A third game, Splatoon 3, is set to be released on September 9, 2022.
The series has sold over 18 million copies. The series has received positive reviews for its style, gameplay mechanics and soundtrack, with both games in the series having been nominated and awarded several year-end accolades from various gaming publications. A sequel, Splatoon 2, was released for the Nintendo Switch in July 2017, followed by an expansion pack, Octo Expansion, in June 2018. The first game in the series, Splatoon, was released for the Wii U in May 2015. They frequently engage in turf war battles with each other and use a variety of weapons that produce and shoot colored ink while in humanoid form, or swim and hide in surfaces covered in their own colored ink while in their cephalopodic forms. Set in a post-apocalyptic Earth inhabited by anthropomorphic marine animals, the series centers around fictional cephalopods known as Inklings and Octolings - based on squid and octopuses respectively - which can transform between humanoid and cephalopod forms at will.
When not sedentary, Kyle enjoys traveling to the National Parks, seeing new cities, and has ambitions to explore abroad.Splatoon is a third-person shooter video game franchise created by Hisashi Nogami, and developed and owned by Nintendo. He's a firm believer in three hours being the perfect length for a movie, but thinks a lot of games are much too long. Or he's trying to get you to watch Mad Men. When not talking about The Legend of Zelda, Dark Souls, Mass Effect, or some PlayStation exclusive, he's probably droning on about the works of Cormac McCarthy, Frank Herbert, Stanley Kubrick, and Wes Anderson. A terminal Midwesterner who graduated from the University of Kansas, Kyle also has knowledge and interest in literature, film, film adaptions of literature, and history. His tenure at SR began in late 2020 as a contributing Game Features writer before quickly becoming a Staff Writer, a role that gradually progressed into an Editor position. One of Kyle's earliest memories is of watching his older brother play Ocarina of Time, which probably explains how he ended up as an Editor for Screen Rant's Gaming section. The gameplay was starting to be finalized, but there was still a disconnect between it and the rabbits' character designs. When asking other Nintendo employees for feedback, common critiques included, " I don't see the appeal of the character," and, " Why are the rabbits shooting ink?" The devs next put players in control of white rabbits, which could then be colored with the ink. Once the general gameplay of Splatoon was in place, character design shifted to finding something more marketable, as " Tofu is a bit of a hard sell." The development team moved from tofu to human characters, but they stood out from the ink too much. Players could look at a top-down map to see enemy locations, but standing in one's own ink obscured their location because their tofu block was the same color.
Shortly after the launch of the Wii U, Splatoon's developers were attempting to " make a new kind of game, without worrying about trying to fit into existing game genres." The tofu demo already had some important gameplay elements still used in Splatoon: Hiding in same-team ink is an important strategy first introduced in the tofu phase, when the map was visible on the TV screen instead of the Wii U GamePad.