the drink. Add in a bunch of inkable walls to what were originally one-way drops and it is a piece of cake to get where you need to go safely.
  • The second part of the Brutal Bonus Level takes things down a notch, compared to the section after it and especially the section before it. It's just an extensive Ride Rail level, far from the brutal difficulty of One-Way Ride Through Target Town. There are more targets to shoot and they appear more spontaneously, but not to the point of significant difficulty, since chances are you'll have a very strong fully upgraded Hero Shot instead of OWRTTT's unreliable weapon selection, and the closeness of the target balloons means there's much more margin for error.
  • The roguelike nature of Side Order means it's possible to get a level of Normal or even Easy difficulty sandwiched between multiple Rigorous floors, though you have to choose to play them. Even certain Rigorous floors can be a cakewalk with the right loadout.
    • The Ink Coating danger effect is easily one one of the least threatening in the game, as all it does is cover the stage with enemy ink. Since you'll be covering the ground anyway so you can swim through it, most of the time it barely even affects the player.
    • The No Item Drops and No Drone danger effects can be devastating against builds that heavily focus on such, but otherwise have little-to-no drawback.
  • Bonerattle Arena is certainly one of the easier Salmon Run stages. It has a concentric design like Gone Fission Hydroplant, but unlike that stage, there are no walls between the outer rim of dry land and the Egg Basket, and the design holds true across all tide levels. This combines with the Inkrails to mean you're never far from the Egg Basket at any given time, circumventing the issue stages like Marooner's Bay or Jammin' Salmon Junction have. Even high tide still gives you plenty of land to work with. Interestingly, there are hints that this may be intentional In-Universe — Bonerattle Arena is a penal colony that the Salmonids have converted into a battle arena, and the large audience present implies they view the proceedings as some kind of Blood Sport. (Well, ink sport.)
• Broken Base:
  • The Casual-Competitive Conflict rages fiercer than in the previous two games. Some view the new additions such as Tableturf Battle, customizable lockers, Big Run, Tricolor Turf War, the improved photo mode, and the improved single player campaign as excellent additions. More hardcore fans feel that several of those additions are undercooked, underwhelming, or unnecessary bloat that took away focus from the multiplayer— the series’ main focus— leaving it with major balance and connectivity issues as well as rather poor map design.
  • Tricolor Turf War is quite divisive. It's either a cool (if flawed) idea that lets all three Splatfest teams take the field at once, opening up new strategies and adding to Splatoon's trademark sense of chaos, or a half-baked concept with fundamental balance problems that skew it heavily in the offensive teams' favor.
  • Return of the Mammalians is either a vast improvement over the previous two story modes with more imaginative stages, more drama, intrigue, and challenge, and an incredibly cool final showdown, or an uninspired rehash of the Octo Expansion with fewer character moments, fewer emotional beats, a far goofier villain in both design and characterization, and less believable stakes (which is saying something, considering this is Splatoon).
  • The Squid Sisters themselves remain popular among fans, but their return in Splatoon 3 received somewhat mixed reactions. Some don't mind seeing them again and enjoy how they play off Deep Cut, and Callie fans in particular were pleased by how much focus she got in "Return of the Mammalians" compared to how badly she was shafted in Splatoon 2. Others feel like there was no reason for them to show up in Alterna given how far it is from Inkopolis, point out how "Return of the Mammalians" struggled to keep them relevant and didn't expand their characters the way Octo Valley and Canyon did, and wish the campaign was solely dedicated to one of the other two groups instead (Deep Cut was notoriously underdeveloped when the game launched thanks to the severe cutbacks to the news dialogue and are left Out of Focus for most of Return, and Off the Hook was "on a world tour" for so long that by the time The Bus Came Back, Splatoon 3 was nearing the end of its update cycle).
  • While the use of Rotating Arcs for the Squid Sisters and Off the Hook isn't controversial on its own (as it has precedence in the Octo Expansion), opinions vary wildly on how Splatoon 3 implented it, particularly with the bussing of Pearl and Marina. No one was happy about it, but some viewed it as necessary to ensure Callie, Marie, and Deep Cut got a fair shake in Return of the Mammalians, and didn't mind the price tag attached as long as it provided more of what they loved about Off the Hook and the Octo Expansion. Others believed it was a rather unfair way to treat such popular characters, and bemoaned how it forced their fans to wait over a full real-time year ^note Between its announcement on August 10, 2022 and the February 2023 Nintendo Direct, nothing was known about Side Order other than that it starred Off the Hook, and even that Direct revealed precious little information about it - not even a release date. Players wouldn't get more concrete information on the campaign until the September 2023 Nintendo Direct, just over seven months later, and the DLC had no set release date until January 2024… one month before launch, then pay $25 extra on top of the $80 minimum they need for the game and a Nintendo Switch Online subscription, just to see them again. There's also some controversy over whether the prerelease announcement of Off the Hook's return in the DLC was a good idea, and how it may have incorrectly given the impression their fans wouldn't have to wait long for their return.
  • Is Deep Cut a worthy successor to the previous two idol groups, or are they too underdeveloped to really fill their shoes? Was their role as bosses in Return of the Mammalians genuinely cool and unexpected, or did it rob them of much-needed Character Development? Did giving each stage unique dialogue in Anarchy Splatcast fix their characterization, or are they still underutilized? Should they have gotten their own DLC campaign like Off the Hook, or would that have taken further resources away from the main game?
  • At their inception, Big Runs had a unique scoring system where rewards were determined by how well a player did compared to the average score of every player. Whenever these events aired, social media would flare up with discourse: some players complained that they weren't able to get the higher-tier rewards and called out high-level Salmon Run group Overfishing for pushing the average to inaccessibility for the majority players, while others cited they preferred that the system encouraged doing one's best instead of simply meeting a minimum quota and shot back that lumping hate on Overfishers for playing well reeked of Sore Loser mentality. About a year after the first Big Run, Nintendo decided that the leaving the rewards inaccessible for the majority of players was a valid point, and the reward system was changed to be based on hitting minimum quotas for each tier so more players can reach it — which kicked up the debate again, this time whether or not this was the right change to make.^note And this is ignoring the way that the introduction of the new system with the Barnacle & Dime Big Run was rather buggy, resulting in the rewards being given out based on the old system, where the new gold threshold (135) isn't even close to the top 5% for that particular Big Run (165) or even the top 20% (144), which says a lot about why the developers decided to change how the rewards worked.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: The arc villain of the base game's single-player mode is heavily spoiled by the story's themes: while the game itself kept the mode's title secret until the final battle, marketing made sure the first thing we knew about the base campaign was that it was called "Return of the Mammalians." Combined with the player receiving a Smallfry companion, any fan paying the slightest bit of attention knew that there's only one morally ambiguous character with a connection to both mammals and Salmonids. One that many fans of the series had already theorized would be the Big Bad of this game due to how many hints Splatoon 2 gave. To its credit, the game knows that veterans were expecting the reveal and doesn't try to hide it for too long, namedropping Mr. Grizz as Cuttlefish's squidnapper and using his Voice Grunting moments prior during the cutscene that plays after beating the third boss. From there, the mystery is what Mr. Grizz actually looks like and what his motive is, though the former was also a case of I Knew It!.
• Cheese Strategy:
  • The Reefslider, Ink Vac, and Super Chump Specials all have wide area of effect but are too predictable to get good use out of... except on Splat Zones, where this same quality makes them really good at inking the entire zone and capturing it in a single move, and some players can get away by just spamming it to paint the zone all the time: even if they die immediately after or fail to get value out of the Special in anything besides painting, it's enough to consistently force the opponent to play around the potential of the Special or risk taking a point penalty.
  • Power Clam jumping returns in this game, enabling players to avoid the usual consequence of Power Clams revealing their position by jumping straight to the enemy's goal and scoring them in. This time though, the strategy is even cheesier: now there exists the invulnerable Kraken special, so players can use it to brute-force their way to the enemy's goal and give Power Clam-carrying allies an easy jump in, with very little counterstrategy available to the opponent once this trick gets rolling.
  • In true roguelike fashion, Side Order has a fair bit of cheese strats, some of which is hinted at by Acht, Marina, and Pearl in their chip commentary. Equipping the Drone Sprinkler and Turf Drone Gauge chips, for instance, lets Pearl recharge her own Drone Gauges just by moving around, which can combine with Drone Inkstrike et al. for near-constant Special spam.
• Common Knowledge:
  • A large part of the fanbase complains about this game having "bad servers" for why online multiplayer can be quite inconsistent. In reality, the game uses peer-to-peer netcode for its gameplay^note Besides matchmaking and authentication servers used by all games on the Nintendo Switch Online. Also not to be confused with the netcode's tick rate, which can actually cause the online multiplayer to be quite inconsistent by receiving and sending data at a significantly slower pace; which can create lag, latency, and the infamous "The connection is unstable" message., so the "server" is the Nintendo Switch of whichever player in the lobby is randomly chosen to host it; if someone's having issues, that's because of either the host's connection or their own connection, not Nintendo's. Players of various shooters typically advocate for dedicated servers for online play for this exact reason, since dedicated servers are typically much more consistent than peer-to-peer.
  • As we all know, Frye is a Memetic Loser who is always given the most awful, least popular Splatfest themes... except, no, not really. Of the game's first 18 Splatfests (counting the Splatfest World Premiere and regional themes separately), Frye's teams were the most popular six times, and she's only been third place by a margin of more than 8% twice (Teams Fame and Frye, and the latter just barely so). Using these metrics, the least popular team is actually Big Man's, being most popular only five times, the least popular by more than 10% four times,^note Teams Scissors, Sour, Bigfoot, and Sunday, and having the least-voted Splatfest team in Splatoon history so far (Team Bigfoot). The misconception seems to stem from conflating popularity with a guaranteed win, when popularity is just one of the five categories a team needs to score in to win; it's just that popularity is the most visible and least balanced category, so most people blame it for why this keeps on happening.
  • Related to the above, the idea that Shiver is winning because of the "Shiver Simps" (ie. the supposed Lowest Common Denominator fans that influence the whole Splatfest's outcome by voting for their favorite idol, Shiver, rather than answering the Splatfest topic) is highly unlikely. While it is true that Shiver usually has the most voted teams, (as of the Drums vs. Guitar vs. Keyboard Splatfest) there are only two Splatfests where her team won the whole Splatfest because they also won the popularity vote: Team Rock and Team Gear. In the other 18 Splatfests (again, region-specific Splatfests counted separately), Shiver either lost, or won enough categories for the popularity vote to not influence the final outcome even if it went to the runner-up. Unless there's some way to prove that voting Shiver is linked to winning the other four categories — which is highly unlikely, given that these categories are based on the skill of each team, and the difference in score percentage is way more narrow than in the popularity vote — it's very safe to say that Shiver doesn't win because people vote for her.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Devoted Anarchy Battle players and competitive players swear by three Main Abilities: Last-Ditch Effort, Ninja Squid, and Stealth Jump. Last-Ditch Effort gives a stacking buff of Ink Saver (Main), Ink Saver (Sub), and Ink Recovery Up the closer the opponents are to winning, maxing out at a whopping 24 AP each when the opposing team's progress counter is 30 points or less or when Overtime kicks in, making it one of the most powerful Abilities in the game. Ninja Squid doesn't reduce swim speed as much in this game, so more weapons can run it — and more weapons will need it to safely move through the game's multiple coverless midpoint areas without getting instantly spotted by a long-range weapon. Stealth Jump helps the user get back into the fray after being splatted without fearing being sniped by a Charger, giving them more time to push the objective.
  • At the higher echelons of competitive play, especially tournament play, expect to see a lot of Splash-o-Matic. Its pinpoint accuracy and decent DPS, combined with a Burst Bomb sub to finish off weakened enemies and the Crab Tank special to lock down key areas with long-range attacks, make it one of the most consistently useful shooters in the meta. For these reasons in the early stages of the game, it was common to see competitive teams running at least two Splash-o-Matics for more consistent access to Crab Tank.
  • Once the Carbon Roller Deco was added to the game in Chill Season 2022, Carbon users switched to it in droves. The Deco has Burst Bombs and Trizooka, as opposed to the vanilla's Autobomb and Zipcaster. Burst Bombs synergize amazingly with the Carbon Roller for finishing off weakened opponents or dealing damage outside its short range, while the Trizooka allows it to pick off enemies at distances it otherwise can't; these synergize much better with the Carbon Roller than the vanilla kit's Autobomb, which can locate enemies but costs the user a sneak attack opportunity, and the Zipcaster, which is Difficult, but Awesome incarnate and highly depends on the main weapon to perform well.
