Game:

Splatoon (2015)

Duration: 12:48

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6

Well, as it so happens, I ran out of my already-processed backlog of videos of BOTH Splatoon and Hyrule Warriors on exactly the same day as the bag of Doritos finally exhausted itself... so... I kinda took some time to shore up more reinforcements!

...while I was doing so, I decided it would be quite the motivator if I shook things up a bit and got started with something I've been wanting to get to for quite awhile... Octo Valley! (Y'know, the weird place full of derelict floating islands and this crazy old man enlisting any passerby squids into service as strike commandos!)

As the single player campaign component to Splatoon, it's a bit of an odd proposition... it bears very little resemblance to the multiplayer game, but rather seems to take a lot of its general design cues from Super Mario Galaxy while teaching the basics of Inkling control and combat in a far more relaxed and lower-stress environment than live-fire multiplayer engagements.

I hope to get a happy medium established wherein I alternate between the two modes (at what rate, I'm not sure) even though the two things clearly didn't take place at the same time... but a huge chunk of one or the other might be a bit tough to swallow. (It certainly might've been giving me some indigestion continuously processing one at a time, but now I've dug myself out of that little trap... maybe. We'll see.)

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Anyway, part of what makes ol' Cap'n Cuttlefish's story about the impending Octarian invasion so fishy-sounding is that the entryways to these little battlegrounds are ...kettles. INVISIBLE kettles! No, I'm serious! Why are you walking away?!

You just spray suspicious-looking spots where you can suspiciously stub your toe on something suspiciously visually absent. Suspicious! ...it's generally not that difficult to find them, and one must question from the player's standpoint what the design purpose is in such a move, but y'know, they're generally placed in pretty obvious locations, but we'll have time to reexamine this later.

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01. Octotrooper Hideout
~ Catch That Zapfish! ~

Every stage in Octo Valley will break down as a series of various configurations of platforms connected by scripted Super Jump sequences from one to the next.

Usually you'll need to defeat all the enemies in an area for it to show up... sometimes you need to find a key... eventually, things will get pretty complex, but for now it's going to stay straightforward enough just to show you the ropes.

However, in every single stage, there will be something called a Sunken Scroll, which is where all kinds of fun little tidbits of exposition and lore and interesting artwork are stashed away alongside the simple experience Octo Valley itself has to offer on the surface.

I'll let you soak in all the stuff happening here on your own before I start getting my usual characteristically ramble on about the details. (You're WELCOME!)

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