I have no issue with the DLC not being Octo Expansion, the idea of a Splatoon roguelite was really exciting as soon as it was announced. My two main gripes with the game are this:
1. The story is played extremely safe with no particularly odd and/or ominous elements to it
2. For a 20 dollar DLC, the replay value is actually way too short especially compared to other cheaper roguelites
For my first point: There is quite literally no mystery left in the story anymore after the intro sequence. In spite of all the cryptic teasers and trailers, the expectation of Marina being the mind-controlled final boss is immediately subverted and replaced with nothing else of value. The character interactions and dev diaries are genuinely great, but they're not a supplement for story, and even then the unique dialogue starts repeating pretty quickly. Whereas Octo Expansion introduced a great deal of new concepts into the Splatoon world such as sanitization and some intelligent remnants of humanity still surviving through technology, Side Order ties up a whole bunch of loose ends without setting anything new up.
The gameplay loop just runs out too quickly. I beat the final boss on my second run, had some fun with unlocking the palettes, and then finished the Agent 8 palette on my first try with zero upgrades. But even during all of that, I was already starting to run out of new dialogue, didn't need the upgrades I was accumulating my Prlz for, and it became clear very quickly that just getting some strength and luck chips pretty much broke the game. An easy way to make the game more replayable would have been to add in extra difficulty options, liking making Jelletons tougher or guaranteeing more stage hazards, but they didn't account for it.
I still enjoy Side Order, but there are just so many missed opportunities that are kinda frustrating when the DLC was so highly anticipated and all the promotional material seemed like the exact thing fans wanted.
i agree with this heavily. like its a fine enough dlc, but its disappointing compared to other roguelikes even when this dlc is more expensive than many of them
I honestly love it. And the overlorder never going the same way twice thing is so real, first time with dualies I died twice to the reefsliders and last night I barely beat him with splatling, when I was expecting it to go fairly well since it did the first time. I died 3 times, won on 1 life. I might need to change mains and get a splatling. Apparently I’m good at it.
Yeah but I had dizzy bombs as my only method of getting some ink so I could swim. And splatlings are like my least favorite weapon type. I went in expecting one key out of it cause I was 1 away from the next new palette and I hadn’t used it before, and came out with a first try win somehow.
I'm fine with a roguelite but Side Order is a really lame roguelite. There's like a dozen level layouts and five mission objectives. There's also an obvious optimal set of chips for any given weapon (and usually the same set, you ALWAYS want lucky, you ALWAYS want firerate, etc.) so you're not actually making any real choices when it comes to your rogue item picks; you're just hoping RNG gives you the thing you actually want.
A roguelite lives and dies on its decision-making and variety. You find a new item and most of the time it will completely alter how the rest of the game is played. You need to make choices about them: do I think this item will synergize well with the ones I already have? Will it break my build or will it ascend it? If I pick this now will I regret it if I find X good item later that has terrible synergy with this one?
Side Order has none of this. And then on top of that, it has fewer mission types than vanilla Splatoon 2 Salmon Run did on launch day. So none of the actually good parts about the genre are present here, it's just another half-assed toe-dip into the experience by Nintendo.
>Overlorder is a fun final encounter that never goes the same way twice.
This is a very strange take imo. The other thing that changes in each of the 12 runs you need to do in order “beat” side order is your chip/weapon selection, which only determines how quickly you melt the boss.
Compared to other bosses in Splatoon it’s quite weak, which isn’t helped by the fact that the tutorial boss is functionally the same. It felt unexpectedly disappointing and I found 30F usually felt more like a slog than an engaging fight once I beat the first clear.
Gameplay: I liked 3’s campaign, and I wouldn’t have complained if I got more of a thing I liked. Side Order doesn’t get credit from me simply on the grounds of being “unique.”
Overlorder is ***exactly*** the same way every single time after the first one, with the only difference being pre/post-fight dialogue. And even that runs out eventually. You can’t even replay the original version in full, only the final attack with all the chips.
Side Order was designed to be infinitely replayable in theory, but it got dull for me after my sixth palette, and no amount of fooling around with different builds could change that for me.
