 I would be lying if I said I haven't been playing a stupid amount of Splatoon 3. I wasn't a huge fan of Splatoon 1, but I love it even more this time. For reasons I hope to figure out today while I make this video. Now I did want to make sure that I experienced everything the game had to offer, so I spent a lot of time playing Splatoon 3. I've played every single mode. We're going to talk about it all today. I'm also going to paint something. Mario 64? No, this is still Splatoon. And this is the Splatoon Switch playing Splatoon. It doesn't get any better than that. Well, other than playing this with a satisfied grip, Splatoon 3 is the kind of game you're going to get sucked into and play portably for hours on end. And trying to play a regular old Switch with that without the satisfied grip, I can't think of a quicker way to develop a couple tunnel. You guys know I love the satisfied grip so much that I even ended up working with them to make my own. Right now, Satisfy is offering free shipping on their orders. I mean, if you click my link below and use code beatemups, which does directly support the channel with every purchase. Also, if you did buy a grip at some point and missed out on the bundle with a case, Satisfy is doing a once in a year deal where they're selling the cases standalone. You will thank yourself for leveling up your Switch handheld experience. Satisfy also sells a bunch of other really cool stuff on their website. So again, links below code beatemup to get 5% off. So let's get back. I want to finish the review and paint this bad boy. The main mode is Turf War where you have two colors on either side. The aim is to cover the field and have more of your color than the other team has of their color. It's really complex stuff. Somewhere in there, you can try and aim to splat people. But honestly, that doesn't really matter. You can't get too many points for it. And it's really all about just covering as much as you can with your color. If you knock out all four of the other team and get a wipe out, then you're going to have a lot of time to cover that field with your color. So there's definitely a lot of strategy in Turf War, but it's also casual fun that anyone can pick up and play and just paint some stuff. It's a little confusing to me what is new in this game and what isn't. It seems like a lot of it is just quality of life improvements like with the lobby system, which is just boring technical mumbo jumbo that we'll get to later. But for right now, I want to focus on the fun stuff. You know, like the weapons. So obviously the new weapons this time around. And I don't know how they come up with these things, but they're so smart. There's katanas now, except the splatanas. And they're like windshield wiper blades that you essentially use as katanas. And then you also have your stringer weapons this time around, which was a heavy focus, your bow and arrows and your crossbows, which are really fun, but really hard to use in battle. There's like a hundred different weapons in this game. And I got to be honest, I really only ever use the arrow spray. It's just so much fun to use. You can cover so much ground with it and also be decent at getting splats. So that, I mean, for the most part is the multiplayer turf battle. We'll circle back around to some ranked stuff. But I want to focus on the solo player, the single player, because it's deceptively fun this time around. Now it's not at all what I was hoping it would be when they revealed Splatoon 3 and showed us that really awesome cinematic getting on the bus with your little small fry and you're going through a deserted town in an apocalyptic looking world. I really thought they were going for something there. Turns out that's just literally the intro of the game, where you design your character and do a little tutorial, you know, a little bit of blub blub blub, and then you're playing the game. And that's the last you'll ever hear of that. So the single player is not what I expected, but still very pleasantly fun. And this time around, they did a little fakey-daky. They knew what they were doing. Oh, geez. They knew what they were doing. They set the game up to make it look like you're doing that same old thing again. But pretty quickly, you end up in a really cool boss fight. The ground cave is in. You end up in some weird underground beneath the Splat City. I don't really know. And from there, the structure is kind of similar to like old school Spyro, I guess. You have the overworld that you can run around in, find hidden little secrets and collectibles. And then there's a ton of these kettles around that you can open up, slither on down into, and then compete in some challenges to win little fish eggies to unlock more areas. Actually to be specific, to use small fry to gobble up the fuzzy so you can access different areas. How cute is small fry? Small fry and big man are easily worth the price of admission here. Honestly, it's a pretty addicting little loop of exploring this overworld and then diving into some challenges. You can also do the challenges again with different weapons if you want to do that. But if it ever does get a little boring and you want to jump out of it, I'll jump over to Salmon Run, where four players struggle to survive an ever-increasing difficulty of waves of fishies. And also bigger things, big bosses, a big chongus that only appears once in a while and is really hard to take down. But when we finally did it, oh, you better believe we were hyped. I actually really enjoy Salmon Run. It stands out to me as being as much fun as Turf Mode. You compete in three rounds and the more you play, the more you level up, the more you get job experience, the harder rounds you are given. At first, I thought, yeah, only three rounds. But I very quickly realized this is much more conducive to the Splatoon format, especially playing with randoms. You know no one's going to hang in there long enough to actually complete the entire horde if it just kept going on forever. And there is a huge satisfaction in actually finishing the rounds, and it does really get tough. And honestly, with how quick this game is with getting you back into the action, there's barely enough time to send a text in between searching for games. So with the scaling difficulty and how quick you keep getting back into it, it really does just feel like you're doing round after