#i really like how the enby palette turned out

[everotten]

color palette test

[spikrock]

my mad t party lgbt hcs explained

very messy post below! some are genuine reasonings and others are just "yeah haha trust me bro"

tarrant: bisexual & nonbinary

i mean for all the bi characters the hc is pretty self explanatory, i mean look at them yknow. hes a little too fruity with mally and thackery 🤨 but tarrant and alice are literally bi4bi couple of all time as for the nonbinary hc, i dont know! id like to know if anyone else sees him this way or if its just me :) hes just got too much enby swag 

alice: bisexual & trans

its all spiderwebs fault!!!!!!! it made her gay!!!!!!!!! /j but seriously, kissing ladypillar and different numbers such ho hey (you know how every now and then theyll switch alice standing with mally to someone else like thackery or absolem, the few times she did it with ladypillar are so funny because they cant rhyme the pronouns 😭). also ik this sounds silly but i really appreciate that in the mtp shows once ladypillar was added they didnt stop doing spiderwebs or change it to be like “haha were both girls 😵‍💫blehh this is so weird 😂”/play it off as a joke or anything because they very easily could have done that. shes trans. i already made that post with her and mally but again, if shes not trans then why is her color palette blue and pink? checkmate liberals. 

thackery: bisexual & bigender

yeah hes bi i dont know what else to say he and mally are in love frfr i actually just completely made up bigender. made it up, i dont know where i got it from i just remember early february drawing mad t party on my laptop and suddenly thinking “bigender thackery” and its stuck with me since then. (the two genders i hc him with are male/female though so) i wouldnt say he feels just one or the other, he feels both at the same time

mally: bisexual & trans

he is top ten bisexuals of all time,, whenever they do the pretender and tarrant and alice stand on either side of him and take turns singing he is DYING. passing away HE IS TRANSGENDER!!!!!!! we all know it. instead of coming out as trans he made up some crazy story about being killed in a war and then coming back as a man 🙄/j hes just dramatic like that

chessur: gay & trans

haha this is mostly because of @thatrandomartistjavi's hcs xd chessur is special in the sense that hes the only mtp character that never really gets a chance to flirt with anyone else since hes always hiding behind that drumset. from what ive seen he was shipped with dinah a lot, presumably just cuz theyre both cats since they rarely interact, so ive never really understood it :p i usually hc cheshire cats as nonbinary/something under that umbrella but this guy gives me transgender vibes. idk

absolem/ladypillar(? dont know if she ever got a real name): lesbian & trans

shes very much a lesbian. just. just like yeah. i think the most prominent character that she flirts with (other than alice) is mally. from what ive seen it only really happens when its el dormouse on stage but before i started seeing that i always saw mally/absolem/thackery as like, a trio. i mean obviously everyone in the band are friends, but idk. i have lots of drawings of those three hanging out so maybe thats just something my delusional brain has completely made up. but anyway the point is i dont ship those two and i sort of see them with a more sibling dynamic. mally always holds her back when shes trying to touch the little castle music box thing, at the end of sets he’ll pull her antennae to take her off stage/she'll pull him by his scarf, etc. (also theres a clip where she kisses him on the cheek and as they begin to walk off stage she turns to the crowd and mouths “no” and does the throat slitting gesture thing which makes me think theyre sorta just playing around :p)

sooo in a post a while back i said i hc her as genderfluid but ive changed my mind?? actually before i made that post i headcanoned her as trans but then switched to genderfluid and now ive uhh changed my mind again. im very indecisive like that and very easily swayed on my opinions haha,,, @ticktockteapot's metaphor for her “becoming the beautiful butterfly she was always meant to be” is very nice i like it lots. also the fact that ladypillar has a much higher stage presence than absolem (obviously not including the spiderwebs number…or crazypillar) was always so sweet to me cuz like,,,aw shes finally more comfortable being herself and performing :’)

tl;dr none of them are straight none of them are cis. happy pride month and thank you for coming to my TED talk

[kieuecaprie]

So, I finished Splatoon 3 Side Order. I did EVERYTHING possible on it. I collected all the color chips, I completed all the palettes, I bought all the things I could get from there and... I feel less than satisfied? That doesn't sound right, I was looking forward to it! Why do I feel this way?