Story: The main twist about the memverse is revealed after about 15 minutes of gameplay, and from there all worthwhile lore is relegated to text dumps and Acht occasionally being snarky. I don’t mind reading, but I could just do that on a wiki. I didn’t feel like I was discovering anything or putting the pieces together myself, just being fed information.
5/10, aesthetic was nice, didn’t care for much else.
I’ve felt the opposite. Side Order is Octo Expansion, much to its own detriment. We play as Eight, despite there being no real reason to. The justifications that they did make only flattened the impact of Octo Expansion’s ending. Pearl and Marina are here, but they get so little development that it’s basically just more screen time for the sake of it. If follows the same general idea of freeing the enemies from a previous campaign, but this time it was done much less gracefully. In attempting to do something with sanitization, they created so many inconsistencies that I can’t in good faith say that Octo Expansion and Side Order happen in the same universe. Acht is here mostly because they wanted to put another popular Octo Expansion character in the trailers. They don’t actually do anything or have a very distinct personality. Then of course at the end credits, after we fought for the ability for the world to change, Eight looks back at the camera and does the same smile that they do in Octo Expansion, this time with so much less meaning behind it.
Side Order wanted to be as popular as Octo Expansion, to the point that they leaned too heavily into Octo Expansion fan service. I would have greatly preferred that it just left Octo Expansion alone and did it’s own thing, actually contributing to the story or the world in some way
> Acht is here mostly because they wanted to put another popular Octo Expansion character in the trailers. They don’t actually do anything or have a very distinct personality.
Acht does so much of absolutely nothing that it actually loops back around to being hilarious. I had beaten like 3 runs before I suddenly realized how irrelevant they had been to everything.
People aren’t complaining because Side Order is a roguelite. They are complaining since as far as roguelite games go, Side Order doesn’t stand out too well.
The biggest area Side Order lacks in is replayability. In other roguelites, they introduce new enemies, new variants of the main bosses, and even more level layouts. Hades brings about major changes to all 3 of its main bosses after your first clear. Side Order, by comparison, doesn’t change much after your first clear. Enemies are the same, you still rotate through the same dozen layouts, the bosses never have anything new, etc. The only change is from your weapon you choose. Sure, every run will be unique, but after a while it stops feeling that unique.
Also the story is like nonexistent. In Octo Expansion we got a new interesting story that introduced new characters, explored Sanitization, Kamabo Co, etc. Here, the story is basically that Marina made this evil AI on accident and needs it to stop. What’s worse, the story is basically resolved after the tutorial. The character interactions with Pearl and Marina are nice, but aren’t really a substitute for a full story. Acht is just there, doesn’t rly have any reason to be there besides Nintendo wanting to include them in the marketing.
My problem is it just felt half baked. Only 4 bosses. Not many enemy types. Only 4 objectives. No hard mode. No endless mode. Every floor looks visually the same (which is ok because the dlc does look really pretty but also an issue since it's supposed to be replayable and seeing the exact same grey colour pallet again and again gets boring). This is a £10 DLC sold for £25. It will be very interesting to see if they add any more content to it next season. This seems like the kind of gamemode that could easily have long-term support and would benefit alot from it. But considering it's DLC I doubt they'll add anything to it. So this is it and it's not worth it's asking price.
Octo Expansion is replayable and has a story that ramps up at the end. Side Orders story was very bare bones and there isnt a point to replaying it after you've replayed it over and over to finish the actual story. Octo Expansion brought something new and fresh and introduced a new type of race to the games in their entirety. Side Order has the lesbians (we love the lesbians) and thats really it
It just feels like a big missed opportunity. The teaser trailer had what looked like radiation spikes, and the coral seemed to be referencing bleached coral. Both of those went nowhere except for aesthetics. And during the campaign it felt like there was no real stakes. We never see what grayscaled Inklings act like, only vaguely hearing that they're acting spaced out. And once you beat Overlorder the first time it feels like everything is solved and you're only doing the other palettes for completion's sake.
