After months of radio silence, Nintendo announced that Splatoon 3 finally has a release date of September 9, and a new trailer.
The trailer, which can be viewed below, showed off the new Turf War gameplay along with new specials and archery for all your paint shooting needs. There was also some minor stuff too, with what looks like a crab that players can ride in and a paintbrush, to you, guessed it, paint the floor.
The game was initially revealed at the end of a February Nintendo Direct last year, but news has been slow up until this point. Fans had become concerned as Nintendo didn’t seem to be showing much of Splatoon 3, and they were worried that it was just another Splatoon 2 again. While Splatoon 3’s new trailer didn’t show a lot of new content, specifically what the single-player is like, it’s still a good sign that Nintendo hasn’t forgotten about the series’ longtime fans.
There is another layer to this story, though. Previously, Nintendo had moved up the release day for their JRPG, Xenoblade 3 to July 29, 2022. So this made fans speculate that maybe Splatoon 3 would be pushed back from a summer release to a fall release. These guesses were in fact correct, and fans will only have to wait about five months to get their squid hands on their shiny new game.
The history of the Splatoon franchise starts with the Wii U, which was a brand-new IP for Nintendo. It then received a sequel in 2017, cleverly titled, Splatoon 2. As of September 2021, the franchise had sold 17.63 million copies. The second entry has sold 12.68 million copies as of February 3, 2022. This puts it at 12th as the highest selling Nintendo Switch games, and over 2 million ahead of Super Mario 3D All Stars, but still far behind Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, which is at 43.35 million copies sold.
There is still the possibility of getting more Splatoon 3 news this summer, either in a game-focused Nintendo Direct or a more general Direct. Whatever the case, it seems like fans have a lot to look forward to in the future.
