The Lesbian update!
After almost a whole year of waiting Splatoon 3’s Side Order expansion is here and I feel it will take another 2 years for our main course to arrive. All jokes aside it honestly feels like yesterday since we got the incredibly vague first teaser trailer and actually playing this felt surreal like I shouldn’t be playing it yet and I actually stole it from Nintendo HQ. But I am pretty certain I can review this without Mr Nogami trying to put a Katana into my liver. So today we will be reviewing Splatoon 3 Side Order and seeing if it’s a tower above the rest of the Splatoon series single player offerings.
In Side Order you get to play as everyone’s second favourite octopus as you get trapped in the Matrix by a mysterious force simply known as Order. After meeting Pearl of Off the Hook fame and Acht of Octo Expansion’s music fame and finding Marina off autistic lesbian fame you set off to climb the mysterious Spire of Order and escape.
The actual tower floors of the Spire of Order come in four flavours of challenges like destroying portals, guiding a tower to the goal, splat zones and 8 ball but not as stressful. There are different stages that carry across between challenges which add a fair bit of variety to your journey up the tower. While it sounds limited I think these four challenges to a pretty good job at letting you flex your sheer power. If they went with the more varied challenges of Octo Expansion certain abilities you wouldn’t be able to show off. The only thing I wish is that we got more stage variety because after 1 to 2 runs through the spire you’ve kind of seen every layout possible.
Of course you’ll need weapons to get through the towers and for that you have Palettes. These marvels of technology give you a certain weapon of every type with a pre-set sub and special weapon. While you start off pretty weak as you go up the spire you complete challenges to get chips to add chips to your palette which grant certain attributes depending on their colour. Red chips increase your attack power on your various weapons, Purple focuses on support like your ink efficiency, Orange increases range, Blue increases your mobility, Yellow increases your luck like the items you get after defeating enemies and Turquoise increase the abilities of the Pearl Drone. Each Palette you unlock has two preferred tones which cause colour chips of that tone to appear more frequently and the more colour chips of a certain tone the more that tone will show up. It’s strangely in depth and while it sounds convoluted you get the general gist after a good couple runs.
I’d be remorse to mention the almighty Pearl Drone which is actually really fun to use. Pearl can help you glide while in mid-air which is incredibly handy and has her own colour chips which give her access to Specials and other sub weapons. But the best part is that when you spin around in the overworld Pearl spins too which makes this DLC an immediate 10/10. In all seriousness I feel that Pearl is just a superior version of Little Buddy in Return of the Mamalians. I only really used him to clear away fuzzy ooze and literally nothing else while Pearl actually was useful even without investing in her colour chips.
Once you die all your chips and stats are converted into PRLZ which can be redeemed for permanent upgrades from Marina. These range from increasing your lives, your armour recovery and the Pearl Drone’s abilities. You also have some locker decorations, banners and gear to purchase from Cipher with any excess PRLZ you have. While that may sound kind of grindy the game at least tries to make it interesting with the Risky Rewards hacks you unlock after clearing the spire once. Risky Rewards multiply your PRLZ after each run with the less hacks you have active increasing your multiplier with an extra caveat being that if you die you get nothing, good day sir. It’s a pretty fun and risky way to get more PRLZ once you are in the endgame.
Also as you go up the Spire you get locker keys which you can use to unlock more Palletes, Banners and Dev Diaries. You get three keys per pallet which help unlock each locker door which gives you some incentive to keep trying out new palettes and completing the spire over and over again. The Dev Diaries are your lore vessels this time around and they are kind of mediocre. They do give insight into Marina’s thoughts and feelings after the events of Splatoon 2’s Final Fest and they explain how she went on to create the Metaverse. But they don’t really have much lore impact outside of that which is a shame because the Alterna Logs in the base game’s story mode gave so much lore about the rest of the world of Splatoon. What made up for it was the secret diaries you get with the final palette you unlock because those were actually super interesting.
Speaking of storytelling one issue I have with Side Order is incredibly lackluster story. Splatoon never really goes for a great story as the plot is normally carried by the absolutely unhinged shenanigans that ensue. However pretty much everything actually interesting happens within the first 10 minutes and Order isn’t that great of an antagonist to be honest compared to Mr Grizz and Tartar. Outside of the Dev Diaries nothing else really happens in terms of story and it makes the whole story of Side Order feel kind of hollow and feels like a step down from the likes of Octo Expansion which was amazing not just for lore but to see Agent 8 as an actual character who had dreams and aspirations throughout that story.
Also the bosses are kind of mediocre which is a shame compared to Splatoon 3’s Return of the Mammalians. Side Order only has around three bosses outside of the final boss which I believe is the least out of any campaign. One is pretty easy if not a cool idea on paper, the second one is actually my favourite and has a ton of varied patterns and the final one is tedious having to chase them throughout the entire stage and of course they were the one who turned up the most often in my runs. Honestly I think they could have done with adding a couple more bosses even if they were remixes from past games kind of like what Octo Expansion did with it’s bosses. Also the final boss is fine but I wish the more times you beat it the more attack patterns it gets to make it harder the more times you go up the spire.
The music is also pretty solid although not as good and memorable as the main game’s OST. It has this almost Lofi and techno style in all the songs and it gives off this mysterious and industrial vibe to the whole experience. My favourite song in the whole OST was the call-back to Ebb and Flow which Is a bit of a spoiler but this is Splatoon and musical call-backs are a given no matter what. But other than that none of the other tracks really stick out to me personally.
So there we have it after long last Splatoon 3 Side Order and it was actually pretty good. The gameplay loop is incredibly fun, It’s a pretty solid Roguelite and the aesthetics and vibes are on point. However I wish they maybe took their time to craft a more interesting narrative, more variety in terms of floors and bosses because that would have greatly elevated this DLC. For £22.49 of your British Pounds including Inkopolis Plaza it’s not a bad deal if you are a hardcore Splatoon enjoyer such as myself or are looking to get into the rogue genre. Also you get to see the best gay couple in all of gaming so you might as well get it to support the gay community. So until next time make sure you don’t get cooked and stay off the hook.
Dragon In The Castle 