Nintendo made a shooter! Sort of. Not really.
It's funny to joke about Nintendo---and here I should say, I really mean Nintendo Nintendo, the core game development team that makes Mario and Zelda Nintendo, not some outside contractor---designing a game in that most popular of Western genres, one that it has studiously ignored until now. And there's no denying that Splatoon is, essentially, a shooter, insofar as you will spend a lot of time firing guns at other players' heads.
But that's not giving Splatoon, to be released Friday on Wii U, enough credit. It's a clever, quite novel action game with the trademark Nintendo stamp of finely polished action and otherworldly design sense---although Nintendo's ongoing war against everyone else's prevailing philosophies of game design does hurt Splatoon, too.
You do score points for taking your opponents out in a 4-on-4 online Splatoon match with a well-placed splatter of ink, the game's non-violent ammo. But you won't win the match that way. The victor of a Splatoon "turf war" is whichever team coats more of the game's map in their color of ink. A lot of the ground will get covered accidentally as you're firing ink rifles and setting off bombs, yes. But you've got to actually try to paint the floor if you want a shot at victory.
NintendoThe characters (the first new squadron of franchise characters that Nintendo-Nintendo has created in well over a decade) are squid. Rather, they're fashion-forward teenagers who can transform into squid. As a humanoid, you can fire your weapons; transform into squid mode and you can swim through the ink lines that you just sprayed. Swimming leaves you vulnerable, but it's also faster---and you're invisible when submerged.
The cover-the-map-in-ink conceit certainly makes Splatoon novel among online shooters, but it's this kid-to-squid dynamic that makes its basic action mechanics stand out from the rest. Laying down an ink path and swimming through it is more fun than just walking everywhere, it rewards precision and daring, and it makes the simple act of moving from place to place something that can be accomplished in myriad ways.
Splatoon's presentation has the same degree of polish. The aesthetic feels less Nintendo and more like something Sega would have put out in its glory days, a slightly-edgy Saturday-morning vibe that's also unmistakably Japanese (the game's hub area feels like nothing but Shibuya's shopping street). The music is addictive on its own, like J-pop written by aliens. It's a real shame that this Nintendo division devotes so much of its resources to pumping out increasingly samey Mario iterations, because it's so good when it throws off those shackles.