  • On the Turf War side of the game, the Aerospray RG is a source of frustration for many players. It has all the painting benefits of the base Aerospray in the only mode where painting is the main method of determining victory, but it has a much more annoying Special than the vanilla Aerospray: the Booyah Bomb, an immensely powerful Special due to the instant armor it grants on startup and the large amount of coverage it provides. Booyah Bombs won't win games on their own, but the Aerospray's high paint rate makes it a very good Special spammer, leading to a lot of Booyah Bombs flying around. This is especially apparent during Splatfests where Ranked players are forced into Turf War, and thus coordinated teams of Aerospray RG users aren't uncommon.
  • Following their introduction in Chill Season 2023, the Enperry Splat Dualies immediately became one of the most used weapons across all modes, due to their high fire rate and DPS which effectively double following a dodge roll, paired with versatile Curling Bombs that allow the wielder to reach the frontlines in a flash, while the Triple Splashdown can instantly kill multiple targets in a huge area, and can also be popped out in a flash upon being fully charged. The above-average fire rate and ink coverage guarantee frequent usage of this special, making them especially formidable to go up against when there's two or more players using these on the opposing team.
  • While a Palette can theoretically hold any combination of Color Chips you want, most players settle on a given Palette's Common Hues (which usually make up for its weapon's biggest shortcomings, sometimes to the point of game break with enough of them), mixing in some Power chips where available to cut through the unending hordes of Jelletons. It helps that the game itself nudges you in the direction of such builds, with Acht suggesting Common Hues as safe bets if you can't decide which chip to take, one of Marina's hacks increasing the appearance rates of Common Hues, and chaining together chips of the same color increases the number of points that you get at the end of a run.
• Contested Sequel: When Splatoon 3 first released, while some players felt it lived up to its predecessors due to new secondary additions such as Tableturf Battle, lockers, Tricolor Turf War, and Return of the Mammalians being an excellent improvement on Octo Valley and Canyon, others felt it was a step down due to a lack of changes from Splatoon 2, poor map design and balancing, the seasonal update model, Return of the Mammalians borrowing too much from Octo Expansion, and Deep Cut being underdeveloped while Off the Hook was locked behind paid DLC. This divisive similarity and lack of content died down with post-launch content addressing many player complaints and Side Order being released to acclaim from most fans. The game, however, remains fairly divisive due to a number of standing balance and connectivity issues, among other reasons.
• Continuity Lockout: Compared to other single-player campaigns in the series, which are pretty self-contained lore-wise, Side Order expands heavily on lore introduced in Octo Expansion, such as the effects of sanitization and the mass exodus of Octolings from the Octarian world into the Inkling one that occurred between Splatoon 1 and 2.
• Critical Dissonance: Critics generally take a positive view of Splatoon 3, deeming it a worthy successor to Splatoon 2 that builds on the first two games with fun bonuses and memorable new characters of its own. Fan reception is mixed; while casual fans tend to agree with critics, many longterm fans view it (exclusively or not) as a lukewarm Mission-Pack Sequel and the weakest link in the series. These hardcore fans decry the slower update cycle, stagnant Metagame, power disparity between high tier and low tier weapons, not receiving a new Ranked/Anarchy game mode like previous Splatoon games, the repetitive and disliked stage design direction, and poor if not worse netcode than prior games. The objective improvements Splatoon 3 does offer, such as Replays and the updated Salmon Run, are often argued to not justify a separate $60 release and that, while nice additions, leave the core game with the issues mentioned before. Even the Downloadable Content sparks debate among fans, with the Inkopolis Plaza wave criticized as lackluster nostalgia bait, and Side Order's long development going quiet for months (and controversially rendering Off the Hook Out of Focus for almost a year and a half). Compare Splatoon 3's 83 metascore (which is shared with 2) to its user rating of 7.0 (the lowest in the series, 14 points below 2).
• Delusion Conclusion: One point of speculation about Side Order during its prerelease is that the plot would concern getting trapped in a simulated reality. This theory is based on the sky displaying circuit board-like patterns across multiple previews, imagery in the first trailer that use brains and the nervous system as a loose visual theme,^note brain coral shows up in a brief flash, the ghost coral scattered around Inkopolis Square resembles nerves, as do the thin, branching growths seen on landscapes in more flash-by photos, the second trailer showing what appears to be a Mem Cake being produced on a factory conveyor belt and Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels named after varying states of mind, its use of polygonal objects and Matrix Raining Code both suggest the characters being in a virtual reality of some form (the latter especially, as its reference material in The Matrix is one of the most recognizable examples of the "trapped in a simulation" plot), and the release date trailer to the DLC having Agent 3 fall asleep before changing scene to the Spire of Order. It also makes the plot point of Pearl transforming into a drone easier to justify; the header for the Palette menu still depicts her as an Inkling, and it's far easier to reconcile this with Pearl existing in the Spire of Order as a robot if this version of her was never real in the first place. Once the expansion finally game out, this theory was confirmed - the expansion takes place in a virtual world created by Marina, called the "Memverse", which has been hijacked by a malignant entity.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Fans of Splatoon 2's Salmon Run mode generally had one desired change that outranked all others: nerf the Flyfish. And yet, it returns in full force for Next Wave. Of all the Boss Salmonids, Flyfish have it all: limited vulnerability window; finicky and ink-hungry method of killing that requires either coordination or a lack of other threats to do in a single cycle; no way to kill it using traditional means without very specific main weapons or an explosive special; height that distracts from ground-level threats; can still unleash an attack even if killed with perfect execution; tendency to remain at the water's edge, the most difficult and dangerous place to get to or remain in; global range to harass everyone no matter how far away; potential to kill you instantly if you're hit directly; the list goes on. All other bosses - new and returning - have some sort of limitation or weakness that the Flyfish simply does not have, and more than one is generally considered a run killer.^note Ironically, the Flyfish was nerfed, just not in any way that made it any less annoying; it now only shoots eight missiles at a time, and destroying one of its crates now slows its rate of fire, halves the number of missiles it can shoot, and makes it incapable of targeting any player other than the nearest in its line of sight (in Splatoon 2, this was only true if you destroyed its blue launcher first). This makes it slightly less lethal, but doesn't really fix why it's such a problem. The 5.1.0 update finally gave Flyfish an indirect nerf by shrinking the Tenta Missiles' explosion hitbox, meaning their attacks are now only a threat if you're standing right next to the crosshairs.
  • There are only four levels in Return of the Mammalians with rival Octolings, but those enemies are much tougher in this game, having Artificial Brilliance on par with Agent 3 in the Octo Expansion. It says something when one of the hardest segments in the Brutal Bonus Level is a Multi-Mook Melee in a claustrophobic arena with over a dozen of them — and those in the last wave have Specials that charge near-instantly.
  • The Side Order DLC has several Demonic Spiders of its own. The most commonly encountered are Battering Lentos, Smash Mooks that can reduce Eight to critical health with a single headbutt even with damage cranked all the way down and occasionally serve as mounts for Goddamned Bats like Springing Spiccattos or Drizzling Capricciosos. Fortunately, they can't ink turf. Spawning Accordos repeatedly create Homing Arpeggios (highly damaging homing missiles) until you destroy their seeds — and since they're immobile, there's usually a horde of other Jelletons to splat before you can get to them. Towering Nobilmentes are relatively rare, but may be the most dangerous of all; they have the longest-ranged attacks of any Jelleton, direct hits cut through Eight's armor like butter, and their weak spot is frequently out of reach of short-range weapons like the Brush and Slosher. You can knock down the pieces of their tower to get to the head like with Stingers, but unlike Stingers, leaving them alone will cause them to regenerate their tower and start firing more aggressively.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Many fans interpret Harmony as being autistic and/or having ADHD. This interpretation rests on a number of her odd, awkward mannerisms, including her stilted speech, her struggles with tactfulness, her repeated use of an Ultra Hand (which resembles a stim), and her obliviousness towards her clownfish companion (which is often cited as a sign of executive dysfunction). Supplemental material additionally notes how she "moves peculiarly while singing and talks in a loose way between songs," which are further cited as indications of neurodivergence.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • With the game's environment being the result of Team Chaos' victory in Final Fest: Splatocalypse, this has prompted speculation as to what the game would've been like if Team Order had won.
  • The initial announcement of the DLC led to a lot of speculation that there would be a total of four DLC waves. This is based on the fact that the logo for the expansion pass as a whole incorporated four colored ink splatters and that the "Wave 1" and "Wave 2" tags for Inkopolis and Side Order each took the appearance of four stickers layered on top of each other. Since the Wave 1 tag was yellow and Wave 2 was indigo, fans widely assumed at the time that there would later be two more DLC packs later down the line that used the teal and red color schemes to represent the other two colors on the expansion pass' ink splatter. This speculation has since died down with Side Order's long development time making the possibility of two more DLC waves seem less likely, since the game steadily neared the promised end of its update cycle.
  • Fans widely speculated that Agent 4 would be playable in Side Order or otherwise have a role in it, during it's prerelease. This is based on the fact that Side Order is oriented around Splatoon 2 characters, the release date promotional art depicting a silhouette with a strong resemblance to Agent 4's promo art appearance, and one color chip description specifying that it increases Inkling form speed. Come release, they aren't actually present: the silhouette depicts the Parallel Canon's leader (who doesn't wear the Hero Suit) and the color chip was rewritten to not mention Inklings. However, the Parallel Canon's leader uses the appearance of either the default Agent 4 or the Inkling from your Splatoon 2 save data, and texts in the expansion reveal that Agent 4's data was used to create the boss fight after Marina hired them to handle Memverse security.
• Fanfic Fuel: Following off previous games of the series, human-language "translations" of the Inkling/Octoling language songs in the series are quite popular. A notable example is "Big Betrayal", which is only partially translated: the first verses are Shiver and Frye heckling Big Man for collaborating with the Squid Sisters (or Off the Hook in the live version), while the song itself is untranslated. Within days of the theme getting shown off, fans jumped on providing "translated" lyrics for the song portion, usually interpreting them as more Big Man harassment with the English lyrics matching syllable count to the Inkling lyrics.
• Fan Nickname:
  • The final boss theme of Return of the Mammalians "Bear With Me" was unofficially christened "Hairy Little Workers" by fans until the 2023 Fresh Season update revealed its song name, as a dark play on the Grizzco theme "Happy Little Workers".
  • Before the Splatoon 3: Side Order DLC had its name officially revealed, fans took to referring to it as "the wedding DLC", since all that was known about it for months was that it would feature Pearl and Marina, two characters that fans love shipping together. The name remained popular after Side Order's release as the sheer amount of Pearlina Ship Tease found within (combined with the rather intimate choreography during their Splatfest song, "We're So Back") makes the idea of Pearl or Marina proposing to the other in the near future more than plausible, with some interpreting Pearl's desire for some "quiet time" with Marina as being just that.
  • Before "Frothy Waters" (the theme of certain Salmon Run known occurances like Mothership and Mudmouths) had its official name revealed, fans called the track "Chaos Carnival", referring to the track's chaotic, unsteady tune.
  • Before "Bait and Click" (the remix of "Clickbait" used in Big Run) had its name officially revealed, fans typically referred to it as "Fishbait", alluding to its use for the Salmonids.
  • "Wasabi Splattershot" for the Tentatek Splattershot, as the Splatoon 3 Tentatek has practically the exact same kit as the Wasabi Splattershot from the original Splatoon.
  • New/Neo Agent 3 for the player character, and Captain 3 for the Captain, to distinguish between them.
  • Until they were named by Splatune 3, the C-Side players Walter, Baker, and Kiki were dubbed Larry, Charlie, and Vanessa, respectively.
  • Some fans refer to Megalodontia as Joe from a Google Translate error reading its Japanese name. The actual name it was translating was "Jaw", but fans latched on to the error for its comedic value.
    • Some fans have also now started referring to Horrorboros as “Boris”. This of course comes from a clipping of the English name, not a translation mistake.
• Fan-Preferred Cut Content: Preview material for the game, such as the announcement trailer and the Return of the Mammalians trailer showed that Scorch Gorge and Eeltail Alley were actually planned to be more traditional Splatoon maps with wider flank areas, rather than what they'd become for Splatoon 3's launch with the side regions pared out. Fans generally prefer the original appearance of these stages, as the new, slimmer design forcing fights through narrow chokepoints has become a major pain point for 3's fanbase.
