February 25th, 2024

Splatoon 3: Side Order finally came out last week, a full year after the Splatoon 3 Expansion Pass initally came out. The DLC also coincides with the release of Ver. 7.0.0, which I'll touch upon when the next season starts next month.

Like last time, I will be putting my thoughts into spoilers for those who haven't played the expansion yet. If you already have or just don't care, click on the headers below to see more.

Side Order - Introduction & 10F Run

After installing Side Order, you get a news bulletin that people seem to be migrating the Inkopolis Square. After the broadcast, the train station contains a new option to start the Side Order campaign. Your character will be shown riding the train, until you doze off and are then transported to a monochromatic Inkopolis Square.

In the elevator, you meet dedf1sh also known as Acht. They were the artist credited for the music in Octo Expansion, but kept as a character only in lore. This is their first in-game apperance. Before you start your first floor, they introduce you to the palette.

The palette stores up to 36 chips. Every floor you start gives you a chip that boosts an specific ability. This can be things like higher damage, faster swimming speed, anything that can be modified about a weapon can be changed with chips. If you want to make a broken weapon, it can be done with chips.

In Side Order, you go up the floors of the Tower of Order. You choose the mission you want to complete. You might have to take control of a zone for one mission, or you might need to guide a turbine tower. Depending on the map and your build, it might be easy or it might be difficult.

Along with the chips, Pearl is also your sidekick. Her Drone form allows you to glide across the map. If you get certain upgrades and chips, you can make her a soldier. She can drop ink tank refills, special refills, stun enemies, and also spawn Inkstrikes and Killer Wails.

The first time you play, you fight Marina on floor 10. She's seemingly been brainwashed.

This boss is a little funny due to the belief that Marina was thought to be the main antagonist of the DLC by the community, due to how Splatoon 1's final Splatfest affected 2's story. I'm glad that it wasn't that predictable.

After you beat Marina, you save her from Order, but the tower soon starts to shake. The three get thrown out of the building before Pearl transforms into her Drone form and drags you to safety. This is where Side Order fully begins.

Now that Marina is by your side, she can change aspects of your run using hacks. This can be things like more lives, enemy damage reduction, make it easier to get certain chips, armor, and other things. It'll make runs much more easier. She also allows you to enable Risky Rewards, which depending on the amount of hacks you have enabled, you can get more money at the end of runs. The drawback is if you lose a run, you get nothing.

There's also Cipher, who gives you cosmetics and locker items for your Prlz. The more runs you clear, the more items avaliable at the shop.

Finally, there's the lockers. You unlock each locker by using keys you get after defeating bosses with different palettes. These reveal other palettes, badges, banners, and the diaries.

The diaries are how this expansion drops lore. You'll find out about the development of Memverse leading up leading up to the start of Side Order.

At this point, you're done with the introductions and can now start doing actual full runs.

Side Order - Runs

Every run lasts for 30 floors with 2 bosses not including the final boss. There's also a chance of having a vending machine floor, where you can buy chips, weapons, and Prlz from. Since the selection and preference of everyone is different, every run will be different. For this section, I will not be focusing on my first full run, but rather aspects that I like. This will touch upon the different bosses, but not include the 30F boss.

I think the floors with portal goals are easy. There's little to no interaction with the enemies if you can manage to hit the portal. Every one you take out explodes and kills all surrounding enemies, so it's easy to protect yourself with them.

In the video I linked, it looks very dark. This is because you also have the possibility of having modifiers to the floors. It might be that the entire floor is painted in enemy ink, or the lights are out, or the Pearl Drone is locked out. If you avoid these floors, the game will make them much more common later in the run until you do one.

Guiding goals are a little fun but a tad slow. You aren't pushing it, but just refilling its tank like a car. No amount of damage you do to it will speed it up. I like using these goals mostly because I like barely strafing past hordes of enemies.