So, in this post, I'm going to try and articulate my grey-and-gray feelings about a DLC about grayscaling and color into a silly little blog post online and see if I'm not alone in feeling that way.

You've already read the teal deer by the way, I'm not putting one under the read more. Oh, and major spoiler warning about literally everything in Side Order. I'd recommend having cleared at least one successful run before you even THINK about reading on.

So, let's get the good bits out of the way first, the story? Sure, it's very bare on the surface but the buildup to Marina Agitando and, subsequently, Order itself in about four runs (one successful tutorial run, two failed runs, one successful normal run) was great. The characters, as usual, were great, it was nice to see Acht in the flesh and it was nice to catch up with Pearl and Marina, the only lesbian couple in Splatoon and I say this in the most affectionate manner possible because I find it hilarious how Nintendo decided to just lean into it.

The memes aren't lying, this really is a DLC about a lesbian couple in an elevator hanging out with their mute possibly-enby friend who had a tussle with Agent 3 once upon a time and an enby DJ who chills in the elevator because they had an injury in the matrix.

The stakes aren't quite as high as, say, the annhilation of all inkfish kind like Octo Expansion and Rise of the Mammalians, the stakes here are that Order wants to grayscale everything and force everyone to live in a world where nothing changes because they feel like that's what everyone wants. At least, that's what Marina initially wanted until pesky Eight and Pearl came along and RUINED IT.

On the surface, the gameplay seems cool too. You pick out a color chip per floor that augments your weapon and you really can make the most batshit insane builds you can think of. Want a splattershot that pours out ink at insane speeds like an aerospray with none of the downsides? With the right chips, you can! Want to make a Grizzco Blaster but better in every single way? There's chips for that too. Want to pretend to be a TF2 bot and snipe everything out of existence? There's chips for your Charger that will absolutely let you do that.

The music is, as it should be, pretty great, even if the DLC as a whole is half-baked and flat in some places (we'll get to that in a bit, I'm not done praising the DLC yet), ranging from the music that plays on each floor to the boss themes to the final boss itself, it's so good!

So why do I feel empty inside? Is it because of the roguelite gameplay? No, I've had plenty of fun with roguelites and roguelikes, I literally have fun playing Gunfire Reborn and hell, I even give Baldi's Basics Plus a fair shake and that game's not even done yet! Go Mecha Ball is fun, Whisker Squadron Survivor is also fun (although right now it feels awful with the elite bosses...), RoboQuest, Barony, hell if you want to stretch, there's Lethal Company. Sure, I don't have as much patience for the genre as I used to these days but that doesn't mean they don't bring me joy. So what is it?

Well... for starters, while the story mode is great, clearing it fairly quickly made it all feel jarring. Again, I wasn't expecting it to be as grand as Octo Expansion but it definitely felt way less impactful. You get to the top and face off against Order who tries everything to resist your attempts to stop it only to then pull out a trap card and start pulling everyone into the Memverse, then your vibe wakes you, Pearl, Marina, and Acht back up and you collect the saturated color chips that it was holding captive and blast it with, you guessed it, a Killer Wail but with COLORS. And then it turns into a small widdle octopus thing and it starts having a widdle tantwum and you go to the real world and that's it.

All the build-up for the climax of the story happens in that one floor and is immediately let go. Okay, fine, I'll take dealing with Smollusk for the next dozen attempts up the tower, especially since it seems like it's developing a personality everytime you go up there going from a stuck-up order fanatic to someone who just wants to have fun... but nothing ever changes.

For every unique palette up to and including Eight's, which has the gimmick of restricting chip slots based on how many hacks you have active, you only get some new dialogue after floor 29 and a new cutscene before the exact same boss, no new patterns and only one new song. Nothing changes about Overlorder besides the subtitle and it dies the exact same way, breaking the portals to break its barrier to then break it down, do this two more times and you win. There's no variance to this.

Speaking of variety, it starts to set in VERY quickly that there isn't as much variety as you'd actually think. Okay, well, it's fine having a roguelite with setpiece levels, Go Mecha Ball, for instance, tends to have the samey feel to the levels but it felt fun to woosh through. But here? You go in, do the objective, get out. The length of time you spend in there is heavily dependent on your weapon, chip loadout, and enemy spawns. Level layouts are varied for the first few runs, everything is new and fresh but quickly wear out after a while, having only two or three variants for each (and there's some that I'm sure only have the one!).