• Franchise Original Sin:
  • The oft-derided "Tetrimino" stage layout has been present since the very first Splatoon game, including in Mahi-Mahi Resort, Camp Triggerfish, Museum d'Alfonsino, and Urchin Underpass (one of the game's most iconic stages). It wasn't a problem in the first two games because such stages weren't the majority, with plenty of more open and/or experimental layouts like Moray Towers, Sturgeon Shipyard, Kelp Dome, Humpback Pump Track, Blackbelly Skatepark, and Saltspray Rig adding variety — and many of the stages that did use this layout had some sort of gimmick to make them stand out, like Ancho-V Games with its propeller lifts. In Splatoon 3, though, most of the wide-open stages from previous games are absent, with over half of all maps as of June 2023 consisting of variations on a basic, gimmick-free "flat hallway out of spawn leading to cramped mid" layout; besides the lack of gameplay diversity, the trend toward open stage design with high visibility, few hazards, and lack of flanking options has led to an overwhelmingly long-range focused meta, frustrating those who main short-ranged weapons like rollers and brushes.
  • Detractors of Return of the Mammalians cite the campaign's structure and plot as being far too similar to the Octo Expansion campaign from Splatoon 2, without enough innovation or iteration on its concepts to make it properly stand on its own. Splatoon 2's Octo Canyon mode garnered the same exact criticisms, being seen as a complete retread of Splatoon 1's Octo Valley. However, due to Octo Expansion setting a precedent for greater gameplay experimentation and a heavier emphasis on story for the franchise's single-player, ROTM is generally regarded as the bigger disappointment, even if Octo Canyon is still viewed as the worst of the five story modes overall.
  • At launch, fans of Off the Hook were disappointed to learn that the duo only appeared as vocalists for the in-universe band Damp Socks, before returning for the Side Order DLC campaign. However, they ironically aren't that much more Out of Focus than they were in their Splatoon 2 debut, where they were also uninvolved in the game's main campaign only to eventually serve as major characters in Octo Expansion. The main difference is that in Splatoon 2, they were the news hosts and thus still got some ample screen time whenever players booted up the game and during Splatfests, so fans of the characters had little to complain about. With that position now taken by Deep Cut, Off the Hook's roles in the base game are relegated to appearing on a Sunken Scroll, in a handful of stage cameos, and when their amiibo are scanned. Similarly, Pearl and Marina aren't the first main characters in the series to be Put on a Bus with only some brief in-game acknowledgement of their current whereabouts; Splatoon 2 did the same for Cap'n Cuttlefish and Agent 3. However, in that case, the characters bussed were a supporting cast member with little overarching importance and a Previous Player-Character Cameo that few players truly expected to come back — doing the same with the popular face characters of the previous game, especially those with as much lore importance as Off the Hook, drew much more mixed reactions. Ironically, when Side Order did come out, Off the Hook proved to be the central focus characters, receiving more screen time than they did in even the Octo Expansion.
  • Splatoon 3 isn't the first Nintendo game to split its Downloadable Content into waves and save the bigger, more exciting content for the end of its life cycle: Super Smash Bros. 4 and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate released each added character several months apart, Mario Kart 8^note both the original Wii U game's DLC and Deluxe's Booster Course Pass split its DLC into packs of two cups each, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild did much the same with its Master Trials and Champions' Ballad campaigns. This drew little to no controversy because while the earlier waves were usually lower-key, they were still engaging in their own right and kept to a timely release schedule. With Splatoon 3, though, many fans were let down when it was announced that Side Order was the second wave of two and had no set release date until January 2024. The first wave, Inkopolis Plaza as an alternate Hub World, was criticized as filler — particularly because unlike Side Order, it came out shortly after its announcement.
  • At Chill Season 2023's release, many fans complained about the apparent lack of testing for accessibility regarding the colorblinding filter that Splattercolor Screen caused. In actuality, the series has always had accessibility problems. The first game made players swing around a heavy Wii U gamepad to enable the must-have precision gyro aim, and Button Mashing weapons like the Inkbrush and Squeezer are well-recognized in the fanbase for their ability to cause carpal tunnel injuries when played optimally. It's just that many players grew to live with the kinesiologic accessibility problems previously in the series, while the audiovisual issues of the Splattercolor Screen caused many established fans to start seeing problems when they previously had none with the franchise. In fact, the Splattercolor Screen got off easier than most forms of accessibility issues in the series, because its most prominent flaws were able to be patched out easily.
• Friendly Fandoms: In May 2023, a ton of Mad Rat Dead fans started drawing posts about that game in Splatoon 3's plaza, something which ultimately culminated in the "#MRDSweep" of tons of fans drawing fanart of Mad Rat Dead.
• Game-Breaker:
  • After the 3.1.0 patch gave Inkjet a Balance Buff in its higher jetpack burst and increased explosion radius, it shot up into a staple of every high-level competitive team. With its now-reliable damage, opportunity to One-Hit Kill, the higher jetpack burst making it harder to hit, the map design making its ability to fly over ledges even more valuable, and its most common weakness — Crab Tanks shooting it out of the air — getting nerfed that same patch, it became a must-pick everywhere at top level for the purpose of retaking map control. The Ballpoint Splatling in particular became the Inkjet weapon of choice, not just because Ballpoint and its Fizzy Bomb could paint for Special quickly, but also because both were great weapons in their own right.
  • The 4.0.0 patch gave Tacticooler a new lease on life: gaining an extra 2 seconds minimum duration and making Special Power Up increase its duration more using less gear, this proved enough of a change to be a decently frequent pick in high-level competition, in part because its Quick Respawn effect could counter an Inkjet slaying the entire team. The standout Tacticooler weapon became the N-ZAP '85, since it could fight when empowered, poke with a lethal bomb, and its amazing paint enables it to farm a second Tacticooler before the first expired. The ZAP '85 alone is capable of replicating Splatoon 1's meta, where players would be constantly active and fighting opponents thanks to Quick Respawn keeping them perpetually in the game after getting splatted.
  • Even by the high standards of the Grizzco weapons, the Grizzco Stringer is absurd. It fires nine projectiles at once, giving it huge coverage and the power to wipe out hordes of Lesser Salmonids single-handedly. What's more, like normal Stringers, the exploding bolts can all hit a single target when fully charged, doing over a thousand damage at close range. Even King Salmonids can't take that kind of damage, and if you happen to have this weapon while fighting one, you can ignore your egg cannon in favor of charge shot spam, which is even easier thanks to the King Salmonids' towering sizes. It does have high ink consumption as a downside, but with this much coverage and damage, it's barely an issue.
  • The Grizzco Splatana trades any form of range on both its uncharged and charged shots in exchange for two unique properties on its charged shot: a greatly improved lunge while holding forward, and the ability to bypass armor, instantly killing bosses that normally require waiting for moments to Attack Its Weak Point, such as Steelheads, Drizzlers, Scrappers and (depending on your positioning) even Flyfish. Its uncharged shot is no slouch either, able to one shot most Lesser Salmonids while dealing massive damage to unarmored Salmonid bosses. If you can handle this weapon's absurdly small range, no enemy can stand in your way.
  • Side Order is a roguelike. This, of course, usually means that with enough luck and smart choice of upgrades, you can create some hilariously overpowered builds, and Side Order certainly delivers on that front. Add palette-favored chips that drop more often and hacks that increase the chance of said chips dropping, increase the chance of double chips and reduce the cost of vending machine items and resetting said vending machine, and it becomes much easier to create builds to utterly destroy your enemies. With the right Palette chips, you can basically build the equivalent of the Grizzco weapons but better and without the weaknesses.
    • Pearl drone modules and energy upgrades. Full stop. Once you get the momentum going on energy generation and have multiple drone weapons equipped, you're basically playing Vampire Survivors at that point in terms of the sheer mayhem Pearl can potentially cause by herself without your input. Which is frankly just like her, really.
    • The Order Charger's long range, high damage, and enemy piercing capabilities absolutely kill in this mode. Other weapons need a Color Chip to pierce enemies; the Order Charger's charged shots have no such limitation and will always pierce as many enemies as you can line up. Despite this massively potent crowd control capability, its above-average range and high damage still make it top-of-the-list for precisely targeting distant enemies. In case that weren't enough, its Triple Inkstrike is perfect for nuking large crowds, eliminating Portals, or creating breathing room. The only downsides might be that it's not easy to use, but homing shots and ink attack size (incidentally, both appearing more often with the Order Charger) will easily alleviate this issue - homing shots in particular will trivialize the Parallel Canon fight. Oh, and for some extra fun, maximum charge speed basically turns the Charger into the Grizzco Charger, which is as comically overpowered as it sounds.
    • The Blaster with high Main Firing Speed. Since Range and Power chips are common with its Palette, it's easy to end up outputting ridiculous bursts of damage at a long distance, like the Charger above. It gets even more powerful if ink-efficiency chips mitigate how (logically) fast this drains your ink tank.
    • The Roller is a rolling doomsday device. It can easily deal with the two most common enemies, can ram the tower repeatedly to move forward without compromising forward offense, pushes Infinity Balls with ease, and paints Zones in record time. Its default kit (Burst Bomb and Kraken) is perfect for shoving enemies away, compensating for Roller's short range, and/or creating breathing room from attacks. Offense, defense, coverage, impairment - the Roller can do it all!
    • Kraken is pretty good in this mode, but Ultra Stamp manages to edge it out in almost every respect. It swings very rapidly to deal lots of damage very rapidly, can be activated and then flip-swung instantly to get Jelletons away from you, and can be thrown early to finish off enemies and immediately start building up a fresh Stamp. The swinging arc is perfect to hit Portals (which Kraken can't do) and it can mash into Order's face for tons of damage. It only has one weakness compared to Kraken — the user isn't perfectly invulnerable — but with how fast this thing moves, stunning everything in its path and smashing it to bits, that's almost a moot point.
    • Booyah Bomb is a ridiculously good panic button in this mode. Not only can it tear through large hordes of enemies with little ease, the temporary invincibility it grants can be a life saver when you're being swarmed by enemies. Combined with special gauge up, you can easily spam it for most of the run with little issue.
    • Reefslider, normally a Low-Tier Letdown, becomes an amazing Jack of All Trades in this mode. Need to quickly escape a situation? The Reefslider easily outspeeds the Jelletons if you want to just run away, but if you want, there is nothing wrong with charging into a group of them and denoting, which, if it doesn't splat them outright, has a high chance of simply knocking any remaining Jelletons off the stage. The only real issue it has is that if a Portal is too high, the explosion will miss, but if the Portal is still close the ground, then the Reefslider can deal heavy damage.
    • In terms of specific Palette Chips, the Lucky Bomb Drop chip has a chance to drop a bomb out of every defeated enemy. Not only is this already pretty good considering the clustered hordes you'll be fighting most of the time, but just one chip sets the chance at a surprisingly high 15% (compare to other item-dropping Lucky chips that only increase by 1%-5% per chip), and increases all the way up to 90% when maxed out. Even two or three of these chips can cause chain reactions that take out or scatter entire crowds and can do serious damage to Portals even if you can't reach them.
    • Splash Radius and Splash Damage color chips. As it says on the tin, they respectively increase the size of explosions and their damage. What puts it into game breaker tier, however, is just how much qualifies as an explosion in the mode. Outside of your standard bombs, it can affect several specials like Triple Splashdown and Inkstrike, the explosions from Blasters and Tri-Stringer bullets, the enemy spawning Portals, Lucky Bombs, Springing Spiccato pedestals, Spawning Accordo and Towering Nobilmentes when they're beaten. They're beneficial to have several chips of regardles of weapon.
• Genius Bonus: The Friday vs. Saturday vs. Sunday Splatfest symbols use calendars with celestial bodies to represent each team. Saturday and Sunday are obvious enough, for many will make the connection that Saturday is named for Roman Mythology god Saturn and Sunday is named after the Sun. Venus representing Friday isn't quite so clear, but the knowledgeable can trace the etymology of Friday via Norse Mythology goddess Frigg, whom Friday is named after and is associated with Roman goddess Venus.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Tentakooks are just as irritating as ever. They hold keys required for progress in 6-11, and constantly run away whenever you try to approach while also dropping a Splat Bomb to dissuade you from following. At least they only appear in that stage in this game. Side Order has Jelleton equivalents in the Panicking Alla Mambo, which have the same movement routine and can appear on any floor. While they only drop Splat Bombs if slowed down by allied ink, you'll frequently have to contend with Jelleton hordes before you even have a chance at getting close to splat them.
  • Flipper-Floppers aren't hard to deal with and go down laughably quickly, but their ability to instantly cover a large area in enemy ink, and to do it repeatedly if not taken out right away, can make them a real pain, especially if there are multiple on-stage at once. Their weakness, inking enough of the circle they ink to flip it to the players' color, can also be surprisingly finicky, sometimes not changing even if you ink almost the entire circle, and it can be very difficult to take down on your own if the wave gives you a weapon with bad coverage.
