I was impressed by this latest series of E3 press conferences and announcements. I saw a ton of cool looking games that make me excited to jump in to the next generation of consoles. I was astounded by technical showpieces like Sunset Overdrive and Destiny, as well as indie triumphs like No Man’s Sky and Cuphead. Going in to the conferences I wasn’t sure which games would grab me, but there was one fact of which I was certain: Nintendo could do nothing to get me to buy a Wii U. I skipped out on the Wii and I rarely played my Gamecube. Honestly, I have never even been that invested in the mainstay Nintendo franchises. I thought there was no game they could announce to get me to want a Wii U, much less a multiplayer third-person shooter. Then Splatoon came along.

Let me preface this by saying I haven’t liked a competitive shooter of any kind since Gears 2 on the Xbox360. After Gears 2, my group of Xbox Live buddies fell apart and my tolerance for the limitless abuse of Xbox Live mainstays waned pretty hard. I just do not find myself longing to invest hundreds of hours into a single game anymore, and running the skill treadmill for a shooter is the last place I want to be in gaming right now. Even with all of these preconceptions I love what Nintendo is doing with Splatoon. By fundamentally changing the goals of a third person shooter, Nintendo has reinvigorated my interest in the genre.

I love the idea of shifting the end-goal of a third person shooter away from kill streaks and body counts, towards movement and territory control. Shooters like Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and Titanfall are putting mobility at the forefront of their military shooter reinvigoration plans; however, the way you actually win at Titanfall or Call of Duty does not actually require you to make use of that mobility. Killing someone with a sniper rifle or a rocket launcher does not need a preceding double-jump and wall run; the game’s developers are treating mobility as an additive, rather than transformative innovation. In Splatoon it looks like you will need to be constantly traversing the map to claim territory. Killing enemies may hinder them from shooting walls, but it won’t actually win you the game. It seems like you could play that game in an entirely passive-aggressive way, avoiding conflict and tagging every wall in sight. It even seems like that may even be a viable and useful strategy. You can even play defense without killing an enemy by breaking their “highways” of continuous paint, thereby slowing enemy advance or preventing escape. The ability to turn into an invulnerable and fast moving squid also allows for rapid movement and it further ties the actual act of shooting with the game’s mobility systems. In Splatoon you shoot to move and you move to shoot. By changing the way you win a game of Splatoon from the standard shooter win conditions, Nintendo has opened up a whole host of new mechanical space and play style variations.

I’m not sure if I am going to buy a Wii U to play Splatoon, but I will say that it is the first multiplayer shooter to get me excited in a good long time. Leave it to Nintendo to invent an entirely new shooter game type and design an entire series of mechanics around that new mode. Every time I count them out they always manage to surprise me.