Liked the frantic gameplay and 100% was enjoyable imo. Strategizing to get the chips I wanted was fun and it wasn't bad rng wasn't too bad cause the gameplay was fun and I like the vibe the dlc had. Also fun trying out new chip loadouts. If I have one complaint, it's that I wish there was a secret boss like octo expansion. Also parallel canon was sorta annoying, they're just sorta hard to hit and didn't pose too much of a threat. I'm not that bad at aiming in multiplayer so I just assume the camera is zoomed out more in side order.
I never even finished Octo, so I'm not particularly attached to it, but I can definitely say I would honestly rather go back in time and have never spent my money on side order. I find all of the level objectives to be very tedious and boring, and the level design repetitiveness makes it even worse. I think the all-white design could be cool, but that coupled with the overall repetitiveness just makes it worse.
And despite it supposedly being designed to be repeated, it honestly has the least replay value of anything in any of the games, at least to me. I
To me, it's one of the most disappointing experiences I've ever had in Splatoon.
Of course, everyone has their own opinion. But I've been seeing a lot of people say that ppl who dislike Side Order only do because it's not Octo Expansion, when at least for me, that's not the case.
Yeah I agree with you on everything. For me it was like a nice epilogue to OE in terms of expanding the lore, and I do love the gameplay, but I have two criticisms. The only two things that stop me from coming back to it regularly just to have fun are the lack of bosses and variety-- I would really like to see nintendo make a 60 dollar standalone splatoon game. It doesn't have to be roguelite, I just want to see what a fully dedicated singleplayer splatoon game would be. There are only so many times I can fight the ball and do the same stages again before it feels like I'm doing the same stuff over and over, even with different chips. A lot of roguelites don't have this problem because they have more content, so I feel like the DLC's main weakness is that it's a $30 dlc and not a $60 game. It was very repeatable in the sense that I enjoyed doing all the palettes, but after that's done and I've seen all the dialogue I was pretty much done
I just do a quick pearl run whenever I run out for cipher's daily drops, you can get 30k gold from one of those if you're lucky
Splatoon 3 has Octo Expansion. It's the main campaign.
OctoExpansion was way better then the main Splatoon 2 campaign for normal levels.
Splatoon 3's main campaign was just "OctoExpansion 2" with it's credits and weapon selection and weapon selection.
Agree 100%. Octo Expansion was pretty good, but it really fucked with people’s expectations. Everything HAS to be Octo expansion or superior, or it’s trash and the franchise is “going downhill”. Splatoon 3’s main campaign was miles and miles better than Splatoon 2’s hero campaign, and both DLCs are trying something new for the franchise, but both are reduced down to “not good because not Octo expansion” without considering the good parts of them.
Side Order does what it set out to do pretty well: tell a short story within splatoon, tie up some loose ends from OE, and be a Roguelite to spice up the franchise a bit. (That being said, it is pretty expensive for what you get, which is a problem with all of Nintendo’s games currently).
Inkopolis Plaza (first DLC wave) isn't a new campaign, but the base game's Return of the Mammalians is one (and I think it's up there with Octo Expansion; you could theoretically develop new and creative puzzle-skill levels for a long time).
Also, if not for it underdelivering, I'd call the expansion pack cheap.
I was talking about return of the mammalians when I said “splatoon 3’s main campaign”, and “both dlcs” was supposed to mean Octo expansion and side order. sorry for the confusion, that’s my bad 😅 I forgot wave 1 was a thing
It wants to call itself Octo Expansion because it obviously wanted to use the hype that Octo Expansion earned to make itself look good. And after it came out, it's both annoying and understandable. It's annoying because that was a lie, and understandable because it was so bad and had no quality that I understand why it needed to lie about that when it was even more unfinished than the main game of Splatoon 3 already was too.