  • While Big Shots pose little threat on their own, they can cause a lot of trouble in tandem with other Boss Salmonids. Like Stingers and Flyfish, they stay by the waterside after spawning, meaning you'll have to wade through a sea of Lesser Salmonids to get to them. Once you reach the Big Shot itself, you'll find that not only does the operator take an obscene amount of punishment before going down,^note They have about as much health as a Maws or an armored Flipper-Flopper but don't have their quick-kill vulnerabilities, making them pure damage sponges, they constantly retreat underwater to reload, becoming invincible in the process. Let them fire a shot, and they'll launch a cannonball toward the egg basket, creating a damaging shockwave where it lands — it's not difficult to dodge or particularly lethal, but good luck avoiding it with everything else Salmon Run throws at you. Often, the shockwave will weaken you just enough for another Salmonid to finish you off. Unlike other long-range bosses, which are clearly visible from a distance, Big Shots are only slightly larger than Cohocks, meaning it can sometimes be hard to tell one has spawned until it starts bombarding you. They also like to spawn in groups of two or three at once, and since all Big Shots in a wave use the same cannon, this drastically boosts their fire rate and results in even more shockwaves to avoid. A Big Shot launcher's position relative to their spawn point also affects their rate of fire, typically ranging from "too low to be a serious threat, but high enough to be irritating" to "constant and unrelenting." The 2.0.0 update nerfed them by reducing their movement speed, meaning they attack less frequently while giving players more time to splat them, and making the projectile trails last much longer, making them easier to track when they first appear.
  • Fish Sticks are surprisingly insidious foes. They fly across the stage to their designated target location, allowing them to ignore your defenses, and once installed they start spraying ink in a wide radius around their pillar. They only deal Scratch Damage and don't target players, but their existence makes it impossible to keep nearby turf in your color and the amount of stage control you lose to them can end runs. A number of weapon classes also struggle against them, especially those lacking area of effect damage or high fire rate, and if you're holding one, you have to hope that an ally with a suitable weapon is paying enough attention to come to your aid.
  • Side Order has the Drizzling Capriccioso. It inks almost as much turf as a Fish Stick but is mobile, and unlike them, it doesn't give any reward or utility when it's taken out beyond the standard Jelleton drops. These things are a nuisance for constantly painting in an area around them, supporting larger units' movement. Splat Zones floors will drown you with their presence, and a single one reaching the zone can flip its alignment. The game even lampshades this with Acht's Monster Compendium entry starting with "I can't stand these things."
• Goddamned Boss: In Side Order, the Pinging Marciale is extremely frustrating to fight in almost every circumstance. It's mostly armored except for two exposed points opposite each other in most instances, taking only a quarter damage outside of those weak spots (and it only takes full damage on a clean hit). Hitting it anywhere will push it in the direction of your shot, rolling its weak points away from you in addition to the boss as a whole, turning much of the fight into a "Get Back Here!" Boss. In addition, if you don't quickly take out its phases or knock it into one of the bumpers in the arena, it'll instead charge you, making it nigh impossible to hit and doing heavy damage if it connects (though for a saving grace, it opens a weak spot across its circumference afterwards, same as if you pushed it into a bumper). As if that's not enough, it will regularly spawn in Battering Lentos and Springing Spiccatos, which have attacks that can push the boss away to make you chase it even more. None of this is overly difficult (even the charge gives you plenty of time to ink an escape route), but it adds up to a fight that can take quite a while unless you're lucky and have a palette that can quickly tear through it. It's even acknowledged in-game; one possible victory quote has Pearl grousing that she isn't sure if the boss was more annoying when it was rolling at you or away from you.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • There used to be a bug where grabbing a locker item, rotating it, then cancelling that action could have the object rotated at an angle that otherwise isn't possible, since rotation normally only allows 90 degree turns. Players used this technique to have greater freedom over locker customization (or, alternatively, to screw with hitboxes and stick long objects partway through the locker's walls), and when the bug got fixed in 2.0.0, many people who customized their locker this way stopped touching the feature out of concern that they wouldn't be able to restore how it previously looked.
  • Mudmouth Eruption events are usually Breather Levels, but during Version 1.1.0, there was a chance the normally stationary Mudmouths would begin sliding around the stage at impossible speeds. This typically resulted in an Unintentionally Unwinnable wave where the Mudmouths immediately sped off to hide in the water, only emerging to pull a drive-by splat with their Collision Damage — something that almost never happens in an unglitched game. As hilarious (and frustrating for the helpless Salmon Run team) as it may be, the 1.1.1 update patched this out.
  • At launch, there was a chance that two Slammin' Lids would overlap; attempting to jump onto one of them would result in the collision freaking out and launching you across the map at ridiculous speeds, often far into the ocean surrounding the stage.
  • Prior to the 1.1.1. update, Salmon Run would alert you ahead of time if your current run would end with an Xtrawave if your team could successfully beat the third wave, labeling the third round as "Wave 3" instead of "Final Wave."
  • On release, Splatanas had a very strange oversight that caused every sixth shot to be a "wide" Sword Beam that inked much more ground than usual. (Charged shots did not count toward this "counter", but still gained its benefits.) Stranger still, a user's place in this "cycle" was randomized at the start of every match, after a respawn, and after using their Special, meaning if they wanted to take advantage of this bugged attack, they would have to check for it after each randomization. It was thought to be an intentional game mechanic until Version 1.2.0 patched it.
  • Prior to Version 2.0.0, in the single-player stages, successfully pausing, unpausing, then pausing again just as the level ends would cause the game to give your Power Egg reward again. If you can master the precise timing needed, you can do this multiple times in a row to make the game give you thousands of eggs before it boots you back to the overworld. This not only allows speedrunners to beat "Return of the Mammalians" in under an hour (resulting in the game's Any% speedrun category briefly being split between Pause Abuse and No Pause Abuse, before eventually splitting into Pre- and Post-2.0.0 instead), but also quickly nets you the necessary eggs to clear the islands of all their ooze and regularly use the Shel-Drone postgame.
  • Due to what appears to be an oversight, when using a Super Sea Snail to reroll ability slots, the game does not autosave until after it shows you what ability you got. There's enough time between the roll appearing and the autosave that one can hit the HOME Button and close the game if they don't like what they rolled; doing this rewinds you to before the reroll while saving a Super Sea Snail. Long story short, you can save scum for decent rerolls while saving Super Sea Snails.
  • A patch intended to fix a collision oversight that caused thrown bombs to occasionally bounce out of Flyfish launchers did its job a little too well — it now rarely causes bombs thrown near but not into the launchers to teleport inside them. Given what infamous Demonic Spiders Flyfish are normally, very few people complained.
• Growing the Beard: The launch day metagame of Splatoon 3 was criticized for the overwhelmingly passive playstyle it encouraged, with the top choices being Crab Tank and Tenta Missiles, both choices that are great at locking down chokepoints and making it highly disadvantageous to take risks when enemies had them on the playing field. Balance patches were quite slow and didn't change much, so players were left feeling like they were languishing in Crab Tank hell — until the balance patch of Fresh Season 2023. This patch gave Inkjet more reliable damage and an improved jetpack jump, greatly increasing the strength of the Special to be able to blast apart entire teams alone. It took a while, but this change relieved players from the overwhelmingly passive Crab Tank metagame and enabled engaging, risky moves with Inkjet. This patch was also the earliest instance of the Splatoon 3 balance direction showing itself (giving players an option between multiple very powerful Special weapons rather than Nerfing whatever's strongest into oblivion), a trend that would repeat for Tacticooler and Trizooka to eventually create one of the most diverse and expressive metagames that the series has seen, and a very welcome difference compared to the highly Splash-o-Matic-centric metagame that existed when Crab Tank was the only option. And the long-awaited release of Side Order in February 2024 not only debuted a praised roguelike gameplay mode, it finally addressed a long-standing criticism by bringing back Off the Hook in style.
• I Knew It!:
  • Because Team Chaos won the Final Fest in Splatoon 2, everyone predicted that the team's victory would impact the direction Splatoon 3 would take, since the first game's "Callie vs. Marie" Splatfest was rumored to have influenced the main campaign of the sequel. Lo and behold, 3 has a general "chaos" theming, the developers later confirming that they didn't even start conceptualizing the third game until after that Splatfest.
  • Several fans predicted, long before Splatoon 3 was even announced, that the next game's single-player campaign would have Mr. Grizz as the main villain, given how Splatoon 2 heavily hinted at the character having Ambiguously Evil intentions that neither of that game's campaigns explored. Furthermore, many predicted that he would be an actual grizzly bear rather than a marine lifeform that resembles a bear. Come Return of the Mammalians, and those fans were proven right on both counts.
  • Between Splatfests now consisting of three sides and precedent existing in the form of the first game's Pokémon Red vs. Pokémon Blue Splatfest, few were surprised when the November 2022 Splatfest was announced to be a Pokémon collab promoting the newest installments of that series, using the starter types as a theme.
  • When a new rare weapon for Salmon Run was first previewed on Splatoon's Twitter/X account during the buildup to the Um'ami Ruins Big Run, many players worked out that it would be the Grizzco Dualies based on the provided closeup of the weapon long before the 5.0.0 patch notes revealed this to be the case.
  • Ever since the announcement of three-way Splatfests, fans speculated that eventually there would be a Splatfest theme pitting the three members of Deep Cut directly against each other, similar to the Callie vs. Marie Splatfest in the first game. What fans didn't see coming, however, was how early into the game's life cycle this Splatfest would appear, debuting just a year after the game's initial release in September 2023.
  • One point of speculation about the first trailer of Side Order was that the Octoling character featured in it was a returning Agent 8, based on its loose theme of memories and abandonment, which would align quite nicely with Agent 8's own story from the Octo Expansion. This got confirmed by the second trailer, in which the Pearl Drone calls the Octoling protagonist Eight.
  • After Deep Cut's first concert was loosely themed around "Return of the Mammalians" and featured the Squid Sisters as guest stars, some fans correctly predicted that their second concert, which was set to debut just under two weeks shy of the "Side Order" DLC, would feature Off the Hook as guests.
  • Many fans predicted that the Order Sector, the central hub of Side Order, was a virtual location in some sort of cyberspace from the frequent shots of Matrix Raining Code, emphasis on simplistic polygonal shapes, subtle circuit patterns on certain objects, and Pearl suddenly being an Attack Drone with seemingly no in-universe explanation.
  • When Inkopolis Plaza returned to the game as an alternate hub world in the DLC, quite a few players called Inkopolis Square subsequently being unlocked after completing Side Order. This was helped by the Order Sector clearly being a twisted monochromatic version of the Square and players noticing that hub selection emphasized traveling to a different city rather than specifically the Plaza. The reveal that Fresh Season 2024 would include new Tableturf Battle cards featuring the Splatoon 2 shopkeepers all but confirmed it shortly before Side Order released.
• Improved Second Attempt:
  • One complaint about Splatoon 2's Hero Mode was Callie having little role in the story beyond being a brainwashed Damsel in Distress who initially vanished after the credits rolled until a later update. Not only were most of Callie's fans disappointed, some of Marie's fans didn't enjoy it either, as she no longer had the energetic wise guy to her sardonic straight man to help elevate her jokes, and Sheldon was too flat for Marie to bounce off. Splatoon 3 not only returns Callie to her role as Agent 1 and gives her and Marie all the back-and-forth banter and sniping their fans know and love, but she also follows you around the hub world in Alterna while Marie and the Captain stay at camp, as if the developers were trying to say, "See? She's actually in this one!"
  • The last time players had to fight a Brainwashed and Crazy idol didn't play well with fans for several reasons, chief among them being that the choice to make Callie a Damsel in Distress stripped a popular character of her agency for contrived reasons. It didn't help that before version 3.0.0, the Final Boss and its refight were Callie's only appearances in the entire game if a player didn't own her amiibo. In Side Order, while Marina is also brainwashed and turns into a boss fight, this is one of the first things that happens in the story instead of the final fight, and it happens because of outside factors she couldn't have predicted. After you save her, Marina joins your team and is a constant presence from then on, never endangered or falling out of the limelight for the rest of the campaign, to the point that one could even consider her the main character of the mode.
  • Return of the Mammalians caught some criticism for the Squid Sisters being rather superfluous to the story, and Deep Cut being Out of Focus for most of it. By contrast, Pearl and Marina (particularly the latter) are unquestionably the main characters of Side Order, and are so central to its plot and themes that the campaign simply could not be about any other group.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!:
  • Many of the new or redesigned stages, like Scorch Gorge, Brinewater Springs, Mahi-Mahi Resort, Um'ami Ruins, and Barnacle & Dime, are bashed for having the same general "Tetrimino" layout — a zigzag-shaped map with two "hallways" out of spawn leading to mid, featuring little height variation or flanking options and few real differences beyond obstacle types and placement and setting. Detractors claim that beyond making a lot of the maps feel same-y, it focuses on Anarchy Battles and Tricolor Turf War at the expense of playability in other modes, and adds to the notorious level of dominance long-range weapons have in the meta.
