Today’s Nintendo Direct had some seriously wild announcements, but none made quite as strong an impression as Splatoon 3. Series creator Hishashi Nogami (disguised as a “Squid Researcher”) stopped by during the direct to drop a brand new trailer, which included new features for turf wars (Splatoon’s PvP mode) and a look at the game’s story mode, titled: “Return of the Mammalians.”
In a recent blog post, Nintendo shared some more information explaining the trailer’s content. First and foremost, the game’s story mode looks to be one of the craziest campaigns with the most complex gameplay so far. Players will take on the role of an inkling hailing from Splatsville who becomes the new Agent 3 after meeting up with characters from the previous games. The player will also be accompanied by a “Smallfry,” which is just a little funny looking fish that will actually have a huge role to play during gameplay. See, Splatoon 3 sees the inklings facing off against a new, furry enemy seemingly affected by “Fuzzy Ooze,” a new obstacle that will turn the player into a little fuzzy ball with weirdly human arms and legs, incapable of doing just about anything.
If an Inkling comes into contact with Fuzzy Ooze, some manner of brown hairy fur-like substance grows all over their body, and they lose their sense of self. In this state, they’re unable to do much but hopelessly roll around…
However, the aforementioned Smallfry isn’t just completely unaffected by the ooze: It actually eats the stuff, as well as attacking enemies, activating different mechanisms and “assisting inklings in various other ways.” This little buddy will accompany the player through Alterna, the location where the campaign takes place.
The trailer also showed off some neat new weapons and abilities coming to turf wars. These include the Crab Tank and Zipcaster, both of which radically change how the player looks and moves around. In the Crab Tank, players can fire two different weapons and curl up into a ball to roll around the map, painting everything in their path. The Zipcaster will actually transform the player character themselves, turning them into a squid-kid hybrid (yes, I know that inklings are already squid-kids, but this is seriously a mix of both). In this new form, players will be able to latch onto surfaces to grapple around the field, and once it runs out they’ll be brought back to where they picked it up for a quick getaway. These new weapons are joined by the Trizooka, Big Bubbler, and Killer Wail 5.1, all three of which show off the full creativity of Splatoon 3’s development team. You can check out screenshots of all the new weapons announced below.