And the objectives are straightforward but it feels like they don't do too much to spice it up. There's a few levels where they actually try to do it such as the one portal level where you can stand back, splat the top spinners that come your way, and then yeeting it at the portals to break them, or the infinity-ball level where you yeet it into a ramp and hope you get a hole in one or another infinity-ball level where you literally are Sisyphus! Or a Splat Zones one where you have a Sisyphusean task of painting the other zone because the sprinkling enemies made it over and just took over said zone and now you splatted them and now there's more back on the other side and ARGH.

However, it does make the more generic levels feel more... well... generic. The only saving grace is that they usually are built around not being around for too long but it does make a run blur together after a while.

And on top of variety, wanna talk about how there's only three unique bosses? Outside of Marina Agitando, who only appears in the ten floor tutorial, and Overlorder? Sure, they're all unique in their own ways and certainly something I haven't exactly seen in either S1/S2/S3 campaigns and OE, Parallel Canon is the most interesting one since they draw from your pallette and can screw you over with your own build if you let them.

But there's only three bosses and you only fight two plus Overlorder per run. I would've liked to see at least a few more, hell, get Octostomp in here, everybody loves Octostomp, right?

Okay, finally, how about the rewards? Well, you get gear to wear, that's great, you get weapon replicas (Order Brella makes me upset because Side Order Brella has Sprinkler/Ink Storm and the replica carries Sprinkler/Triple Inkstrike), you get locker decorations, you get stickers and banners and badges, oh my. Very good! I like this, I like having more options to express myself and I like more weapons because that's one more weapon I can use to farm for silver Sheldon Tickets (I know they're Weapon Licenses but whatever...).

So, surely there's something really cool for the completionists out there? Surely there's something on the same level as Inner Agent 3, perhaps the most hype (and only) superboss in the Splatoon serie? Surely there's something cool for clearing all the palettes, including Eight's? Is there anything for doing that?

You get... one more piece of altered dialogue with Smollusk and an Octoshot.

That's it. That's all you get.

For suffering through nine weapons worth of palettes and then agonizing over one more that boasts a tougher restriction of chip slots being restricted based on your number of active hacks, that is what you get? No superboss, no change in the final boss, nothing, just the same routine like you've been doing the past eight palettes...

I'm sorry but am I wrong for expecting something more? Am I wrong for expecting something really cool? Am I wrong for expecting Side Order to deliver a satisfying finale after having effectively hamstringing the quality of the seasonal updates for a good portion of Splatoon 3's active service life?

Okay... maybe something will unlock after I buy everything from Cypher right? Right?

Nope.

Sheldrone 2.0.

Literally fucking Sheldrone but you use 100 Prlz instead of 999 Power Eggs. And it pulls from a prize pool made up of, I'd wager, tickets, coins, and items from the shop since you could only buy one of each from it.

And the Chip Collection grants you more badges, cool. But there's nothing for reaching 100%, there's no grand fight with another Agent 3, there's no alterations, no extra modes, no dialogue acknowledging your feat, nothing.

It's depressing. It's upsetting spending a year and some change waiting for a DLC and being wowed by it within the first few hours only to peel it back and find that the shiny silver that adorns it is more or less tin foil with a few traces of actual silver here and there.

I want to like this DLC, I really do. But I can't bring myself to fully commit to liking it...

The whole DLC feels half-baked and it's depressing to see it like this. Once the hype simmers down, all that you're left with is an empty room with a bunch of confetti that you now have to clean up.

However, there are silver linings to this DLC, the characters, as I've said, were great and while they have less proper interactions that I would've liked, it's nice to catch up with Off the Hook again, it's nice learning a tiny bit about Acht's past life and it's nice to see Marina's efforts to fixing the sanitized Octolings left in the Deep Sea Metro.

The music, as it does, is full of bangers from start to finish. The Acid Hues and Ebb and Flow mixes were, of course, amazing and the finale to the story felt great.

The setting was also pretty interesting, albeit underutilized. And the reward of being able to go to Inkopolis Square, thereby finishing the trifecta of hub worlds, and seeing how it changed from Splatoon 2 was a sight to behold!

Again, Side Order is not a perfect DLC, it's just an okay DLC that has a lot to be desired. People can have fun with it but I'm not going to ignore the glaring flaws because I felt like it could do SO MUCH better.