  • "Return of the Mammalians", by the developers' admission, is a "best of" version of the prior single-player campaigns. In practice, this means that levels in Alterna are structured identically to Octo Expansion's stations (a mix of traditional and gimmick levels with multiple weapon kits available), right down to having an "ally" character who observes your performance and punishes you with an automatic splat whenever you fail certain level conditions. Meanwhile, the overworld has more of past single-player modes' DNA, with scalable terrain the player must navigate to find level entrances and unique bosses. Then you get to the finale, where the game becomes Octo Expansion in gameplay and story. It's a multi-stage gauntlet leading up to the final encounter with very similar setpieces and pacing, only accessible once you collect and combine a number of strange-looking pieces. The antagonist is The Corruptor, who uses a strange kind of ooze and aims to eradicate Inklings and Octolings because they're unsatisfied with them being the dominant species on the planet. If you fail against the final boss — which involves maneuvering around a supersized entity to attack its weak points — you get a few shots of their plan succeeding and wiping out all life on Earth. Whether these similarities make the mode better or worse, and whether OE or RotM had the better execution of this framework, inevitably varies from fan-to-fan.
• Junk Rare:
  • The Experience Food Tickets are helpful for leveling up so you get new equipment faster, but once you reach Level 30, the only benefit to additional levels is extra Sheldon Licenses, rendering Experience Food Tickets substantially less useful.
  • Tableturf Battle has the Tentatek and Smallfry cards, listed as Rare and Fresh (the second-highest and highest card rarities, respectively) despite covering some of the fewest squares of any card in the game. Tentatek is just two diagonal spaces, while Smallfry is only three, identical to a mirrored Splat Bomb. Smaller cards like these are good for patching holes, but quite poor for covering turf.
• Just Here for Godzilla:
  • Like prior entries in the series, some players are only invested in Splatoon 3's single-player campaigns or Salmon Run and hardly touch the main multiplayer modes.
  • For Side Order specifically, the main selling point for many was that it would serve as the return of Off the Hook, who were otherwise Demoted to Extra in the base game. Arguably invoked, as this was also one of the few things that was even known about the DLC for well over a year.
• LGBT Fanbase:
  • Similar to other Nintendo games at the time, such as Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Splatoon 3 refers to appearances not as "gender" but as "style", which also removes restrictions regarding hairstyle and legwear. The game's logo also happens to use colors similar to the nonbinary flag◊, and Splatfest titles are no longer gender-specific; instead of the top title being "King/Queen", it's "Ruler". All this gave the game a large nonbinary fanbase that only grew after the first trailer.
  • Shiver, one of the three members of Deep Cut, has an androgynous appearance and initially wasn't referred to with gendered pronouns, even in heavily gendered languages like Spanish and French. Even after being confirmed as female, Shiver remains popular with nonbinary fans, and is often headcanoned as nonbinary or trans.
  • Mr. Coco immediately drew attention from fans of the Bara Genre for being incredibly buff, seemingly having chest hair, and having some rather endearing expressions with his big, shiny eyes. His fanbase only grew when the game released, as he turned out to be quite an encouraging and likeable guy.
  • In a similar case to Shiver, Acht was referred to with they/them pronouns in teasers for Side Order, leading to a large portion of the fanbase to pin them as nonbinary right away. Unlike Shiver, however, Acht being nonbinary turned out to be canon following the DLC's release, as Pearl and Marina also refer to them with exclusively they/them, leading to much rejoicing from the fandom.
  • After Off the Hook's long absence from the base game, Side Order rewarded the patience of their queer fanbase by using every conceivable way of saying Pearl and Marina (one of the most popular fandom ships) are dating without saying it outright. They're about one hand-hold or meaningful look into each other's eyes away from being an Official Couple at this point. Even Shiver/Frye gets some Ship Tease!
• Magnificent Bastard: The Final Boss of the Return of the Mammalians: Mr. Grizz, once known as Bear #03. The last surviving mammal of the doomed Ark Polaris, Mr. Grizz plots to restore the world he once knew by transforming sea creatures into mammals using his creation, the Fuzzy Ooze. He establishes Grizzco Industries as a front for his operations, recruiting young Inklings and Octolings to harvest the Golden Eggs needed for his Fuzzy Ooze production with the allure of exclusive gear and battles. After five years of successful business, Grizz steals the Great Zapfish to power his Fuzzy Ooze rocket and the Octarian Army to protect it, while also draining Cap'n Cuttlefish's brain to guide his endgame. Launching himself into space with the rocket, Grizz nearly succeeds in covering the Earth with Fuzzy Ooze, only to be thwarted by the combined might of New Agent 3, Hugefry, and DJ Octavio. Realizing his plans are in ruins, Grizz accepts the new status quo of Earth as the future and takes his defeat with grace, proving himself to be a true Well-Intentioned Extremist.
• Memetic Badass:
  • Due to the initial learning curve of Tableturf Battle, many players trying to learn the mode lose their battles against the game's first opponent, Baby Jelly. As such, much of the fanbase has painted what is supposed to be a Warmup Boss as a Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass or straight-up SNK Boss.
  • Shiver is given a somewhat backhanded version of this when it comes to Splatfests due to how many she's won, with fans (sometimes sarcastically) saying any upcoming Splatfest will inevitably end in Shiver winning. It doesn't help that Shiver's win-streak is occasionally pointed out in-game.
• Memetic Loser:
  • Until after the Grass vs Fire vs Water Splatfest, Big Man was portrayed as this: for all the prior Splatfests, his team would pull ahead in ranking early... and then get stuck with defending during Tricolor Turf War, which doomed him to failure thanks to Tricolor's map design. It took a rework to Sturgeon Shipyard's Tricolor layout and Big Man winning the aforementioned Splatfest for him to shed this reputation. However, he entered this status once again after the Nessie vs Aliens vs Bigfoot Splatfest, because Team Bigfoot is the least-voted team in Splatoon history, at a measly 8% of players.
  • Frye has only won two Splatfests since the game's launch, one of which was exclusive to Japan, and is the only idol in 3 who has had a team be voted most popular but fail to win the Splatfest overall - five times in fact, counting both international and Japan-exclusive themes. The early ones had her teams either be the least supported or her team would earn the fewest amount of points. She got out of this status during the Spicy vs Sweet vs Sour Splatfest where she finally won her first Splatfest with 56% player popularity, but after that, she's slowly crept back into this, with Teams Milk Chocolate and Strawberry failing to score any Splatfest score at all, while Team Fame barely managed to escape being the new least-voted team in Splatoon history at 9% of votes. And with the Shiver vs Frye vs Big Man Splatfest, she ended up being the least popular idol with 17% of the vote. Things got even worse after the regional Splatfests of Handshake vs. Fist Bump vs. Hug and Friday vs. Saturday vs. Sunday, where she still managed to lose both to Shiver despite representing the most popular team by far in both cases (though she at least won the Japanese regional Splatfest in the former case)... and then it was followed up with taking the most popular team in Springfest and not only losing but getting last place in rankings.
  • Agent 4 is alluded to by the game in a number of spots, particularly in Side Order, but never actually shows up in the flesh. Pearl even admits to forgetting who they were when their Palette is unlocked. Contrast this to how every other major character (who isn't dead) appears in Splatoon 3 in some form. Some fans like to dunk on Agent 4 for this, acting like every other character and/or Nintendo themselves have forgotten or abandoned them. Though the developers did throw a bone Agent 4's way in Side Order - their Palette is guaranteed to unlock early on, Marina's dev logs and the Palette notes reveal that she hired Agent 4 to handle Memverse security, and the Parallel Canon boss fight is based on Agent 4's data (the leader even takes on Agent 4's appearence from your Splatoon 2 save file), meaning that that boss is essentially Side Order's equivalent of the Agent 3 fight from Octo Expansion.
• Minimalist Run:
  • Return of the Mammalians has 65 kettle levels and 4 boss battles before the final sequence at the Alterna Space Center. While the boss fights are all mandatory, only four the standard kettle levels are: the four Crater levels. Fuzzy Ooze is the only thing impeding progression across Alterna's main overworld, and the boss kettles don't require the player to beat all the other levels on their respective islands like in previous games. Eggs collected in the Crater don't carry over to Alterna, however, so if you don't want to play any Alterna levels, get ready to spend time grinding the Power Egg balloon floating around Squid Sisters Base, which you can barely reach from the starting area. Considering this means waiting for a slow-moving balloon to pass by so you can hopefully time and land a precise Smallfry toss^note (if you miss, it's actually faster to kill yourself to soft-reset its movement cycle, rather than wait for it to come back around), after which you must exit and reenter the campaign so the balloon respawns, then repeat the process? Probably not the most fun thing in the world, but at least you can move to an easier spot to hit the balloon once you collect enough eggs to clear out a few patches of ooze.
  • Side Order encourages minimalist runs with the Risky Rewards hack, which awards more Prlz upon a successful run and in higher quantities the fewer hacks you have active and Eight's Palette, which gains more Color Chip slots in the same way. You can earn a special badge for your Splashtag by successfully completing an Eight's Palette run with four or fewer hacks active.
• Moe:
  • Big Man. There is no way to make a sleepy-looking manta ray with a cat smile anything but adorable. He's also the kindest of Deep Cut, wanting to resolve tensions between Inkopolis and Splatsville's music scenes, allying himself with Team Love, and (in Return of the Mammalians) still being nice even when he has to fight New Agent 3. The promotional artwork for Shiver vs. Frye vs. Big Man◊ manages to make him look even more adorable as a child, with his tiny, rounder, chest-tall physique giving him an intensely huggable appearance.
  • Harmony was always pretty cute in her previous side appearances as a member of Chirpy Chips, but she really brings it to the fore as the shopkeeper of Hotlantis, showcasing a ditzy, space-cadet personality and some adorably awkward poses.
  • Pearl's new outfit features a jacket with big, puffy white sleeves that looks far too big on her. She looks just like a little marshmallow, especially in her drone form from Side Order.
  • Side Order ratchets up Marina's adorkable traits even more in her interactions with Pearl and Dedf1sh, squeeing over Pearl and having some painfully adorable things to say about her partner in her dev diaries.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The little jingle the Tacticooler plays when deployed, and the related tune that plays when you take a drink from it. Get ready for a buff that cranks your cephalopod's stats to the max!
  • The whooshing sound that announces the whole enemy team's wiped; doubly so if you're the one who did it.
  • The opening riff of Off the Hook's Inkopolis News broadcast is always welcome to hear in Side Order — you've just picked up your third Disc Piece, offering you a brief reprieve from the Jelleton rush.
• Narm Charm: Part of the reason why the pathos of that one scene from Return of the Mammalians when Cuttlefish gets dehydrated and is apparently killed doesn't work for most fans is Agent 3's cluelessly neutral expression for it. While it does still feel fitting for their reaction to the apparent death of someone they barely know (the latter especially if Agent 3 is an Octoling that has been faced with Octo-racism from Cuttlefish and the Squid Sisters throughout the campaign - especially in the Western localizations, which is where the bulk of the "Octo-racism" came from), it's still hard not to look at their face during this scene and not think "a-duhhh..."
• Old Guard Versus New Blood: Overall, the main game of Splatoon 3 falls more heavily on the new blood side. It's set in a completely different city from the previous two Splatoon games and features a mostly new cast outside of several series mainstays. It only loosely references the events of previous games, most infamously by sending Off the Hook on a world tour (information that is only revealed if you find a non-essential item). Gameplay, in general, skews in a more casual direction against the wishes of the game's competitive audience, with flatter, more open maps encouraging the use of long-range weapons. The game's higher ranks are generally easier to attain, with ranks for all modes being merged once again and making it possible to stay in a good group in Anarchy Battle (Series) or grind ranks in Anarchy Battle (Open) and "be carried" (instead of it always shuffling players for ranked battles) and once reached, they lack any mechanic to rank down, not even in S+/X Battle, which in turn causes balancing issues with the game's ranking and matchmaking system due to the resulting very uneven power levels making the X Power range too broad. There's also a number of standing balance and connectivity issues from previous games left unaddressed. Return of the Mammalians in particular feels like it was aimed at people who had never played the Octo Expansion in Splatoon 2; it has very similar level design, plot structure, difficulty, even the finale is significantly similar. The game's Downloadable Content, meanwhile, is focused strictly on the old guard, allowing players to return to Inkopolis Plaza and Inkopolis Square alongside bringing back fan-favorites Off the Hook and Ascended Extra Dedf1sh to star in Side Order. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the complaints about Splatoon 3 come from the old guard — meanwhile, new blood players, who don't have experience with older Splatoon games and are the target audience of the more casual direction, have much nicer things to say about it.
