Splatoon

Splatoon is a 2014 far-future squid-based shooter video game series published and developed by Nintendo. In it, humanoid squids called Inklings, having evolved long after humanity has gone extinct due to climate change, roam the Earth, mostly in a metro area called Inkopolis. The heart of Inkopolis is fittingly named Inkopolis Square, the hub of both Splatoon 1 and 2. Teenage Inklings compete against each other in battles in multiple gamemodes such as Turf War and Squad Battle where they can use a myriad of ink-firing, -flinging, or -sloshing weapons to either cover more turf (any horizontal surface on the map that the player can splat with their ink) than the opposing team or complete a certain goal (in the case of Ranked and Squad Battle).

Characters
The player's character is what's called an Inkling, a humanoid creature that has a few squid-like features resembling like tentacles, but overall looks more related to a human. An Inkling has an ability that allows it to freely shift between its upright bipedal form and its squid form, a flat, nearly triangular, four-limbed cephalopod that can completely submerge in any ink that is of its color and swim much faster than the Inkling can run. This squid can climb up a wall so as long as that wall has been splatted in its ink, granting the Inkling more mobility. The squid can also go through fences, a trick that lets the Inkling go into places it otherwise would be locked out of. Another ability the squid has is a massive jump called the Super Jump, a power that launches the squid in a jet of its ink to a place it desires. In online battles, the squid can only Super Jump to its teammates, Squid Beakons, or its spawn point. Neither the human nor squid form of Inklings can survive in water as making contact with it will cause it to burst in a gaseous form of its ink and return to its last used spawn point.

The world of Splatoon isn't only populated by Inklings, however. There are also many other advanced former aquatic life forms such as jellyfish and shrimp that coexist with the Inklings. In Inkopolis Square, they take up jobs at shops where the player can buy new weapons or gear they can bring with them into battle. Jellyfish, referred to as jellies by the game, can be seen casually enjoying local shops or Just Hangin' Out doing nothing in particular.

In a certain part of this futuristic world, there lives another cephalopod species called the Octoling, the close relative and long-time enemy of the Inkling. Octolings possess weapons and abilities like those that Inklings have and use them to fight off any Inklings who dare enter their territory. In both Splatoon 1 and 2 's story mode, the Octolings "squidnapped" the zapfish along with the largest and most powerful of them all, the Great Zapfish, to power their own underground cities. The player must complete the levels of the story mode to rescue the zapfish at the end of each level who, when rescued once, will be replaced by an obvious dummy zapfish that has the same electrical output as a real zapfish.

Gameplay
From the very beginning of Splatoon 1 and 2, the player is given a brief introduction to the controls and many mechanisms of the game they're about to start. After the tutorial has been completed, the player will Super Jump to Inkopolis Square and be let loose to do what they want. So early in the game, any shops except for Sheldon the horseshoe crab's shop, Ammo Knights, will reject the player due to their low level. Until they reach level 4, the shopkeepers deem the player not "fresh" enough to access their wares, so in the meantime, they must go into the only gamemode of online battle that is available to them, Turf War, Splatoon's most showcased gamemode. Alternatively, if the player either doesn't want to play online at the moment or they don't have a wifi connection, they can play the story mode of the game. In Splatoon 1, the hub of story mode is called Octo Valley, while Splatoon 2's version of the hub is Octo Canyon. Here, the player must initially look around the map for kettles that will let them travel to different lairs, the levels in story mode where Octarians live. At the end of each lair, a zapfish waits for the player, as Agent 3 in Splatoon 1 or 4 in 2, to rescue it.