My second to least favorite goal is the 8-balls. There's little to no action and most of the fun comes from just seeing how quickly you can finish it. I liked the 8-ball stages in Octo Expansion, but here, there's little to no risk. The worst thing that can happen is maybe the enemies will hit the ball away from the goal, but that's about it.

My least favorite goals is zones, and that's because of the Drizzling Capriccioso enemies. They're flying enemies that act as a sprinkler. They're common on Zones floors. They're really annoying, especially if the stage has 2 zones. One will spawn and I'll go over and defeat it, and I have to swim back cause there might be another one that spawned.

The floor I hate the most is the Divided floor. The middle of the floor is uninkable, so you have to walk. If there's a lot of enemies spawning, it gets extremely annoying. My first exposure to this stage was Zones with Roller. I turned back immediately because my kit was awful.

One of the new Splashtag badges in version 7.0.0 are chip badges. These badges are unlocked by completing the info entries for the chips, which is done by maxxing out the power of the chip in a single run. This can be sped up by using palettes that have a bias towards certain colored chips and hacks that boost chip bias.

While not necessary, I've been doing perfect/near-perfect runs to get those chips. It's really fun!

Spamming specials is so much fun!

My favorite are the Pearl Drone chips. If you enable all the abilities and get their respective chips at high levels, Pearl will raise hell whenever there's the slightest bit of danger. If you pair it with a good special like Booyah Bomb or Triple Splashdown, it's very fun.

My least favorite perfect run so far is with the Range chips. It's pretty obvious since the range stat doesn't affect your damage or speed. I had to keep a large distance to make it seem like range was worth it. It's very lame... I still haven't gotten any range badges, so I'll try again with Power chips.

For bosses, not including Marina or the 30F one, there's only three. My favorite is tied between Asynchronous Rondo and Pinging Marciale.

Asynchronous Rondo is a layered pyramid boss that constantly spins. You have to take down every highlighted layer to defeat it. I like it especially because of how you can abuse range to make it end fast.

Pinging Marciale plays like an offensive 8-ball. I like it because it has little to fight with. It's very fast if you constantly push it to the bumpers. The bumpers deal an easy 1,000 damage. The boss has 50,000 health, so it's pretty easy to win.

My least favorite is probably the Parallel Canon. Splatoon doesn't have that good AI to play against, so it's just a pushover. It's so easy that simply painting their feet is enough to make them forfeit and take them down.

Side Order - 30F Boss + Final Thoughts

As stated previously, the final floor is always the 30th floor.

Once you reach the 30th floor, you face against the Overlorder, the person "in charge" of the Memverse. It establishes Order in the Memverse and hates the idea of change. According to Marina, it's not supposed to be here.

This is the worst video to use because I destroy this phase in 20 seconds... but I don't have anything else to use!

This fight plays similar to the Marina fight at the start of the game. The Overlorder spawns a bunch of tentacle portals that you shoot until they explode. After all the ones active explode, you'll attack the Overlorder himself before you go onto the next phase.

The first time you defeat the Overlorder, you get to be overpowered! The Overlorder takes every chip and stuffs it into his portals, and you'll have to bust each portal to get the chips inside. This isn't limited to the chips you had during the run, this is every chip in the game. After knocking out one or two portals, this phase is low-effort from there.

This phase only happens the first time you reach the Overlorder, but it's replayable from the ground floor.

This part was really fun, of course. You can finally know how it feels to have a good weapon.

After you defeat the Overlorder, you find out they're just a small crybaby. They don't do any harm and Pearl comforts them to let them finish their palette, ending the run and technically also Side Order. Every subsequent clear afterwards, Pearl & Marina boost their relationship with the small octopus.

Once the credits roll, you unlock Inkopolis Square as a main hub. It felt a little offputting being in Inkopolis Square on Splatoon 3. It feels like Splatoon 2 but weird.

