Splatoon 3’s final Splatfest has come and gone, and with it ended one of the biggest sendoffs for any recent video game. Or has it?
As we reported earlier this month, that Splatfest asked the question Past, Present, and Future, and brought with a megaton of a concert from all of Splatoon’s hosts. The Squid Sisters, Off The Hook, and Deep Cut all appeared to perform their songs in the Grand Festival, an in-game concert that players could attend.
Yes, it was very similar to the various Fortnite concerts that featured real life live acts like Marshmello, Karol, and Metallica. But unlike Fortnite, Splatoon 3 is not a live service game, and it had a definitive end.
That gave Nintendo’s Splatoon team the opportunity to give this game a proper sendoff, as they set to work on the next installment, which will clearly now be made for Nintendo’s next console.
As reported by NintendoLife, this was a very successful event, that gave a lot of fans that feeling of satisfaction that they were hoping for. If it isn’t quite at the same scale as the awesome ending of Tabula Rasa, it certainly feels like a new generation of gamers got that kind of experience nearly a decade later.
But you may now be wondering, what a waste it would be if that was the end of the Grand Festival. Does that mean that any newer incoming Splatoon 3 players won’t get to experience it anymore? Thankfully, that is not the case.
The Splatoon North American Twitter account shared this message earlier today:
“Missing Grand Festival? Tap the Squid Sisters, Off the Hook, or Deep Cut amiibo while connected online to replicate the Grand Festival venue! Stay tuned for offline support in a future update.
When you re-experience the Grand Festival venue using amiibo, you can change the time of the festival at will! Choose from the first phase, second phase, and post-event Grand Festival stages. You can even fast-forward to change which song is being performed.
Head to the Train Station under the main menu to change the time and enjoy Grand Festival all over again!”
As you can see, Nintendo has gone the extra mile, not only to give the squidkids that satisfying resolution, but to make sure that it’s available for posterity. We won’t ignore that accessing the festival requires getting one of those amiibo, essentially making it DLC. We wonder if fans can prod Nintendo to just make it free, if not now, a few years down the line.
But there’s something else interesting about this announcement. Nintendo had this way of time limiting certain events that put them at odds with their fans. It’s true that the Year of Luigi is special because it only happened from February 2013 to March 2014 and only people who were there could understand it. It’s something else to only have Super Mario Bros. 35 playable for half a year.
This sounds like a hint that Nintendo now understands what their fans want. This is not a rumor, but a hope that Nintendo won’t repeat that practice for future games, and maybe, just maybe, they’ll even consider bringing Super Mario Bros. 35, as well as other games and content they have time limited, back, for gamers to discover in their own time.