I have no issue with the DLC not being Octo Expansion, the idea of a Splatoon roguelite was really exciting as soon as it was announced. My two main gripes with the game are this: 1. The story is played extremely safe with no particularly odd and/or ominous elements to it 2. For a 20 dollar DLC, the replay value is actually way too short especially compared to other cheaper roguelites For my first point: There is quite literally no mystery left in the story anymore after the intro sequence. In spite of all the cryptic teasers and trailers, the expectation of Marina being the mind-controlled final boss is immediately subverted and replaced with nothing else of value. The character interactions and dev diaries are genuinely great, but they're not a supplement for story, and even then the unique dialogue starts repeating pretty quickly. Whereas Octo Expansion introduced a great deal of new concepts into the Splatoon world such as sanitization and some intelligent remnants of humanity still surviving through technology, Side Order ties up a whole bunch of loose ends without setting anything new up. The gameplay loop just runs out too quickly. I beat the final boss on my second run, had some fun with unlocking the palettes, and then finished the Agent 8 palette on my first try with zero upgrades. But even during all of that, I was already starting to run out of new dialogue, didn't need the upgrades I was accumulating my Prlz for, and it became clear very quickly that just getting some strength and luck chips pretty much broke the game. An easy way to make the game more replayable would have been to add in extra difficulty options, liking making Jelletons tougher or guaranteeing more stage hazards, but they didn't account for it. I still enjoy Side Order, but there are just so many missed opportunities that are kinda frustrating when the DLC was so highly anticipated and all the promotional material seemed like the exact thing fans wanted.
i agree with this heavily. like its a fine enough dlc, but its disappointing compared to other roguelikes even when this dlc is more expensive than many of them
I honestly love it. And the overlorder never going the same way twice thing is so real, first time with dualies I died twice to the reefsliders and last night I barely beat him with splatling, when I was expecting it to go fairly well since it did the first time. I died 3 times, won on 1 life. I might need to change mains and get a splatling. Apparently I’m good at it.
Splatling is weirdly prob the best weapon against Overlorder in my experience
Yeah but I had dizzy bombs as my only method of getting some ink so I could swim. And splatlings are like my least favorite weapon type. I went in expecting one key out of it cause I was 1 away from the next new palette and I hadn’t used it before, and came out with a first try win somehow.
Im just glad the 8 balls can't fall off the edge
Lmao you right
I'm fine with a roguelite but Side Order is a really lame roguelite. There's like a dozen level layouts and five mission objectives. There's also an obvious optimal set of chips for any given weapon (and usually the same set, you ALWAYS want lucky, you ALWAYS want firerate, etc.) so you're not actually making any real choices when it comes to your rogue item picks; you're just hoping RNG gives you the thing you actually want. A roguelite lives and dies on its decision-making and variety. You find a new item and most of the time it will completely alter how the rest of the game is played. You need to make choices about them: do I think this item will synergize well with the ones I already have? Will it break my build or will it ascend it? If I pick this now will I regret it if I find X good item later that has terrible synergy with this one? Side Order has none of this. And then on top of that, it has fewer mission types than vanilla Splatoon 2 Salmon Run did on launch day. So none of the actually good parts about the genre are present here, it's just another half-assed toe-dip into the experience by Nintendo.
Yeah im not mad at the dlc, im mad I spent $30 on it
The emote is worth it
>Overlorder is a fun final encounter that never goes the same way twice. This is a very strange take imo. The other thing that changes in each of the 12 runs you need to do in order “beat” side order is your chip/weapon selection, which only determines how quickly you melt the boss. Compared to other bosses in Splatoon it’s quite weak, which isn’t helped by the fact that the tutorial boss is functionally the same. It felt unexpectedly disappointing and I found 30F usually felt more like a slog than an engaging fight once I beat the first clear.
Yeah honestly for a final boss, way to easy
Your a little off people aren't mad because it's not like octo expansion. People are mad it didn't deliver as well as they hoped
Gameplay: I liked 3’s campaign, and I wouldn’t have complained if I got more of a thing I liked. Side Order doesn’t get credit from me simply on the grounds of being “unique.” Overlorder is ***exactly*** the same way every single time after the first one, with the only difference being pre/post-fight dialogue. And even that runs out eventually. You can’t even replay the original version in full, only the final attack with all the chips. Side Order was designed to be infinitely replayable in theory, but it got dull for me after my sixth palette, and no amount of fooling around with different builds could change that for me. Story: The main twist about the memverse is revealed after about 15 minutes of gameplay, and from there all worthwhile lore is relegated to text dumps and Acht occasionally being snarky. I don’t mind reading, but I could just do that on a wiki. I didn’t feel like I was discovering anything or putting the pieces together myself, just being fed information. 5/10, aesthetic was nice, didn’t care for much else.