Being a roguelike, you're supposed to play the game over and over. If finishing the first run felt unsatisfying, that's because it's only a part of the game. There's more to unlock after. I mentioned the chip badges in the previous section, but you can also unlock new weapon skins that mimic the look of the palette weapons. Of course, there's nothing to lose to do a bunch of experimentation in this mode, which I also covered in the previous section.

One major thing is that I wish Nintendo can build off of this in the future, in either updates to Side Order (yeah right) or Splatoon 4. A Splatoon roguelike is very fun and I feel like this can be expanded on with more goals and abilities. The most I want is an endless mode.

There's also the fact that there's a lack of Agent 4 in this game. A lot of people were expecting Agent 4 to appear here and mentioned, but there's nothing except the possibility that she might be held captive for the Inkling boss. This part is why I feel like they might expand on this storyline a bit longer, even if it isn't a roguelike.

Overall, I found this DLC very fun and something I've needed for a while. I've honestly been getting a tad bored of Splatoon. The new season seems pretty bad and I'm at the point right now where I'm not anticipating new Splatoon Twitter updates. I might be burnt out, but playing this expansion was more fun than playing the actual game.

Side Order - Final Palette

Overall, I think the DLC is pretty fun. I like how it's not a mission-based story mode like Octo Expansion and you have more control on what you want to do.

If you want me to pitch Octo Expansion and Side Order against each other, it's a close match. Each expansion had it's own great aspects. I like Octo Expansion's story but the Side Order gameplay is really fun!

Anyways, new stuff from Japan, as usual.

This is DS Rakubiki Jiten. It's a Japanese & English dictionary, which digitizes some commercially-avaliable dictionaries to a DS card.

Of course, as a dictionary, it serves its purpose. One thing to note is the additional tools and games it has.

One game is the Game & Watch Ball minigame. By typing in GAME & WATCH or ボール, you can bring up a playable Game & Watch ball minigame.

You might've caught on that this UI looks strangely like PictoChat. Well, it also has a PictoChat client. You can copy definitions, high scores, or tool output and paste it to a chat room. Since this client seperate from the BIOS, this software is the only official way to use PictoChat on 3DS systems.

Another tool is the Parapara Manga. It allows you to create a 50-frame flipbook animation. There didn't seem to be any saved animation when I got the card.

A year later, DS Rakubiki Jiten was re-released soon after as Kanji Sonomama DS Rakubiki Jiten. The new re-release includes Kanji input as well as voice over. It does get rid of some tools, like the flipbook or the 1101 tab. PictoChat still remains and more Game & Watch games were added.

After the DS releases, the Rakubiki Jiten games were re-released as 3 seperate DSiWare apps. One was preinstalled in all DSi LL systems. The apps only covered a part of the dictionary and lacked the tools.

I also bought Made in Wario. It's the first one for GBA. No box or manual, I didn't really care.

Previous owner played a good bit of it, but didn't complete the final Wario stage. The guide is almost completed, with some of the final Wario games done, but I guess they just lost interest since they technically already played the whoel game.

Danganronpa was also a buy. I played this game when I was like... 8, I think. I bought it cause it's funny to make fun of it.

It's strange to buy PSP games when my PSP doesn't have a functioning UMD drive. I grew up with the console though, played a lot of imports on it. That's not to mention how many PSX games I played on it. I want a new PSP since mine is in horrible condition.

I also got this copy of Donkey Konga. I used to own the Konga controller, but it broke a while ago. I remember it was pretty awful to use.

It's an alright game. The GameCube barely had any rhythm games, so I guess this is as good as it gets. I won't buy the controller again, it was probably the worst rhythm game controller I played with. I had to push on the top of the bongos so the mic wouldn't pick up the sound and do the wrong input.

Please do not talk to me about anything recently about this coyote. I will kill myself.

I also have this LD. I got it for only $4. I don't think it has disc rot.

I'm still out for a player though. If you read the December 2022 post, you would remember that I did try to buy one, but it got smashed in transit. It sits in my basement. It's sad to see.

Here's a PS2 memory card. It's a white one that I believe was only sold for 100 yen. It's really clean!

