Alright well Nintendo had another Direct today… eventually. Maybe I had the time wrong but it seemed as though it started almost an hour late, a bad sign for what is supposed to be such a big new title for Nintendo. A company that beats old IP’s into a bloody mess on the floor like your mother downs cheap wine. Nintendo is even giving them their own amiibos, which seems like a big step for new characters right out of the starting gate. When will they come out? Don’t know. Who has two thumbs and doesn’t care? This guy. To be fair unlike most amiibos though these seem to have more in game relevance than a single skin.
No this time each amiibo will offer a wide variety of challenges with the usual rewards… like more skins or accessories. That was one thing they really wanted to get across this time. Going the Team Fortress route you can customize with a wide variety of clothes and, drum roll please, hats! Not only that but the series of special event items and other special items you can collect. Some look mildly interesting, one suit of armor looked half like a big daddy. It really doesn’t change the fact that all the squid kids look like some weird goth/skater punk mash up. I can only assume they wanted to show off the female squid so we can be really impressed with the natural sway of her tentacles sway but it came off as a little pervy by the end. The school girl squid especially brought back terrible memories of my old roommate and what he called ‘tentacle hentai’. The game really wants to be what I can only assume is what developers think is ‘hip’ today. Even the store clerks all had to have some weird quark to make them more interesting. I don’t plan on bonding with the giant prawn selling me shoes, I just want to buy the damn shoes. The singing squids was mildly interesting and the singing part was mildly entertaining.
How does the game look? Well it reminds me of when I played multiplayer Golden Eye on paint ball mode, eventually it just became a game of who can shoot up more wall. That’s the majority of the game, you have a map that looks like it was designed for a skater or parkour person and paint as much as possible. One aspect that was interesting was how a person in squid mode could swim super fast through their own paint and almost pull a surprise attack. I especially liked the idea of jumping out the wall at someone and strafing them, an actual new twist on an old concept I would not have thought Nintendo was capable of. Of course this is Nintendo though so everything has to have a heavy layer of cartoon plastered over it. I thought after Nintendo acquired Bayonneta they would have gotten over this but it’s just not worth the pain of explaining squid heaven to kids I guess. So all your guns are basically squirt guns, the most harmless gun possible. There was also some paint brush weapon, something intriguing because it adds actual strategy to this baby’s first shooter. I can imagine one roller with the team in close proximity behind him just charging in. Some of the special weapons are interesting though, such as a missile that uses the Wii pad to aim at any point on the field or scanners that sense all enemies. Again though it’s nothing that special, your usual shooter with paintball guns.
I’m almost surprised this game has a multiplayer mode. Maybe Nintendo is finally catching up with the rest of the world and realizes that some games actually need a multiplayer mode. With only eight person lobbies on what looked liked constricted fields I have to wonder if they shouldn’t have tried just a little harder though. Then again paint explosions seem to spread over such a wide area any more people and the entire game would probably crash in on itself. Since the single player and multiplayer modes appear to be almost identical it seems there is not much need to do both. Just stick to one and go all out. Of course single player mode had some unique bits to separate itself from multiplayer. In what I assume is a kind of story mode, which they refer to as challenges, you face off against octopus. Answering that age old question of which would win in a fight. No wait… that’s whale versus squid… Either way they look like aliens and you have to shoot them all with various restrictions and in return you get… more clothes.
So the game comes out May 29th on the Wii U. If you have a Wii U then you should probably get this because now that Zelda is up in the air there’s not much else to look forward to, except Xenoblade of course but that’s also in the air. Hell, it may even be fun, the cynic in me just won’t let me enjoy anything more cartoony than Disney with less charm than Paper Mario. I thought about getting it just to see how it functions but I’m already booked through June and not much will pull me away from Elder Scrolls or Batman. Want to know more about what I’m rambling about? Then watch the video below.