round after round anyway. I'm taking a step back right now and realizing what I've created. It's like one of them things you'd see in a fancy museum and then they would like put like a thousand dollar price tag on it or something. That's my paint water. You know what this needs? Ranked modes. I like it a lot. My biggest thing is why isn't turf mode in ranked? Turf mode is the main mode, and I've been playing it so much and getting so good at it. Turns out you don't play that at all, and the modes are very different. I think there's more ranked modes than I got to experience because they rotate them, but the two I've played is Tower Defense and Rainmaker. Tower Control. Tower Control. I'm gonna paint a C for my mistake. Control. Tower Control reminds me a lot of Overwatch. You essentially have a payload that you start moving towards the opponent's side when you stand on top of it, and the obvious goal here is to get it all the way to the other side, but that back and forth struggle is really fun and makes the end screen a much bigger surprise because it goes by distance traveled at that point and I'd never have any idea who's gonna actually win. Rainmaker is weirdly similar to that mode. Where there's a big Rainmaker thing, and you have to shoot at a bunch to make it your color, and then once it's your color, you can pick it up and try and take it to the enemy goal. I guess it's a little different because the Rainmaker isn't on rails, and you can go and move any way you want. I enjoy the teamwork in that, too, because often the opponent's side will be covered in their paint, so if your guy is carrying the Rainmaker, you gotta make sure his path is nice and clear with your paint, so you're kind of supporting him the whole time. And yeah, don't get me wrong. I really like these modes. They're a ton of fun, but the thing with not having Turf Mode in ranked, it just seems like a wasted opportunity. Like even when I explain Tower Defense to you or Tower Control, I had to use Overwatch as an example, and as soon as I did, you probably got it because we've seen that before. In Turf Mode, you just kind of have to explain it. It is what it is. There's no other game out there like it, so to not have a ranked version of that, the main thing the game is special for, just one of them weird choices. In fact, can we talk about weird choices? Because this game still has a ton of them. It suffers from the classic Nintendo issues that we see in almost every Nintendo online game. For right now, at least, there is a ton of server problems and issues. I can barely play in the evening without disconnecting from several games. Often even just while searching in the lobby for a game, there'll be a connection issue, and it'll say, hey, sorry, you'll have to try searching again. What do you mean my search failed? It just put me in another search. But if you want to stop the search, you can. The only way I can get out of the search is to turn my switch off. But thankfully, we have voice chat this time around in the mobile app again. All right, well, that's all just connection issues and weird technical stuff. The only really big issue I have with it is the city. There is so much obvious and apparent lore and character to the world of Splatoon, and yet we haven't really ever been given in. It's just so personality packed and in your face with the outfits and the accessories and the characters, we kind of just fill in the rest of the gaps. You can say there's stores in it, but if you try going into one of these stores, it just loads you into a essentially menu adjacent screen. Sure, it kind of looks like you're in, but you can't like actually look at things and you just have a menu down below with the stuff that's in stock. The fact that I can just press the X button and zip around to everywhere anyway, then what is the point? Let my friends walk around my city. Let me give my city some personality so my friends can come and explore. The amount of people I've seen, including me on Twitch, struggling to find these lockers. I have no idea where my locker is. I just want to lock things up. All right, I'm going to give you a hint, okay? It's on the main floor. How long have you been looking for it? Dave, I've not been to my locker once, Dave. It's next to the Pimble Machine. It's near the Pimble Machine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What? And the whole point of them is to dress them up and make them look all cute and have your stuff in them. But I never see my friends lockers. It's always random people. I don't care about random people. I want to see what Scoot and Bob have done to their locker. I feel like those aspects of the game are still very lacking. But oh, there is just a lot that they have really improved here. The time in between rounds is just seconds and matchmaking with your friends has become so easy. The previous games only allowed you to play Salmon Run unlike Saturdays. Now you can play Salmon Run anytime you want, which is normal. Visually, it is fantastic. The music slaps so hard and the gameplay is faster and more furious than ever before. It is just an absolute joy to play. And don't get me wrong with all the things that I did complain about. I absolutely loved Splatoon 3. I'm having so much fun with it this time around to a casual player. There might not be that much of a difference, but it is definitely better. All right, I think that's looking pretty good. Turns out yellow and purple mixed together kind of makes a poop brown, but it's not like I did basic finger painting in kindergarten or anything. But let me show you. I think it looks pretty good. What do you guys think? A little smaller than I pictured, but I liked it. The little dinosaur back there, that turned out nice. I don't know how I did that with just a paintbrush. This time, boys, we're going to war. It would have been good if I filmed it or something. I forgot to film the actually painting. So I guess my editor will have to put in some other random painting the whole time. Not the one I actually just did. It's suspiciously dry. You know, this is a joke that about three people are going to understand the punchline of. If you're one of those people, or hey, even if you're not, could you like, comment and subscribe? I don't really carry the way, to be honest. I just like making videos and painting. So see you in five years for the next one, I guess.