I put it into my PS2 and there's not a lot of save data, only having Ape Escape 2 and Disney Golf. There doesn't seem to be any deleted saves at all. The history doesn't seem to be any different either. I guess that explains the cleanliness.

Another DS game I got is Love Plus+. This is the sequel to Love Plus that contains much more content, the back stating it has 4 gigabits (512MB) of ROM space!

I actually tried getting this game earlier from the same seller, but they shipped my proxy the wrong game.

I played the original Love Plus with a translation a couple of times. I can describe it as Tokimeki Memorial but simplified. Unlike Tokimemo, majority of the game's content comes after a confession.

The Tokyo Tower costume, unlockable by playing the Local Gacha.

One feature this game adds is the Local Gacha. You were supposed to go to different prefectures and connect to a DS Station kiosk to play the gacha. You would then be able to transmit the animation to other people over local wireless.

For the uninitiated, DS Stations are kiosks which transmit DS demos and other services in stores. It's similar to Nintendo Zone or DS Download Stations in America. In 2012, they were replaced with 3DS Stations. According to this wiki page talk section, the 3DS Stations still work with the gacha as late as 2015. It doesn't matter anyways, as 3DS Stations were removed in 2020. It's not like these animations were DLC or anything, there exists codes to unlock all of them.

You might be thinking what was the point of buying a dating sim if I can't read? If you manage to get a confession, you can play Puzzle Dama!

I lose on the second stage. Boo.

As I said previously, this is playable after you get a confession out of someone. You can play as Mimi & Nyami from pop'n music, Sharon and Media from Quiz Magic Academy, Dixie from Rumble Roses, or your girlfriend. If you manage to play well, you get to face Shiori from Tokimeki Memorial.

One of the dreams you can have during the game makes it look like Tokimeki!

This game has a lot of callbacks to Tokimeki Memorial. It's funny since the last Tokimeki Memorial game that isn't the Girl's Side games was released in 2009, a year before Love Plus+. There hasn't been a Love Plus game since 2014 too. I wonder if Girl's Side is better than the standard games because people fight for those games on Yahoo Auctions.

Some Famitsu magazines arrived. They're in great condition!

This old one is from October 6th, 1995. The binding is a little screwy. This is my first magazine that was published when Famitsu was still known as Famicom Tsushin.

Look at this double-page spread for Puyo Puyo Tsu on Sega Saturn!

At this point of time, the PS1 and Saturn were already out, while Super Famicom was still Nintendo's latest console.

There's some coverage for 3DO software. The 3DO was rather popular in Japan, with the console getting its own category on the site. I probably won't buy one from there though, if ever.

This is a management game for 3DO.

I heard the 3DO was rather popular over here in America for a bit before the PS1 and Saturn actually came out. It sounds believable.

There's a small catalog at the end of the magazines. It shows this one VHS tape. I'm not entire sure what it is, but it seems to be some DJ celebrity doing talking with some big names while also doing a gig. I was interested in Namie Amuro being apart of the program, as she recently debuted at the time and was a massive hit.

This is an advert for Hamelin no Violin Hiki. Looking at the advert makes the game look fun. I might play it.

This one is from October 27th, 2000. The PS2 was already out for half a year.

One of the opening adverts is for Rhyme Rider Kerorikan, a rhythm game for the WonderSwan Color by NanaOn-Sha. I want it.

I want a Wonderswan Color. I know there's a beatmania game on there too. Maybe one of these days.

There's a bit of coverage of the Amusement Machine Show of that year. They played a bit of Shakatto Tambourine, which ended up the magazine's most favorite from the show.

I was looking at the upcoming releases section of the magazine when I came across this part. This section is the upcoming software for the Sega Dreamcast. While I haven't gone through each of these games, there are some here that went unreleased. AQUA PANIC, Type X: Spiral Nightmare, Baldur's Gate, and Dee Dee Planet were all cancelled.

