My Thoughts on the First Splatoon 2 Splatfest (Congratulations Team Mayo!)

This past weekend, the Squid Research team hit fans with the first official Splatfest of Splatoon 2. For those of you who are unfamiliar, Splatfests are 24 hour events where all players choose to join one team or another, in this case team mayonnaise or team ketchup. Once a team is selected, traditional 4-on-4 turf wars ensue in order to decide which team wins. The winning team receives a larger reward at the end of the Splatfest than the losing team. These events became tradition during the life of the original Splatoon, and are now promised to continue for approximately 2 years on Splatoon 2. The battle of mayonnaise versus ketchup kicked off the festivities in what was an overall incredible Splatfest. The event was just as good, perhaps even better, than the one’s experienced in Splatoon 1. However, despite an unquestionably great time, the Splatfest didn’t go on without any problems.

The first thing that has to be mentioned about this Splatfest is that it was simply a great time. Even though the battles are straight forward turf wars, adding the fact that you are part of a larger team makes each individual battle feel like you are fighting for a greater cause. This seemed especially true for this Splatfest, as even though the decision to pit two condiments against each other seems like a silly one, it actually made for a very personalized battle experience. Personally, I HATE mayonnaise. I cannot even stand the smell of the stuff. On the other hand, I eat Ketchup on nearly half of all the foods I eat. Despite being a very silly premise, this choice of teams made me feel invested to win for both my team and my condiment of choice. I absolutely did not want team mayonnaise to win, all I wanted to do was defend one of the greatest condiments ever created, ketchup.

Even though the battles were a blast and playing for a larger team kept me coming back in order to win as many matches as possible in the 24-hour period, I did notice myself getting burnt out in the late hours of the Splatfest. This brought back memories of why I stopped playing in later Splatfests in the original Splatoon, turf wars just become too repetitive after a while. This is not a problem when playing the game normally, as you have other game modes to choose from. However, during Splatfests, this option is not available as turf war is the only game mode available. Nintendo really needs to add the ranked battle modes to turf war sometime in the near future in order to add variety and keep their 2 years of Splatfests interesting and keep fans engaged.

Now we have to discuss the scoring of this Splatfest. I won’t sit here and say that team mayonnaise didn’t win fair and square, because they absolutely did. Despite being in the vast majority, team ketchup lost more matches in both the solo and team divisions. Unlike a lot of the responses that I have seen online after the Splatfest, I actually like the way that Splatoon 2 is scoring them. Dividing the scoring up into 3 categories, votes, solo, and team, makes the event feel very fair, as there are multiple chances to win for your team. I personally don’t understand the complaints of people saying that the way Splatfests are scored somehow played into the favor of team mayo. The problem I did notice, however, was how hard it was to find a team of mayonnaise players to compete against. More than half of the 50 Splatfest battles I participated in were against my own team, as the servers could not find enough mayonnaise players to pair my team with. While I am not sure how Nintendo handled teams of Ketchup battling one another, I assume they were essentially exhibition matches that didn’t count toward the Splatfest score. This means that half of my time spent playing in the event was essentially a waste, instead of being able to earn much needed victories for team ketchup. This is a serious problem that needs to be fixed, but I am clueless as to what the solution could be. The problem was a result of nearly 75% of people voting team ketchup, thus not leaving enough mayo players to compete against. Regardless of how they fix, Nintendo just needs to find a way to prevent this from happening in the future.

That is pretty much all there is to say about the first official Splatoon 2 Splatfest! It was an undoubtedly fun event that reminded me why I loved them so much in the original Splatoon. Despite the fun though, there were some glaring issues that need to be fixed in the near future. Even though I took a hard loss as a member of team ketchup, there is no doubt that congratulations are in order for all you team mayo players!