• One True Pairing: Though not quite as unanimously agreed upon as Pearl/Marina, Shiver/Frye is a very popular ship among fans, to the point Side Order gives it a bit of Ship Tease. Big Man is typically either a Shipper on Deck or in on the act, making Deep Cut a polycule.
• Pandering to the Base:
  • Lockers are quite obviously supposed to be the interior design mechanic for players who wanted customizable apartments since the first game.
  • The Inkopolis DLC caters to Splatoon 1 loreheads, who were curious about what happened to Inkopolis Plaza and its residents during the seven-ish years since that game released. After the DLC's announcement hype died down, everyone else was left scratching their heads, wondering what justifies the $5 price tag^note While Inkopolis is only available as part of a $25 expansion pass alongside Side Order, the previous game's expansion, which didn't include a new hub, was only $20, leading people to assign the extra $5 as the cost of Inkopolis. for an alternate hub, which — while cool — is one of the less-essential parts of the game, especially given that Inkopolis Plaza is far smaller than Splatsville and so doesn't work as well as a place to explore or chill out after a battle.
  • From the beginning, the Side Order DLC was quite open about pandering to fans of Off the Hook, who lamented how Out of Focus they were in the base game. When the DLC released, it brought with it an enormous amount of Pearlina Ship Tease, with their dialogue and behavior doing everything short of explicitly denoting them as a couple, indicating Nintendo was perfectly aware what many of Off the Hook's fans wanted out of the campaign. (Shiver/Frye is hinted at too, for good measure.)
• Popular with Furries: This game, like the last one, hit it off with the Furry Fandom, with all the furry-based Splatsville posts non-furries have come to either love or hate. It also introduced Big Man, a Funny Animal manta ray who happens to be the third member of Deep Cut and a boss in Return of the Mammalians. And with lots of attention comes a fair amount of fanart through Splatsville posts or otherwise, some of which portray him as a Big Beautiful Man and wouldn't look out of place in the bara community.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Tricolor Turf War had a chilly reception for the first two Splatfests, being seen as too unfavorable to the defenders thanks to the map design and Ultra Signal mechanics.
  • Grass vs. Fire vs. Water improved its outlook; Sturgeon Shipyard returned from Rock vs. Paper vs. Scissors, but with a redesigned mid that reduces attackers' flank options have and gives defenders more space and paintable turf at their spawn points. The revamped layout is much more fair to the defending team, and was the most likely factor in Team Water's landslide victory.
  • Players were locked to playing only as either offense or defense depending on their team's performance during the first half of the Splatfest. Not only was this limitation annoying for those looking to earn the badges for winning as either side, it also meant that matchmaking for Tricolor battles was spotty since it was never guaranteed that there were enough players queuing for either side to get a full match. This often resulted in players being forced into regular Turf War battles to the point where some could go the entire Splatfest without playing a single Tricolor match. This was thankfully fixed in the 2.0.0 update which made it so all teams would randomly be assigned as either attackers or defenders regardless of the halftime results, with bonus Clout being awarded should the player be put on the side their team is currently in.
• Salvaged Gameplay Mechanic: Among the most infamous That One Levels in Splatoon 2's Octo Expansion are the ones where Agent 8 must roll an 8-ball across an obstacle course to a goal. Dropping the ball into a pit means failing the test and losing a life — and you will drop the ball, thanks to the finicky physics and tight paths you have to roll them across. In Side Order, ball-rolling stages return. The first time you enter one, Pearl groans "Not again!" in dismay... only for Acht to tell her to cool it, because these balls can't fall off the stage.
• Self-Fanservice:
  • Some New Agent 3 fanart makes the damaged Hero Suit more revealing than in the game, such as having underboob exposure.
  • As per the norm, idols Shiver and Frye, especially Shiver, tend to be drawn with curvier, more overtly humanoid proportions in fan art than their big-headed in-game selves. Frye's Forehead of Doom usually gets shrunk down to a less distracting size, too. Even Big Man (a bipedal manta ray, the last thing most people would consider attractive) gets his share of art depicting him as a macho hunk. And flat-chested Shiver (whose bust wouldn't be very visible under her Sarashi anyway) often gets bumped up a few cup sizes.
  • Even when fanart of Harmony isn't making her curvier, her weirder-looking features (like her Comical Nap Drool, blank expression, and Rubber-Hose Limbs) are often toned down, leaving her more conventionally cute.
  • The antagonist of Return of the Mammalians, Mr. Grizz, resembles nothing less than a gigantic teddy bear with an itty-bitty head. You'd never know this from the fan art (particularly from the Furry Fandom), which tends to draw him as anywhere from a Big Beautiful Man to an outright hairy hunk.
  • While this already happened with their appearance in the predecessor, the reappearance of Agent 8 in Side Order with a skin-tight bodysuit was made even more form-fitting and curvy by a number of fan artists.
  • Acht is somewhat curvy but flat-chested and rather androgynous in-game, and may in fact be non-binary. Still, they frequently get a much larger, more mature, and less ambiguous figure in fan art.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Shortly after Side Order came out, completing a run with every weapon without using any of Marina's hacks quickly became a common challenge run. While completing a run of Eight's Palette with four or fewer hacks active gets you a special badge, there is no reward for completing a run with a weapon with zero hacks other than being able to say you've done it. Depending on the weapon, the runs can either being relatively easy to nightmarishly difficult.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop:
  • While Return of the Mammalians lifts many concepts from Octo Expansion, its extreme difficulty is not one of them. There's much more freedom in how the player navigates the map, letting them avoid the hardest levels while still making progress, and the tougher ones STILL tend to be more lenient when it comes to checkpoints and design. Power Eggs are more generous compared to CQ Points due to lower stage costs and higher payouts, and the ability to upgrade the Hero Gear means that levels where it's an option can be made much easier. Lastly, the bosses are more focused on being unique than challenging, and the final gauntlet is a four-part Final Exam Finale rather than the complex, grueling eight-part escape sequence of Octo Expansion. Even the Brutal Bonus Level is more forgiving than Octo Expansion's merciless, cheaty, five-part Marathon Boss battle against Inner Agent 3, being instead a series of long, seriously difficult, but fair platforming challenges and a battle against a squad of Elite Octolings, with checkpoints at the beginning of each segment. It's still got a few of its own changes to make things tougher — the biggest being that level skipping no longer exists — and plenty of late-game levels are as hard or harder than what Octo Expansion had to offer.
  • Once Side Order really gets started, it's brutal. There are some small mercies that keep it from reaching Octo Expansion levels of Nintendo Hard, though — players who are struggling with the campaign can select the difficulty of the next floor they face, and talking to Marina can unlock a variety of hacks that almost universally make the mode easier. However, considering the expansion is a roguelike, it only makes sense that the difficulty is high after the tutorial is over.
• Shocking Moments:
  • The boss fights in Return of the Mammalians, which the marketing did a very good job of hiding. Not only is DJ Octavio the first boss, but the others are Deep Cut, the game's new idol group. Special mention goes to the Site 6 boss, who compounds this further for Mario fans and people who know about Super Mario Sunshine, with the standard reaction to seeing Big Man Casting a Shadow is "No way, they seriously brought back Phantamanta?!"
  • While just about everyone expected Side Order to feature more hints toward Pearl and Marina being in a relationship due to Splatoon 2 and the Octo Expansion setting the stage for it, the frequency, intensity, and overtness of these hints meant some fans were still taken by surprise. Most Nintendo series (especially those aimed at younger audiences) are chaste as can be, with most that do feature explicit romance having it between a man and a woman — so even many shippers didn't expect two of Splatoon's lead (female!) characters to do things like use intimate-looking photos of each other as desktop backgrounds, get jealous over perceived flirting, long for quiet moments together, and generally act exactly like lovey-dovey girlfriends. While the "L" word is never actually used, nearly everything else that implies a romantic relationship is. Considering Splatoon 2 played it much more coy and ambiguously, with the biggest tease being lighthearted throwaway dialogue along the lines of "you know I love you", this was somewhat unprecedented and a pretty ballsy move.
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: Tableturf Battle has a surprising amount of depth in deckbuilding and game strategy, to the point where some players have reported spending more time on it than the actual game.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: Each run of Side Order is a bit of a slog at the start; your weapon is weak without upgrades, but there aren't enough enemies for the game to have much of a challenge despite that. Things get better after the first boss, when spicier level layouts start showing up alongside larger enemy quantities, until the mid/lategame where Side Order really delivers on the power fantasy of using an overpowered kit to slaughter monsters by the kiloton.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • Background NPCs in multiplayer maps have a noticably lower framerate for their animation. Normally this isn't an issue since you're usually too busy inking and splatting to admire the background scenery, but season trailers tend to include zoomed-in panning shots of them in all their low-framerate glory, such as in the Chill Season 2022 trailer where it focuses on a jellyfish bathing in an onsen and you can practically count the number of frames per second they move at with one hand.
  • While Callie and Marie received updated models for both their New Squidbeak Splatoon and idol outfits, Off the Hook received only minor texture tweaks from Splatoon 2 (most notably giving Pearl a rosier, more art-accurate shade of pink). The slight Art Shift between Splatoon 2 and 3 already makes Pearl and Marina look slightly out of place, but take their amiibo into Photo Mode and their blockier models, jerkier animations, and lack of normal maps^*Images that provide information about how the surface is shaped, e.g. the ripples left by a swimming Inkling become even more apparent. The glow effect on their clothes, hair, and Marina's fingers is also missing, making them appear duller and less vibrant than the other characters. Even in the Side Order DLC, Pearl and Marina's new models still use the older ones as a base, so they look slightly off — particularly in terms of their facial animations — compared to Eight and Acht, who do use updated models.
  • The Squid Sisters' animations in Inkopolis Plaza are of slightly lower quality than everything else in the game. They look fine while sitting and talking in the studio and while performing during a Splatfest, but peek at them through the window after completing Return of the Mammalians and witness Marie's wrist snap almost 180 degrees into the "Stay fresh!" pose, then awkwardly tween back into place.
  • The audience in Bonerattle Arena is rendered as 2D sprites of Lesser Salmonids, which is understandable since there are a lot of them and any more detail would risk causing lag with the amount of moving creatures onscreen at any given time (never a welcome sight in Salmon Run due to a Game-Breaking Bug). This is far from a unique tactic in any game (Nintendo's own Mario Kart series is fond of it). Problem is, the Salmonid sprites are animated at about 4 FPS and relatively close to the stage, meaning they suffer from the same issues as the background jellyfish in certain PVP stages — and some of them, particularly the Cohocks, have visible light outlines that make them look crudely copy-pasted into the scene.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: "Anarchy Rainbow" sounds surprisingly similar to the recurring song "Let's Dance, Boys!" from the Bayonetta franchise in both tempo and instrumentation.
• Tainted by the Preview:
  • The competitive scene rolled their eyes when Fresh Season 2023 revealed the Neo Splash-o-Matic with the Suction Bombs and Triple Inkstrike — almost identical to the Tentatek Splattershot's kit (the Tentatek has Splat Bombs instead).
  • Many of the new maps, like Um'ami Ruins and Barnacle & Dime, received some backlash when their layouts were officially revealed for being more "Tetrimino stages" with flat, open mids and several excellent vantage points for ranged weapons, in a game where such stages were already running rampant — to the point of most of them being That One Level.
  • The announcement of how Challenges would work in Sizzle Season (ie. that they would be limited to just two hours at a time on specific days) drew a ton of negative backlash, with fans complaining that such a good idea would be heavily limited to the point of inaccessibility.
  • The various Sizzle Season 2023 kits caused some players to balk at their reveal; all of them lacked bombs to attack with at range, and since bombs are Boring, but Practical many players dismissed them outright. The exception is the Splatana Wiper Deco, which was shown to have Tenta Missiles; the Splatana Wiper had already proven to be quite the powerhouse, so a ton of players started panicking about an actually decent weapon getting the strongest Special in the game. At release, it was generally found that most of the kits weren't as bad as first impressions found, thanks to generally-decent kit synergy. Furthermore, Wiper Deco didn't upset the metagame as much as it was predicted; Splatana Wiper gets its kill power by using it in tandem with the Torpedo, so when Wiper Deco has the utility-based Squid Beakon, it has to use its Tenta Missiles much more strategically since that's its only way to approach reliably.
