Splatoon 3‘s reveal yesterday surprised many people, both because there were few indications in advance that the water sportsman would get a third episode and because of the presence of a upside down Eiffel Tower in the trailer. No, your eyes don’t deceive you: Splatoon is set on Earth, thousands of years after the world we know was destroyed by a climate apocalypse.
Hints of the Splatoon world’s grim past can be traced back to the series’ arrival in 2015, but this lore was largely limited to Sunken Scrolls, tucked away in the single-player, which took a backseat for most people in the sweet, sweet multiplayer -competition . While these collectibles covered mostly wacky topics like Inkling biology and what happens to the multi-colored junk that covers the battlefield after each match, they also detailed humanity’s terrifying swan song 12,000 years prior to the games.
The first conjecture (pun Surely intended) that Splatoon was about more than just the peat wars with squid kids that got into the tenth stage of the first entry, courtesy of a Sunken Scroll explaining how the game’s Inkling species evolved over the years.
“Creatures of the surface” sounds an awful lot like people, doesn’t it? Add to that an image that suggests that the squid we know and love served in the real world as the forerunners of the Inkling breed, and it immediately starts to feel like Splatoon takes place on Earth.
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A dozen or so stages later, another Sunken Scroll appears to be a menu from a long-lost era before Inklings roamed the arid land and suggested a fried shrimp that looks remarkably like the guy who sells you sweet kicks Splatoon‘s main hub.
The last few Sunken Scrolls are where things get super clear. They are even attributed to people speaking of an impending disaster that sounds all too familiar for what we encounter in the real world.
That’s literally a human skeleton buried while playing the Wii U. Very subtle, Nintendo.
And finally, some insight into how Judd, the cat made all of that Splatoon matches, came to life in a world ruled by cephalopods.
Unfortunately, the Sunken Scrolls are coming in Splatoon 2 do not keep this tradition, with the excepted a single mention of Judd’s former human owner, but both games are filled with a variety of subtle hints beyond the ones I’ve documented here.
With the upcoming release of the Splatoon 3 announcement and the oddly located Eiffel Tower, the franchise’s post-apocalyptic tendencies are now beginning to come to the fore. That said, it’s strange to see the Inklings in a dusty, Mad Max-esque environment after previous games said the water level was still rising, endangering the dominant species.
I think we’ll have to wait until next year to learn what that is all about, but I hope Nintendo keeps pushing these themes. Not only does it add great flavor, but it can be just what people in the real world need to recognize the dangerous path we all follow.