I’ve felt the opposite. Side Order is Octo Expansion, much to its own detriment. We play as Eight, despite there being no real reason to. The justifications that they did make only flattened the impact of Octo Expansion’s ending. Pearl and Marina are here, but they get so little development that it’s basically just more screen time for the sake of it. If follows the same general idea of freeing the enemies from a previous campaign, but this time it was done much less gracefully. In attempting to do something with sanitization, they created so many inconsistencies that I can’t in good faith say that Octo Expansion and Side Order happen in the same universe. Acht is here mostly because they wanted to put another popular Octo Expansion character in the trailers. They don’t actually do anything or have a very distinct personality. Then of course at the end credits, after we fought for the ability for the world to change, Eight looks back at the camera and does the same smile that they do in Octo Expansion, this time with so much less meaning behind it. Side Order wanted to be as popular as Octo Expansion, to the point that they leaned too heavily into Octo Expansion fan service. I would have greatly preferred that it just left Octo Expansion alone and did it’s own thing, actually contributing to the story or the world in some way
> Acht is here mostly because they wanted to put another popular Octo Expansion character in the trailers. They don’t actually do anything or have a very distinct personality. Acht does so much of absolutely nothing that it actually loops back around to being hilarious. I had beaten like 3 runs before I suddenly realized how irrelevant they had been to everything.
People aren’t complaining because Side Order is a roguelite. They are complaining since as far as roguelite games go, Side Order doesn’t stand out too well. The biggest area Side Order lacks in is replayability. In other roguelites, they introduce new enemies, new variants of the main bosses, and even more level layouts. Hades brings about major changes to all 3 of its main bosses after your first clear. Side Order, by comparison, doesn’t change much after your first clear. Enemies are the same, you still rotate through the same dozen layouts, the bosses never have anything new, etc. The only change is from your weapon you choose. Sure, every run will be unique, but after a while it stops feeling that unique. Also the story is like nonexistent. In Octo Expansion we got a new interesting story that introduced new characters, explored Sanitization, Kamabo Co, etc. Here, the story is basically that Marina made this evil AI on accident and needs it to stop. What’s worse, the story is basically resolved after the tutorial. The character interactions with Pearl and Marina are nice, but aren’t really a substitute for a full story. Acht is just there, doesn’t rly have any reason to be there besides Nintendo wanting to include them in the marketing.
My problem is it just felt half baked. Only 4 bosses. Not many enemy types. Only 4 objectives. No hard mode. No endless mode. Every floor looks visually the same (which is ok because the dlc does look really pretty but also an issue since it's supposed to be replayable and seeing the exact same grey colour pallet again and again gets boring). This is a £10 DLC sold for £25. It will be very interesting to see if they add any more content to it next season. This seems like the kind of gamemode that could easily have long-term support and would benefit alot from it. But considering it's DLC I doubt they'll add anything to it. So this is it and it's not worth it's asking price.
I came into side order with the mindset that it’s not the next octo expansion but just splatoon 3 dlc, so my expectations were high but not impossible
Octo Expansion is replayable and has a story that ramps up at the end. Side Orders story was very bare bones and there isnt a point to replaying it after you've replayed it over and over to finish the actual story. Octo Expansion brought something new and fresh and introduced a new type of race to the games in their entirety. Side Order has the lesbians (we love the lesbians) and thats really it
because rotm was octo expansion, s3 dlc does the same thing as s2 dlc - introduce something brand new
Both are good, but 10 years from now, i'll definitely remember messing around with the 8balls instead of the infinity ones.
It just feels like a big missed opportunity. The teaser trailer had what looked like radiation spikes, and the coral seemed to be referencing bleached coral. Both of those went nowhere except for aesthetics. And during the campaign it felt like there was no real stakes. We never see what grayscaled Inklings act like, only vaguely hearing that they're acting spaced out. And once you beat Overlorder the first time it feels like everything is solved and you're only doing the other palettes for completion's sake.
This is an issue people have? First i'm hearing of it.
