What is splatoon?

Splatoon is a family friendly third person shooter made by Nintendo featuring humanoid squid/octopus characters to play as. The first game coming out in 2015 and becoming a success on the Wii U, leading to a sequel to come out only 2 years later in 2017, and the third coming out in September 2022.

The gameplay mostly revolves around online multiplayer turf wars where you ink the most ground to win a 3 minute long match. Ranked battles were introduced early into the life cycle of Splatoon 1, you fight much more competitively with more specific battle goals to get points to rank up. The highest rank used to be S rank but is now X rank. There are many more modes in the franchise than just these however.

The games featured splatfests, a festival that would last for 24 hours (48 hours in Splatoon 3,) every month with a different theme each time. You would fight the opposite team and try to get your team to win and obtain super sea snails to use for I dunno crime, I guess.

What does Splatoon mean to me?

Okay so like back in the day when Splatoon 1 started its ad campain, I was just watching CN/Nick and then I got bombarded by those loud commercials that definitely scared so many people away from the game but I wanted the game so badly. But, I didn't have a Wii U so the next best thing was that Roblox game and listening to the soundtrack.

At least I was prepared for Splatoon 2 since I waited so impaitently to finally experience the ink shooter, I waited since July 2017 to Christmas of that year to finally get the game and spend like 500 hours on it in the 5 years since the game came out. I drew fanart and got active in the fandom in 2018, met new friends in 2019, and basically grinded right through every Splatfest.

By Splatoon 3, I was no longer a 11-12 year old, I was 16 and (OH NO I ALREADY PLAYED 200 HOURS OF IT) yep this is a franchise I don't think is going away or even leaving my life any time soon. Basically Splatoon changed my life forever, I started making art because of it and idk where I would be without it. Sure all of my ocs have turned from Splatoon ocs to normal characters but I still love the ones who are still funny fishies.