This recent one is from January 6th, 2022. The main topic of the magazine is asking game producers what their favorite games of 2021 were.

Compared to the older issues, this magazine didn't really capture my attention that much.

I got a Canopus ADVC-110. I wanted a slim DV capture device for my room. This was listed on Yahoo Auctions. It was listed as untested junk, so it was a pretty easy win. The original price sticker was left intact, with an MSRP of 34,800 yen. That's alot!

If you remember the post when I got the Sony DVMC-DA2, you would remember that device would notify you if the signal being captured had Macrovision. You also probably remember that the box did nothing to protect the image. The only issue was that the box was awful.

The Canopus is similar in protection. Normally, the box will have the brightness and contrast lowered when it detects Macrovision, resulting in an ugly picture. Despite the implementation, you can disable this protection. By holding the mode change button, the device will show the color bars test screen, but holding it for longer will completely disable the protection for as long as the box is powered on. It seems like it was intentional.

Despite this, the video captured from a VHS signal is a little wobbly, most likely due to the lack of a good TBC. TBC units go for a bajillion dollars, so I'm probably good with using my trusty Sony VCR to do the transferring.

It's weird how all 4 of my DV boxes either ignore Macrovision or have an internal workaround.

In the package with the ADVC-110, I also got other games.

Vib-ribbon on the PS1 was a rather hard find for under $10. I found an untested copy for $5, but it works just fine.

Recorded using the ADVC-110! I think I scaled it up wrong, it's not supposed to be 4K.

It's been more than a decade since I last played vib-ribbon. I'm pretty bad at it, mostly cause the generated charts are all over the place. It's a little easy to get used to.

Next is the hit Britney's Dance Beat. I saw this on Mercari, thought it was funny and bought it. It's in amazing condition!

I played a bit of it and frankly, it's pretty good. Timing is a bit specific but it's fun to play. The graphics reek of early-PS2 which I like a lot. It only has 5 songs, both full and short versions, but they're all pretty good music.

Next is Sonic Heroes. This is honestly the only Sonic game I really like and saw my favorite seller was selling it. The disc is very scratched, but a hard drive copy would do it some good. Like Puyo Puyo Fever, this game has multiple languages and loaded up in English.

I grew up playing the Xbox version, which runs at 60fps. It's jarring seeing this run at 30fps, but it's the PS2. Since I don't have my Xbox anymore (gave it to my brother), I'll play this version soon. I already copied it to my hard drive.

Finally, there is Crash Bandicoot 5, also known as Crash Twinsanity. Same seller was selling it and I wanted it cause Crash Bandicooot.

Disc seems to be in poor condition and has a ring scratch around the edge. The previous owner must've played it on a PS2 slim. A little disapointing...

I got one new CD this month. It's the Shaman King Image Album. Unfortunately, I know very little about Shaman King. I bought this CD because ABYSS sang a song for this album! It's SECRET WEAPON. It's alright.

As the song was made for a pretty popular series, it's available on YouTube.

Alan comes back with digging too deep into some more useless trash from Japan.

I finally got a nasne. I won a 1TB nasne for around $25. It was tested for power but not tested past that. I wanted to try to see if I could use the nasne as a file server. As you can see, the style of the nasne is similar to the PS3 slim.

The back of the unit holds the B-CAS card, antenna I/O, external HDD USB port, and the ethernet and power plugs.

While the unit was bare, it came with the B-CAS card, which is required to decrypt digital TV. The power adapter is a 12-volt one, which is used in many Sony products.

I connected the unit and waited for a bit to see if an error popped up. If there was an error, the LEDs would flash together. After a minute, the disk access light flickers like normal and the power light is steady. Next thing I know, my absolutely essential Xfinity app, not at all worthless, tells me a Sumitomo device was added to the network.

After finding the IP address, I visit the nasne's homepage. It seems to be working just fine. I scrolled to the bottom of the page which lists the storage status. It stated that over 700GB of storage space was already used. That's a lot! Now I just need to access it.

