My thoughts on Side Order
(Written pretty much as soon as I finished it. So don't expect these thoughts to be super coherent and/or accurate)
Before we start, I have only finished the main story of Side Order so far, because I've been playing it all day. If I tried to get any closer to 100% completion than I currently am, I'll be here all night as well.
It was very fun to play (so fun that I spent all day playing it, as previously mentioned). I think that a part of that is down to how different it is from the three Hero Modes, and from Octo Expansion. Going up the tower was never too frustrating (which may be partly becasue I am primarily a shooter/dualies main, ie the two palettes you get first if I'm not mistaken) but it was difficult at times. Which is good! There weren't too many floors, but there weren't too little either. And I really enjoyed the colour palette system. It was very fun how you just gradually get higher and higher in strength, but you almost don't notice it as you're going because youre almost always only getting one pallette chip at a time. (Also I like being overpowered, which was the case in the bonus levels with chip saturation, which were my favourite levels). I also liked the variety and randomness in the levels a lot, and their gradual difficulty increase. Maybe I should play more roguelites. The danger stages were very fun as well, and the ones with the lights out were genuinly quite creepy. They also added even more variety than the gameplay already had, as you couldn't predict when they'd show up.
I was a massive fan of almost everything about the Jelletons. Primarily the fact that their existance meant NO MORE OCTARIANS. Not that I dont like Octarians, I just think we've been fighting against them for far too long. I also really liked the Jelleton's general apperance and skeleton fish theme, and the jelly part. They looked really cool. The main thing I don't really like that much about them is the lack of explaination about what they actually are. I know we can kind of explain it away with "ohh simulation blah blah blah" but still. It bugs me.
The story is quite a different beast all together. It was pretty good. I l liked the insight we got on things such as Pearl and Marina's relationship (it all but confirmed Pearlina as canon in my eyes). The only problem was that it didnt entirely make sense. What the fuck was order's deal. How did it even get there. I was just. Confused. And my confusion wasn't really helped by the final boss, and the aftermath of said boss, like... is it an octoling of some kind? I just don't know. Maybe it's revealed in the post game somehow. It was cool, dont get me wrong, but... why was it there exactly? Why was it the antagonist, especially when the Telephone is right there. I know it was implied to have died at the end of octo expansion, but we didn't exactly see it die. It just kind of faded out into light, and we never saw it again. It was also on the side of order in the FinalFest of Splatoon 2. Having the Telephone as the antagonist would especially make sense because of the original purpose of the Memverse, that being, to unsanitise the sanitised Octolings (and other creatures). It stands to reason that if the Telephone had found out about it, it would be more than a little bit angry, seeing as it is the one that sanitised all those octolings in the first place. I thought the telephone would make sense as the villain even before I found out about the existance of order (not that much before mind you, it was during the boss fight against marina, because the stuff that was holding her was turquoise and looked a little like sanisised ink, because of the colour). Also, the whole plot to take away the free will of the people of the world using the program that was meant to save them from sanitisation does feel like something the Telephone would do. At least it feels like that to me. Maybe it would just want to resanitise them, I dont know.
The boss fight against Marina and the section leading up to it was my favourite part of Side Order. There were so many unknowns at that point! Like who was doing this, what did they want, what had happened to Marina, etc etc etc. And in the part leading up to the fight against her, those unknowns kind of came to a head, and I was wondering what would happen after the boss fight, because surely this couldn't be the end? It was not the end. I quite like how both of the Splatoon 3 storylines have sort of "false starts" before the story really begins. Hero Mode had it and now Side Order has it too. It's a shame that Splatoon 3 has seemingly exchanged the story making sense for cool openings. At least both Splatoon 3 Hero Mode and Side Order are very fun to play. Also Ahato was there! (Or Acht or Dedf1sh if you'd prefer to call them that, I'm just used to calling them Ahato). They are my favourite character in Splatoon, and have been since I found out they existed, which was in the days of the Octo Expansion.
I was very much a fan of the whole colour thing, with saturated colour v greyscaling. I really liked the visuals of it, and how the saturation of the colour kind of represented power and free will and stuff like that. Just the visuals of the game in general were exellent.
A very minor thing, but I like how Side Order pretty much confirmed that coloured fingertips is a thing that Octolings get with age, since Agent 8 in the Octo Expansion didn't have them, and they do have them now in Side Order.
Thank you very much if you read this far! I hope you enjoyed reading my extremely rambly thoughts. I might make another post if I have more Side Order related thoughts and/or when I finish the post game.