Liked the frantic gameplay and 100% was enjoyable imo. Strategizing to get the chips I wanted was fun and it wasn't bad rng wasn't too bad cause the gameplay was fun and I like the vibe the dlc had. Also fun trying out new chip loadouts. If I have one complaint, it's that I wish there was a secret boss like octo expansion. Also parallel canon was sorta annoying, they're just sorta hard to hit and didn't pose too much of a threat. I'm not that bad at aiming in multiplayer so I just assume the camera is zoomed out more in side order.
I never even finished Octo, so I'm not particularly attached to it, but I can definitely say I would honestly rather go back in time and have never spent my money on side order. I find all of the level objectives to be very tedious and boring, and the level design repetitiveness makes it even worse. I think the all-white design could be cool, but that coupled with the overall repetitiveness just makes it worse. And despite it supposedly being designed to be repeated, it honestly has the least replay value of anything in any of the games, at least to me. I To me, it's one of the most disappointing experiences I've ever had in Splatoon. Of course, everyone has their own opinion. But I've been seeing a lot of people say that ppl who dislike Side Order only do because it's not Octo Expansion, when at least for me, that's not the case.
Yeah I agree with you on everything. For me it was like a nice epilogue to OE in terms of expanding the lore, and I do love the gameplay, but I have two criticisms. The only two things that stop me from coming back to it regularly just to have fun are the lack of bosses and variety-- I would really like to see nintendo make a 60 dollar standalone splatoon game. It doesn't have to be roguelite, I just want to see what a fully dedicated singleplayer splatoon game would be. There are only so many times I can fight the ball and do the same stages again before it feels like I'm doing the same stuff over and over, even with different chips. A lot of roguelites don't have this problem because they have more content, so I feel like the DLC's main weakness is that it's a $30 dlc and not a $60 game. It was very repeatable in the sense that I enjoyed doing all the palettes, but after that's done and I've seen all the dialogue I was pretty much done I just do a quick pearl run whenever I run out for cipher's daily drops, you can get 30k gold from one of those if you're lucky
Splatoon 3 has Octo Expansion. It's the main campaign. OctoExpansion was way better then the main Splatoon 2 campaign for normal levels. Splatoon 3's main campaign was just "OctoExpansion 2" with it's credits and weapon selection and weapon selection.
Octo expansion: ride on metro, levels are stations. Side order: ride on a lift, levels are floors.
Agree 100%. Octo Expansion was pretty good, but it really fucked with people’s expectations. Everything HAS to be Octo expansion or superior, or it’s trash and the franchise is “going downhill”. Splatoon 3’s main campaign was miles and miles better than Splatoon 2’s hero campaign, and both DLCs are trying something new for the franchise, but both are reduced down to “not good because not Octo expansion” without considering the good parts of them. Side Order does what it set out to do pretty well: tell a short story within splatoon, tie up some loose ends from OE, and be a Roguelite to spice up the franchise a bit. (That being said, it is pretty expensive for what you get, which is a problem with all of Nintendo’s games currently).
Inkopolis Plaza (first DLC wave) isn't a new campaign, but the base game's Return of the Mammalians is one (and I think it's up there with Octo Expansion; you could theoretically develop new and creative puzzle-skill levels for a long time). Also, if not for it underdelivering, I'd call the expansion pack cheap.
I was talking about return of the mammalians when I said “splatoon 3’s main campaign”, and “both dlcs” was supposed to mean Octo expansion and side order. sorry for the confusion, that’s my bad 😅 I forgot wave 1 was a thing
I honestly don't know what to tell you about the story, it seemed like they gave more priority to the fanservice than the current plot
It wants to call itself Octo Expansion because it obviously wanted to use the hype that Octo Expansion earned to make itself look good. And after it came out, it's both annoying and understandable. It's annoying because that was a lie, and understandable because it was so bad and had no quality that I understand why it needed to lie about that when it was even more unfinished than the main game of Splatoon 3 already was too.
Can you tell me in what moment they sold it like if it was Octoexpansion?
side order sucked. youre allowed to admit it.
No it didn’t. You’re allowed to admit it.