I tried accessing it over the general Windows file explorer, which brought me to Windows Media Player. There's loads of recordings from the previous owner, all of it being anime. The recordings are of a handful of series around late-2015 to late-2018. I later realized it's probably expecting a proper client, so I got on my PS3.

The PS3 detects the nasne's media server just fine, but playing anything would give me an error asking for DTCP-IP to be enabled. It appears that VLC and Windows Media Player wouldn't work because all the contents are encrypted. After a quick verification, I was able to play stuff without needing to get on torne.

I'm surprised that this only has a single content ID for the LoveLive ad.

After that, I used the torne application, which is one of the frontends to use the device. I had it installed out of curiosity, but I couldn't use it unless I had a USB digital tuner or a nasne. I recorded the menus and interface from the latest version. I hate using my Elgato.

The torne app contains a lot of features. You can watch programs over nasne and schedule recordings from the PS3, while also being able to tweet or comment about the program live.

The store page on the menu, which I didn't show, has additional themes, avatars, and functionality that you can pay for.

Pleasure by Makoto. This theme is included with the Torne Black theme.

One of the cheaper options are the app themes. These usually cost 500 yen and include new BGM. You're able to preview these themes for a while before purchasing. Since I can't use the nasne, I don't really care for the themes. The DLC is only just an unlock key, so the application itself already has the BGM, which sounds pretty good.

One function that you need to buy is the ability to export videos to a nav-u (car GPS) or a Walkman. This has the restrictions of exporting videos with Copy Once (more on that in a bit) but the option seems nice. It's weird having the option to export videos to a GPS though.

There is also the Reco x Torne option. This feature allows you to use Sony BD recorders from the torne app. This includes being able to view recordings and schedule future recordings on the recorder. One drawback seems to be that you aren't able to transfer recordings from nasne to those recorders, which means it's impossible to dub BD discs using torne programs with those recorders.

On the topic of payment, torne on PS3, PS4, and Vita are all free. The software is not free on some other platforms. The PC app requires a $20 payment after a 14-day free trial, while the mobile and PS5 app don't let you use the device at all unless you pay a fee.

The issue now is how to get these recordings out of the nasne. The DLNA server is protected with DTCP-IP, which is a form of DRM, and there's no way to crack it as far as I know. The only way to access these recordings is with the PC application, PC TV Plus. That name sounds like bloatware.

PC TV Plus is the PC interface for the nasne. It looks like something Microsoft could've passed out a decade ago. This software comes with a 14-day free trial, and requires a $20 purchase to access it on 1 computer. It seems odd, but the price is probably attributed to licensing.

PC TV Plus lets you burn all the recordings to a BD-R disc. This might be the only way, but it presents another issue: the Copy Once and Copy 10 feature.

Copy Once and Copy 10 are security bits that tell the recorder the avaliability of the program. If it's set to Copy Once, only one copy of the recording can exist at one time. If you want to copy the recording to a disc, you must delete it off the recorder. Copy 10 is similar, in which you can only copy it 9 times before it's locked for good.

PC TV Plus makes a database file containing every single program and it's information. I made a Python script that makes it easier to read. If you're interested in seeing what programs I have on my nasne, check this file. Please note that none of the names or descriptions are translated.

Now, I think I'm done with DVRs and whatever. I got a PSX and a nasne, it's so cool! I would be stupid to buy an actual BD recorder.

...I swear that is not foreshadowing of any kind.

Before I end this post, look at this toy I bought from Yahoo Auctions. I don't know who the hell this is. I bought it cause it looked funny. The tag says "Winter Afternoon" and is licensed by Sanrio. I checked so many Sanrio wikis and guides for who the hell this is and I can't find anything. It's a badger, but who? Is this a background character for a Hello Kitty cartoon? I don't know who the hell this is and looking up Windy Afternoon on Google only redirects me to the listing I got him from. I'm starting to think it's a bootleg.