Splatoon 2s Octo Expansion Is A Major Aesthetic... Considering The Core Story Was A Lil Lackluster, OE

Splatoon 2′s octo expansion is a major aesthetic... considering the core story was a lil lackluster, OE felt like the story the game should’ve had. And I finished it recently so!! art time!!

Based off of @turbobyakuren’s amazing text post on twitter!

“Come along with me, and the butterflies and bees. We can wander through a forest and do so as we please.”

“Come along with me, to a cliff under a tree. Where we can gaze upon the water, as an everlasting dream.”

i bet you thought you’d seen the last of my jeannetta

Jeanne is such a fucking dork lmfao

We're about 3/4th done the game and the reviews were not kidding when they said that the gameplay was perfect while the story is ass. There's so much personality zapped from the cast. Every AU Bayonetta gets unceremoniously killed in the same scene she's introduced sans Cairo Bayo (whose arc with Cairo Jeanne I really liked! Why couldn't the whole game have been like this!?). Luka's character is reinvented from the ground up in order to justify his sudden plot relevance and ends up taking half the established mythos of the game's universe down with it. Bayo takes a bizarre amount of Ls from her enemies and turns into an awkward mess every time Luka comes up (the character assassination comments were not kidding. who is this woman). If this Bayo is the little girl from 1, then the fact that he calls her "Cerezita" while flirting with her is genuinely creepy and weird. Jeanne gets (predictably) sidelined, but I appreciate the Cutie J callbacks. This game is hardly about it's titular character (let alone the rest of the main cast), so it's hard to get invested in any of these huge changes they're making to game's universe. as far as I'm concerned, it feels like they were trying to get away with actually making Scalebound? The random sci-fi elements make the tone feel completely alien at times, and the whole multiverse plot is somehow more convoluted than the Umbra witches and Lumen sages story.

I desperately want to like Viola, but she doesn't have anything going for her beyond "Nero clone". The fact that the game outright tells you whose kid she is in the beginning just makes the fact that she's never upfront about it during pivotal story moments so frustrating. She doesn't get enough meaningful interaction with the cast to make her interesting to me. Her interactions with Bayo in particular directly contradict how the game initially says she should feel about her. They REALLY are trying to DMCV this game with her, but the way that all the story issues are intertwined with her existence put it closer to Parasite Eve Third Birthday.

"who cares about Bayonetta's plot" Me. I do. Because I like it to watch women get a little wacky and campy and these elements were missing terribly.