“Staaaay Fresh!”. Those two words concluded every Inkopolis News broadcast. Still do, in fact. However, ever since April 8, 2024, those broadcasts have had a drastic drop in frequency. Why? Because the Wii U was a flop, and Splatoon 1 is exclusively for the console.
The game was released May 28, 2015. It’s been almost ten years since then. So, how is the game?
The online features are, of course, gone. No more turf wars for the pioneers. However, offline is another story entirely. Minor Spoiler warning. The story mode follows the player, Agent 3, and Cap’n Cuttlefish, a crotchety old man who is a war veteran of the Great Turf War 100 years prior. In the Great Turf War, the octarians and inklings battled, until the inklings forced the Octarians underground. The grudging octarians then steal the Great Zapfish, the source of Inkopolis’ power. Inkopolis is the city in which all the online events occur.
In terms of gameplay, there are some difficult levels, but most of it is smooth sailing. The enemies, bosses, and simply the game in general are fun, imaginative, and quirky.
Now, onto the music. The songs are amazing. So good, in fact, there are stacks of lore put into the music and even the music artists. For example, Calamari Inkantation, most likely the game’s most well-known song, is actually, as we can see in the sunken sea scrolls, a remix of a folk song from where the Squid Sisters, the game’s idols, grew up(Calamari County). And there are all sorts of other bits of lore that you can find in the sunken sea scrolls. Such as how the human race had gone extinct ten thousand years ago, and, by inkling standards, we have ‘small craniums’ that may be linked to ‘primitive behaviour’. What’s more, is that it lays the groundwork for the rest of the entire Splatoon series. Splatoon 2 and 3, not to mention DLC add ons like Splatoon 2 Octo Expansion and Splatoon 3 Side order would have never happened without the Wii U. So, Splatoon 1 is, objectively, still a good game in many aspects, even if one of its core concepts is gone.
