Game:

Splatoon 2 (2017)

Duration: 10:59

413 views

4

There's ONE last thing that any reasonable demo-tryer should do in the week leading up to when its actual function goes live... and that's inspect the menus and other indirect documentation, about 90% of which will mean nothing until the full game anyway! Plus! A large portion of it should be quite familiar, and whatever isn't should be a minor change that's rather easily absorbed. Yes! Let's do it!

Honestly, for most players who aren't SUPER deep into the skills system of the original Splatoon, a lot of this will be a big ol' "so what?" more than anything else... but a whole lot of it has been wildly revamped in... admittedly minor tweaks. The important part is that you have to know less about the more arcane specific abilities and what gear even CAN have it and instead focus on stacking up the ones you like with relative confidence that your investment will do what you want... and do more if you get more. Mostly. The presence of "ability chunks" indicates that we can expect a bit more granular certainty in our gear customization, too.

For me, that's pretty... good, I guess? ...but I never actually rerolled a single piece of gear and still have a ton of Super Sea Snails that I haven't used because I only add slots to whatever equipment I think looks good enough to use together and want more slots to grind for... and then I keep running out of slots. (Clearly I'm not doing this at all right anyway, so why should I care about this kind of thing?!)

On the other hand, and not to bury the lead too much... you've presumably noticed all the familiar-resolution graffiti is still alive and kicking and shared by every Inkling idling about the Square, despite the fact that Miiverse hasn't made the jump to the new hardware, and instead the Switch can post directly to existing social media, specifically the (annoyingly) ever-present Twitter and Facebook.

I think Miiverse was a neat idea and all, but I can't say that the thankless chore of hosting, curating, and managing your own social media network from scratch was a good idea on Nintendo's part... way better to just farm it out to existing ones that people are already using and then using this to reach the ocean of nonbelievers out THERE.

That said, I'm a little confused... because clearly these posts EXIST in the game itself... but I find it hard to believe that they'd actually be fetched straight off of Twitter or Facebook, so... what do we call the middleware that houses the posts people make that gets called up in-game?

Of more important note, the Switch IS a touchscreen device, so you CAN write on it... but... it's capacitive, screen, which means most styli won't do the trick unless you already happen to have a specialized one. That said, playing around with it myself, I've found that the inaccuracy of a finger is fairly well supplemented by the button controls for detail-oriented touch-ups. Though I suppose this means we won't be seeing a lot of footage of people touch-drawing, only the results... and maybe some time-lapse pixel art...

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I have a license to use Nintendo’s content in this video through the Nintendo Creators Program. This video is not sponsored or endorsed by Nintendo, but any advertising revenue from this video will be shared with Nintendo.