  • One of Side Order's biggest selling points is that it would be the grand return of Off the Hook... and then Marina failed to appear in both the second trailer and all promotional materials for the DLC, despite them heavily featuring Pearl and (of all characters) Dedf1sh. The immediate assumption from the fanbase was that this was to avoid major spoilers, leading to theories that Marina had either been kidnapped or underwent a Face–Heel Turn to be the main villain — both of which were viewed as being painfully disappointing uses for the character, as it would mean being deprived of Pearl and Marina's dynamic (something Octo Canyon was already criticized for), on top of just making little sense for her arc. This is to say nothing of such a plot being a narrative retread of Octo Canyon, or how it would leave Eight as the the only unambiguously heroic Octoling character in the series. One particular meme of the potential story outcomes became popular enough to get over a thousand upvotes on Reddit. Once the actual expansion came out, players quickly found out that the developers decided to Take a Third Option: while Marina is indeed a brainwashed Badass in Distress at first, she is only the Warm-Up Boss. She's rescued at the end of the fight and acts as your ally for the remainder of the campaign. And while the events of the story are technically her fault by way of everyone being stuck in a virtual world she created, the villain is an entity that hijacked control of said world for malicious purposes. Needless to say, fans were relieved.
• Tear Dryer: The sadness of Cuttlefish seemingly dying is quickly undone by Captain 3 shedding a tear over his dehydrated squid body, returning him to his senses.
• That One Attack:
  • The removal of Sting Ray from player-accessible kits won't stop the Special from ruining players when used by non-playable foes. Not only does the ever-annoying Stinger make a return in Salmon Run: Next Wave, but several bosses in Side Order also have it, most notably the Final Boss, who will make short work of you if it decides to cast it and you are stuck between a rock and a hard place with no inked route to escape.
  • Side Order's Final Boss also has an attack where he launches back-to-back Reefsliders at you. While this is easy enough to avoid if you catch the text box warning and have an escape route, it can quickly end your life if you get hit since you not only take massive amounts of damage but will also likely be stuck in a large pool of enemy ink, leaving you an easy target for a swift follow-up Reefslider explosion if the first one didn't already off you. What truly makes this attack awful is if he uses it when you're right next to him, something he's particularly fond of doing when he's close to defeat, as you'll have even less time to react before the Reefslider explodes on you.
• That One Level:
  • Return of the Mammalians has "One-Way Ride Through Target Town". It's another "hit the targets while riding a Ride Rail" level, but the weapon choices are what sell it: they either deal blast damage but have a poor fire rate (Rapid Blaster), require time to charge (Heavy Splatling), or both (Tri-Stringer). The level tests how well you can precision aim while moving, as if you miss once, you probably won't get a second chance. This is especially the case with the final set of targets, which forces you into a blind jump while shooting at two groups of targets and hoping you can destroy them in time to spawn the Ride Rail below you before you fall in the water and die. And as the name of the level implies, unlike other levels of this type, there are no checkpoints except at the very start. A single mistake means you're doing it all over again.
  • Just like in Octo Expansion, any target-shooting level when using a Charger. Special mention goes to "Time Trial and Errors" in Site 3 and "Those Aren't Birds" in Site 4. Anyone planning on 100% Completion is bound to spend many hours and many more Power Eggs on these levels. The difficulty primarily comes from the choice of Charger you're given, a Squiffer. Both levels are lenient enough to give you Burst Bombs, but the latter requires you to shoot the last 5 targets in a short amount of time, which will waste a lot of ink trying to get them. The former, meanwhile, requires you to do it in a minimal amount of time, and you'll spend a lot of ink trying to shoot every target.
  • "The Enemy's Ink is Lava" has you use Curling Bombs to make a path through enemy ink; which if you touch, you die. However you aren't able to refill ink, barring picking up an ink refill, meaning you have one shot to make it to the end. Several shots are very easy to mess up, and you can't even stop to aim your curling bombs as holding them out decreases the distance they will go. And to add one final insult to injury, even so much as tapping enemy ink is an instant fail and the checkpoints are very far apart.
  • Several of the game's new maps continue to have few flanking options, forcing all players into mid. Mincemeat Metalworks, Undertow Spillway, and the redesigned Mahi-Mahi Resort in particular have very good sniping positions that can easily shut a team down. Mincemeat barely has any cover, and the only way directly to the sniper is through a grate floor that you can't swim in while always remaining at their sight lines if a weapon tries to attack them, making sneak attacks impossible and severely favoring the ranged weapons camping there. Undertow has a raised "bunker" that slices the map into two lanes; just one Charger or Splatling standing on it can completely lock down the map. Unlike Mincemeat, there is no way around a sniper's sight lines, since everyone is funneled under the two glass lookout platforms. Mahi-Mahi has several different layouts depending on the game mode, but all are extremely small and open with little to no cover, making it a ranged weapon's paradise — its Turf War layout in particular has three raised platforms that make for ludicrously good camping spots. Provided they can fight off incoming attacks, a skilled enough Charger, Splatling, or Stringer user can win a match all by themself. While multiple maps were given updates in March 2023 to try to reduce the effectiveness of longer-ranged weapons, these amount to a handful of out-of-place obstacles that just barely hinder visibility, which are considered a band-aid solution at best; the "hallway" stage design that facilitates ranged dominance is otherwise untouched.
  • Barnacle & Dime, released in Sizzle Season 2023. It looks nice, absolutely, but it has serious design issues emblematic of the problems players have with "Tetrimino" maps. There are no flanking routes, at all, meaning that it's a straight shot from spawn to center and a well-coordinated team can run roughshod over the map. Once a team starts pushing past mid and into the enemy spawn, it can become nearly impossible to fight back against them since the opponents' options are so limited, especially if one of them happens to be running Zipcaster. It's also very small and has little cover, so chargers and other powerful, long-range weapons will dominate. The problems continue into the Tricolor map too, giving defenders a massive advantage and leaving attackers with nowhere to go. The Ultra Signal is on the blocks, requiring you to go on the blocks to get it, leaving you vulnerable to longer range weapons from all sides.
  • Bluefin Depot remains a popular stage for its unorthodox layout, but its Tricolor Battle retool immediately went down as one of the game's most divisive. Unlike most Tricolor maps, the spawn areas are divided into quarters, with the defenders coming from two opposing quarters and the attackers coming from the other two. Oh, and it's one of the smallest Tricolor maps in the game. Not only does this make it nearly impossible to avoid confrontation, there are only two ways out of each quarter and they both funnel into the same area, so a coordinated defense can lock the offense down completely. The first Sprinkler of Doom is also placed in an area where most of the ink it produces will land in the water, meaning the offensive teams need both Ultra Signals to stand a fighting chance.
  • From Side Order:
    • Cruel_Sisyphean_Eight-Shaped.Floor, a name that is especially appropriate on Splat Zones. Two zones on a figure-eight-shaped narrow pathway, with Drizzling Capricciosos constantly spawning in to paint them with impunity. The zones are far apart so you'll constantly be running back and forth to splat the Capricciosos and retake each zone, only to leave the other one wide open to be captured again. Enemies spawn en masse from gushers at the bottom (where Mook Makers are hard to reach) and at the top (right in your way on the best path between the zones). If you have the misfortune of running into a "Danger!" modifier, this stage can turn from merely tedious and frustrating to virtually impossible.
    • Any level with the Stronger Jelletons modifier, which causes all of them to spawn in with their Increasingly Lethal Enemy effect active. This makes the fight against the hordes a struggle to survive as they constantly bum-rush you; this applies doubly so if you're on Splat Zones, meaning you're a sitting duck as you're waiting for the unmoving objective to slowly tick up. Oh, and it's often paired with the "Arpeggio Barrage" modifier — so not only are you bombarded non-stop throughout, one hit will probably break your armor. Good luck.
    • "Lights Out" turns out the lights so you can barely see the ground around you, let alone the enemies outside the glow of their eyes. Hope you've got plenty of lives and Membux! There's also a variant that adds "Ink Coating" too, but it's the "Lights Out" effect that's the main source of trouble.
    • Eternally-Vigilant_Soaker-Blockade.Floor. The two gushers utterly spam Jelletons at you, most notably starting with two Spawning Accordos, and they're located on higher ground that cannot be inked which makes it risky to get up close. The four soaker blocks don't completely block off the enemies, as they leave a hole for mobile Jelletons to crawl through even when fully inked. This is also a Zones floor, meaning you're also going to get Drizzling Capricciosos in your face while the other Jelletons swarm you, which will likely set you back at best and end your run at worst.
    • Coverage(Between-Crosshairs).Floor, compared to other Splat Zone levels, comes with just two enemies. Sound deceptively easy? That's where the bad news come in: those enemies are Drizzling Capriccioso and Towering Nobilmente, which means you can very easily lose the zone and you're getting targeted at a distance. Not helping matters is that there are two zones, each one located on either side, and the only way to get to them is by inkrails which have to be activated and eventually expire; the farther zone additionally requires getting on the floating platform in the middle and gliding from the grate to it. And though the lethal shot of the Nobilementes can be dodged, the level can and will spawn multiple amounts of them which will lead to them covering a lot of ground with their own ink, making them an exceptional challenge to contend with.
• That One Sidequest:
  • Unlocking the special card sleeves the AI opponents use in Tableturf Battle requires defeating them on Level 3 (the hardest difficulty setting by far, with Perfect Play A.I. bordering on The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard)... thirty times. This one manages to frustrate both Tableturf pros and casual players. For experienced players, it's little more than busywork; for beginners, it's a monumental undertaking. Either way, unless you're determined to get everything in Splatoon 3, you'll probably tune out long before you get to put Judd on the back of your cards.
  • Some of the Bonus conditions in Side Order are so restrictive and crippling that players might not even bother trying to fulfill them.
    • One condition is to not use your main weapon. Unless you have an appropriate sub or special weapon for the objective and enemies or invested in the Pearl Drone, trying to complete the level without your main weapon can range from tedious, to suicidal, to outright impossible.
    • Another condition is to not move in Octoling form. While you aren't penalized for falling or using your weapons, any form of horizontal movement in Octoling form will deduct the bonus, including special weapons that move you like the Reefslider or getting pushed around by enemies. It's especially bad if the stage doesn't have a lot of inkable terrain, as that means you'll be moving at a snail's pace in swim form and unable to escape from the enemies.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Many fans have criticized the updated iterations of Mahi-Mahi Resort and Hammerhead Bridge, returning stages from the first Splatoon, both of which have been reworked in ways that make them smaller and less maneuverable. Hammerhead Bridge's general layout is similar, but the added walls and layout adjustments serve to funnel players into a claustrophobic, janky battle for the center. Mahi-Mahi Resort is a completely new and much smaller stage with the same name and concept; its revamped layout provides almost no flanking options (especially when the water is high) and is significantly flatter and more open, giving the advantage to long-range weapons like Chargers, Splatlings, and Stringers — almost by design, considering the central platform in Turf War makes for a disgustingly good camping spot. Other returning maps received comparatively few changes, possibly as a response to this; though Flounder Heights has less height variation and lost a couple of inkable walls, and one of Manta Maria's flank routes was removed, they're still viewed as far superior to these complete redesigns. In fact, Mahi-Mahi Resort's layout was so infamous that it was one of the first stages in Splatoon 3 to get a large-scale redesign, which naturally focused primarily on making it less cramped.
  • The announcement of the Pokémon Splatfest came with a big caveat: since it was set for early November 2022, it meant that for the first time in series history, there would be no Halloween-themed Splatfest that year. This disappointed many fans who were hoping to see what the three choices for a Deep Cut Splatoween would be like. Based on datamining, it's likely that Splatoween was meant to be the debut for Big Run, which would've been absolutely appropriate, but apparently it wasn't ready in time.
  • Many fans have lamented the loss of the losing animations in exchange for being forced to watch the other team's victory poses, both due to the fact the losing animations were widely considered to be rather amusing and because many argue that being forced to watch your opponents celebrate is more insulting than your avatar being a Sore Loser.
