Picture this: back in 2014, someone pitches Nintendo making a competitive shooter. You laugh. Then they tell you the hook involves turning into a squid and swimming through your own paint. You laugh harder. And yet Splatoon became one of the most original franchises in gaming, now over 30 million units sold across the series.
Now Splatoon Raiders has dropped on Switch 2 (July 23), and it's doing something Nintendo almost never does: taking a genre the company has zero history with and making it feel completely its own.
What Splatoon Raiders actually is
Raiders is a player-versus-environment looter-shooter built on Splatoon's core paint mechanics. Think Borderlands meets Diablo, filtered through Nintendo's pop aesthetic and Splatoon's signature chaos. The Salmonids are back as the enemy faction, and the loop is exactly what you'd expect from the genre: run missions, collect loot, build your loadout, repeat.
Here's the thing, though. This genre is absolutely packed. Destiny, Borderlands, Path of Exile, Diablo 4 , these franchises have been fighting for the same players for years. Nintendo walking into that space with Inklings and paint-based territory mechanics is either bold or reckless, and early reactions suggest it's landing closer to the former.
Reviewers have called it a kind of Destiny lite, and that framing actually works in its favor. It's lighter, more accessible, and distinctly Nintendo in a way that gives it a lane of its own inside an otherwise crowded genre.
The bigger argument Raiders is making
Splatoon has always been Nintendo's most culturally aware franchise. The original 2015 Wii U game didn't just borrow from competitive shooters , it observed what made them work, then rebuilt the concept from scratch around movement, territory, and a fashion-forward aesthetic that no other publisher would have greenlit. That instinct to process external gaming culture and reframe it is rare at Nintendo.
What most players miss is just how much Nintendo's identity is built on refinement rather than genre exploration. Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Kirby , these are franchises Nintendo has iterated on for decades. They're exceptional at what they do. But the company's willingness to step into genuinely unfamiliar territory, genres it hasn't touched, mechanics it hasn't mastered, has historically been limited.
Splatoon broke that pattern in 2015. Raiders is doing it again in 2026. The question is why this only happens once a decade.
Nintendo's genre blind spots are still significant
Think about what Nintendo hasn't made. A roguelike in the vein of Hades or Dead Cells. A survival game. A proper action RPG that isn't Xenoblade. A city builder. A horror game. A live-service cooperative experience that isn't Splatoon or Arms (which, respectfully, didn't last).
Some of these would fail. That's fine. The point isn't that Nintendo should make every genre , it's that the company has the design talent to find a Nintendo-shaped angle on almost anything, the same way it found a Nintendo-shaped angle on shooters with Splatoon and now on looter-shooters with Raiders.
Pikmin is another example worth raising. That franchise has been quietly doing its own thing in a genre (real-time strategy with resource management) that Nintendo otherwise ignores entirely. WarioWare is another. These are franchises that feel like Nintendo designers were given permission to just go weird, and the results are consistently some of the most interesting things the company ships.
The key here is that Nintendo's quality bar doesn't drop when it goes outside its comfort zone. If anything, the novelty seems to sharpen the design thinking.
Raiders is the proof of concept, not the destination
Splatoon Raiders working as a looter-shooter isn't just good news for Splatoon fans. It's an argument for Nintendo to keep pushing. What would a Nintendo survival game look like? A Nintendo co-op horror experience? A Nintendo tactics RPG that isn't Fire Emblem?
Those questions sound speculative, but they didn't sound any less speculative than "what would a Nintendo competitive shooter look like?" did in 2013.
If you're jumping into Raiders and want to hit the ground running, the Splatoon Raiders best gadgets guide breaks down every gadget by Tank type and covers the best endgame loadouts for tackling the toughest Salmonid raids. For everything else, the full Splatoon Raiders strategy guides collection has you covered as the game continues to evolve post-launch.
