#and there's still a bunch that does have an impact. points to octo expansion. but in the end...

[astrolotte]

as much as i love splatoon lore. you all know i love splatoon lore. as much as i love splatoon lore i am not afraid to admit that a lot of the impact is lost via the storytelling methods.

For example, the Sunken Scrolls. a HUGE part of the lore is from here. and a lot of impact is lost simply because these scrolls don't allow for any further exploration. At most you'll get a few scroll pages (a paragraph for each page) on a topic. Like the fact that Judd was from the human time and was cryogenically frozen.

If they wanted to explore that concept, it could be devastating. He had an owner, a human who loved him very much. A human who loved his cat so much that, when faced with the end of the world and the resources to only save one person, he elected to save his cat. But instead of a big story with drama and heartache, we get like 3 paragraphs on it, and then... nothing.

Humanity's downfall is another big devastating lore beat, obviously, and to its credit it does have somewhat of a focus in Splatoon 3, via the Alterna Logs! Instead of a picture of a human skeleton with a Wii U nearby (a canon sunken scroll btw), we have multiple mini stories on how the survived, and how they died. The Alterna Logs are GREAT, and in my mind they're impactful! Even the fact that you can only unlock them a few sentences at a time via completing missions didn't stall it too much, as the logs tell a whole story rather than a tiny lore dump.

But it's.. not always treated that way. There's the previously mentioned drawing of a human skeleton with a Wii U right next to it (a gamer to the end...) and characters regularly mention that humans are dead without a care. Which, y'know, makes sense. Humans are long extinct, and the fish have no attachment to them. But it does negate a lot of the meaning.

Then there's cases where the drear is hidden away within mere implications, like with OE's "hundreds of dead test subjects" beat. While it's fun to sit there and have it slowly dawn on you that many test subjects likely did get blended up, it really messes with the impact of it.

My final point here is the areas of the lore left unexplored. The biggest instance of this, imo, is the Octarian society, which we... know next to nothing about. We know they live underground. We know they are in the middle of a power crisis. We know that they can be inspired by Calamari Inkantation to leave. But what about their daily lives? What is it like deep down in Octo Valley? What is it like to live in the middle of a power crisis like that, and what is it like under Octavio's rule? This could be such an interesting perspective, but we're left with next to nothing. A few Sunken Scrolls, and a few bits of poetry from Agent 8, but after that...

Like I said, I love Splatoon lore, truly. It's fun and it's dark and it's crazy. But a lot of its impact, its meaning, its passion, is left with less simply due to the way its told.

As weird as it might be to suggest, I kinda hope we get a Splatoon spinoff that's not a multiplayer shooter, something that can properly explore the lore and let people process just how devastating it really is. It's one thing to say all of humanity went extinct, and it's another thing to really feel the impact of that.

I know the developers have passion for the world they made. That's apparent with just how much lore we have in general- if they didn't care about the world of Splatoon, we wouldn't even have an explanation for why Inklings are humanoid. Or, well, for the vast majority of things in the game. No one really needs to know that microbes in the air are what make the ink disappear after games, but we have that information because the developers love what they made.

I just hope that we eventually reach a point where this can be properly explored.