  • "Color Pulse (2024)" is a much heavier remix of the original than "City of Color (2023)", from the lower-pitched synths to Pearl's different rapping style. Despite Off the Hook's mission statement at the end of Splatoon 2 being to explore different styles of music (hence their collabs with Damp Socks and Dedf1sh, this drew some criticism from fans who were attached to the older version of the song and don't appreciate it being tinkered with to such a degree and/or feel the new, more laid-back tone is inappropriate for Splatfests.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Pearl and Marina, who became massively popular additions in the second game after Octo Expansion explored their characters in greater depth, have little presence in the base game. While the duo did get some snazzy new costumes, their role is purely as one of the many in-game bands whose music plays during multiplayer matches; specifically, they act as vocalists for a new musical group called Damp Socks, building on their stated goal of exploring more musical genres after FinalFest in Splatoon 2. Outside this and one of the Sunken Scrolls offhandedly mentioning they've "leapt to the world stage", their only other appearances are on in-game merch and some cereal boxes on the MakoMart stage. Their return as the main characters of the then-unnamed Side Order DLC was directly hinted at almost a month before the game's release, easing concerns that the duo had been completely Demoted to Extra, but the lack of any news concerning the DLC for over a year still annoyed Off the Hook fans. Happily, Side Order would reward their patience with heaps of story that built upon the aftermath of Octo Expansion on top of giving a peek at what they'd been doing on their world tour.
  • While Deep Cut's involvement in the "Return of the Mammalians" campaign was well-received, they spend most of the story in the background due to beginning the campaign as antagonistic rivals. They only come to the fore near the end, when they pledge allegiance to the NEW New Squidbeak Splatoon and help Agent 3 chase Mr. Grizz's rocket, which still leaves them feeling like Satellite Characters for the Squid Sisters. They don't even sing in the credits theme "Wave Goodbye". The trio does host Anarchy Splatcast, so interested players can hold off on skipping the broadcasts to listen to their banter, but prior to Version 4.0.0 it was drastically cut down from either incarnation of Inkopolis News — all Turf War/Anarchy Battle stages shared the same, small pool of Splatcast dialogue — and Salmon Run announcements still use only a few generic lines. This limited their characterization to special events like Splatfests and Big Runs, leaving them feeling underdeveloped and vague to some. Even after new Splatcast dialogue was added to flesh out their characterization and the world of Splatoon 3 a little more, the fact that Deep Cut are basically supporting characters in a single story campaign while Callie, Marie, Marina, and Pearl have all acted as the main characters in at least two campaigns each means they still come across as relatively flat.
  • At launch, Big Man felt especially underutilized for a character and an idol — he should have been significant for being the first male idol, first non-Inkling non-Octoling idol, and being associated with a very cool reference in Return of the Mammalians. Of Deep Cut's 10+ songs, he sung in just over half of them (and has a notable singing role in just half of that)^note Big Man sings in "Anarchy Poisons (Boar Mix)", "Anarchy Rainbow", "Fins in the Air", "Calimari Inkantation 3MIX", and the Splatfest defeat jingle. However, in "3MIX" he shares the singing role with not just the rest of Deep Cut but also the Squid Sisters, so his voice barely has one section to itself; the Splatfest defeat jingle is incredibly short; and his vocal part in "Fins in the Air" is limited to a very brief section at the end of the chorus, and he rarely takes the initiative in Anarchy Splatcast dialogue, leaving his characterization vague.^note The Spicy-Sweet-Sour Splatfest announcement, for example, has most of the discourse between Shiver and Frye, with Big Man only contributing his love of pickled plums at the end. One point stood out especially for Big Man just being "along for the ride", near the end of ROTM and before the Final Boss: to pursue Mr. Grizz' rocket, Shiver and Frye get to do very character-specific things that play into their boss fights... while Big Man just gives New Agent 3 a headset, something any other character could have done. Big Man's focus improved as time went on, with stage-specific Anarchy Splatcast dialogue giving him more dialogue, and two new Splatfest tunes heavily focused on him.^note "Liquid Sunshine" is a rare inter-idol collaboration between Big Man and the Squid Sisters, while "Big Betrayal" puts the spotlight on Big Man's collab and the rest of Deep Cut's reaction to that.
  • Agent 4 is one of the few Splatoon characters who doesn't make any appearance in Splatoon 3; the only references to them come in the leader of the Parallel Canon taking on their appearance, Marina mentioning that she hired them to handle Memverse security in her dev logs, and the notes regarding their Palette.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • More along the lines of a perfectly good joke, but some players were disappointed that if you looked into Deep Cut's studio while still in the middle of "Return of the Mammalians", they don't glare at you or make threatening gestures, even though they're currently convinced that you're a rival bandit.
  • Right before the Final Boss of Return of the Mammalians, Captain Cuttlefish gets dehydrated and is apparently just a flattened, mummified corpse (which should seemingly be an emotional moment to rival "Tide Goes Out"), but his granddaughters' reaction is more akin to losing a baseball game than a loved one, and he soon gets rehydrated by Captain 3's tears and is alive again, playing off his apparent death for humor as he was just severely thirsty. This could have presented some development along the recurring cast and further raised the stakes, but it ends up being a minor speed bump in the plot's final climactic moments, any gravitas of the situation is thrown out the window because it also shares a sequence with Mr. Grizz' physical reveal, the rocket launching, and Deep Cut helping pursue the rocket which throws the pacing all out of whack, his almost-immediate revival feels like an attempt to create drama without any long-term consequences (other than Cuttlefish no longer being able to shift to his humanoid form), and the only one who reacts to this seriously is Agent 3, with the Squid Sisters taking it better than they really should, wasting any actual development.
  • The Big Runs have been a little more underwhelming than a lot of people initially expected in terms of presentation. Sure, the ambience in the hubs is incredible, but people expected a lot more terror and panic, since the Big Runs are historically known as terrifying events where the Salmonids swarm the land to slaughter anyone in their path. They also don't seem to have quite as much prominence as Splatfests, since they typically replace them as a the monthly event. Instead, while the Big Runs are still treated as major, they're not considered that big a deal; everyone in-game seems to either take them in stride, either being mildly annoyed that the Salmonids are invading a part of Inkopolis/Splatsville or outright eager to take the fight to the Salmonids — a line of dialogue for the Barnacle & Dime Big Run even states that the mall stays open during the infestation, and only part of it is cordoned off due to the Salmonid swarms. While still an interesting detail that highlights how inkthirsty modern Inklings and Octolings have become, it does feel like a bit of a letdown to some.
• Trans Audience Interpretation:
  • Shiver is frequently interpreted by fans as a trans or non-binary person (albeit one who uses feminine pronouns) due to her androgynous design, flat chest (with some fans misinterpreting her Sarashi as a binder), early preview material not referring to her with gendered pronouns, and her rebellious, "alternative" personality. And with Deep Cut being a three-idol group, it would also allow each member of the group to be a different gender.
  • Acht's gender never comes up in-game, but their androgynous design, use of they/them pronouns as opposed to the she/her pronouns they used in Splatoon 2 (and especially in tandem with how Acht is the only non-Previous Player-Character Cameo to use gender-neutral pronouns), and the rather "alternative" style they are seen to have had before becoming Sanitized has led many fans to conclude they are a non-binary person who came out between games.
• Ugly Cute: The Smallfry companion, aptly nicknamed your "little buddy", with its big googly eyes, pudgy, jiggly body, and single buck tooth. And it's still pretty cute after its transformation into Hugefry.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • Like in previous games, many mechanics used liberally in the single-player modes, like bounce pads, dash tracks, and inkfurlers, see no use in standard multiplayer or Salmon Run stages. However, special mention goes to ride rails, which were prominently featured in Splatoon 2's Octo Canyon and Octo Expansion, but appear in very few Return of the Mammalians levels in Splatoon 3.
  • Inkable walls are mostly absent from many of the new stages in this game, which greatly limits the Squid Surge's utility and is a major factor in why many of the new maps are rife with chokepoints. Mincemeat Metalworks, Brinewater Springs, and Barnacle & Dime are especially bad about this; the only inkable walls shared across all modes are at mid, which makes offense on those maps feel like hallways with no options but one specific, vulnerable path.
  • One critique of Splatoon 3 is that it has a ton of Special Weapons (more than 1 and 2 combined at 19^*not counting the Hero Mode-exclusive singular Splashdown), but does not adequately use all of them; Splatoon 3 feels like it's not using many potential fun and powerful weapon kits, despite having all the pieces to easily put them together. The Inkjet and Crab Tank have it the worst, since the former had only two weapon kits with it at launch, while the latter was added onto very few weapon kits in the year since release.
• Unexpected Character:
  • No one expected Acht (alias Dedf1sh) to show up in Side Order. At most, there were theories that they would come back to provide the OST for the campaign as they did for their debut in Octo Expansion, but them appearing physically as one of the main characters came as a surprise to many who recognized them.
  • After largely being replaced by the Reefslider, which is generally agreed to be a better-designed version of the special, nobody expected the Splashdown to show up in Chill Season 2023, reworked into the Triple Splashdown. This one managed to even surprise dataminers, who knew about its existence via Dummied Out code but were assuming it would drop the following season instead, since the Triple Splashdown didn't appear in any of the trailers (while its sibling the Splattercolor Screen did).
• Unfortunate Character Design:
  • Shiver's fingers are given an orange hue as color contrast and to match her eyes, similar to Frye having her fingers be purple. However, to some, Shiver ends up looking like her fingers are constantly covered in dust from orange colored snack chips, providing ample jokes for her "Cheeto fingers".
  • Fred Crumbs is based on the Japanese dish known as aji furai, which is a butterfly-cut, breaded, and fried horse mackerel. Non-Japanese players do not have that frame of reference: previews of his character prior to Wave 1's release received reactions that repeatedly described him as a "deep fried ballsack".
• Viewer Gender Confusion:
  • Many people were caught off by Shiver's extremely androgynous appearance which, mixed with a lack of gendered pronouns in the Splatoon 3 Direct, led to mass speculation that she was nonbinary before the World Premiere Splatfest confirmed that she's female.
  • With hairstyles no longer the primary indicator of Inkling/Octoling gender, many player characters have become very gender-ambiguous, with characters' gender indicators now being only body shape (which is very hard to spot given certain shirts) and voice. A lot of people enjoy this change because it lets them make their characters more androgynous; Octolings with a masculine voice and typically-feminine Tentatwists hairstyle are fairly common.
• Viewer Pronunciation Confusion: This was almost inevitable with Acht, whose name is the German and Dutch name for the number eight, due to the English language not featuring this -ch- sound (with the exception of Scottish).
• Watched It for the Representation: Side Order was already going to please a number of players due to its strong focus on Marina (a very popular character among Nintendo's Black fans), but when it launched, Splatoon's large LGBT Fanbase was delighted by Acht aka Dedf1sh, an Octoling who uses they/them pronouns and is implied to be non-binary, and the cavalcade of Ship Tease between Pearl and Marina all but confirming them as an interracial lesbian couple.
• Win Back the Crowd:
  • This game is often considered to have brought Nintendo's competitive franchises back in the spotlight after their previous two games (Nintendo Switch Sports and Mario Strikers Battle League) proved to be major Contested Sequels.
  • Side Order's addicting roguelite gameplay, unique aesthetic, and heavy focus on fan-favorite idol group Off the Hook brought back a lot of fans who were starting to lose interest in the game thanks to some controversial design decisions and the slow update cycle.
• Woolseyism:
  • One of the new weapon classes are known as "Wipers" in Japan, which is a bit of a Non-Indicative Name since only one of them is made out of a windshield wiper (the others are made from a rolling stamp). English localizes them as "Splatanas", which features a pun (splat + katana) and better communicates a shared trait between all of them (that they're sword-like).
  • The first two idols of Deep Cut are known as Fuka and Utsuho in Japanese, which puns the Japanese words for "shark" and "moray eel" with Japanese names. The English translation dubs them Shiver and Frye, maintaining the animal theme naming (a "shiver" and a "fry" are the terms for groups of sharks and eels), while also adding a pun of its own (contrasting cold shivers to hot frying).
  • The pseudonym Big Man uses when collaborating with the Squid Sisters is "RANOMAT" in the Japanese version, which is Big Man's Japanese name (Mantaro) but scrambled up. The English version dubs the alias as "Ian BGM", which keeps the anagram aspect, while also sounding more like a name and adding a subtle pun ("BGM" is short for "background music").
  • The French and Spanish versions of the Nessie vs. Aliens vs. Bigfoot refer to the "Aliens" team as "Martians", specifying which cryptid players are voting for and ruling out the concept of any extraterrestrial life in the far reaches of the universe distant from Earthling eyes.
  • Jelletons are known as "Skeletones" in Japan, a layered pun based on "skeleton", "tone" as in ink, and "tone" as in music. Their English name is just as, if not more, complex ("jelly" + "skeleton" + "gelatin" + "tone"), and has the added bonus of reading more naturally for English-speakers.
  • The pseudonyms Shiver and Frye use when rap-battling Off the Hook, "Ice" and "Fire", were invented for the European-language translations. The Japanese version just uses their regular names written in kanji.

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