The toughest boss Nintendo has ever put in a game might not be a towering Mythic Salmonid or a screen-filling final villain. It's a tiny fish with absurd HP, erratic movement, and exactly 50 seconds to kill it.
Splatoon Raiders has quietly become home to one of the most punishing encounters in Nintendo's history, and the culprit is the Smallfry of Pudyin Den.
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What makes Pudyin Den different from every other Salmonid Den
Most Salmonid Dens in Splatoon Raiders follow a familiar loop: drop into an arena packed with one enemy type, collect a target number of Power Eggs within the time limit, and move on. Pudyin Den strips all of that away. There's only one enemy to face, and you only need to collect 10 Power Eggs to clear it. On paper, that sounds manageable.
Here's the thing: that single enemy is a Smallfry, the smallest and most unassuming creature in the entire game. The catch is that this particular Smallfry has ridiculously inflated HP, moves so erratically that landing clean shots is genuinely difficult, and can splat you in nearly one hit if it closes the gap. You have 50 seconds. That's it.
On standard difficulty the fight is hard but winnable with enough grinding. On Ultra Spicy, which sits at Salmonid Level 76, it becomes something else entirely. Players who have pushed deep into the endgame are hitting a wall they didn't see coming.
The fight is designed to punish your instincts
What makes Pudyin Den so specifically maddening is that everything you've learned about Splatoon Raiders' combat actively works against you here. Loading up on gadgets, the natural instinct for any endgame player, makes it harder to track the Smallfry visually. Bringing in a squad to share the workload sounds logical, but multiplayer triggers a significant HP boost on the Smallfry, meaning a full team can walk away with only 2 Power Eggs to show for their effort.
The Smallfry's movement pattern is the real killer. It doesn't behave like a boss. It skitters, darts, and repositions constantly, making it nearly impossible to chain direct hits. Players who've spent dozens of hours in the game grinding to level 50 and beyond are still walking out of Pudyin Den empty-handed.
How the Splatoon community turned one fish into a legend
The Splatoon subreddit has fully embraced the chaos. Players have started calling the Smallfry "John Smallfry," and the fight has become a recurring meme thread topic. One post asking for advice on beating the Ultra Spicy version got a reply that summed up the community mood perfectly: "Super spicy? You're cooked bro."
The frustration hasn't turned toxic though. Players are actually sharing creative solutions, and that's where it gets interesting. One community member cleared the fight by modding a gadget to freeze enemies and then switching to a weapon with bonus damage against frozen targets. That kind of layered build thinking is exactly what the game's action RPG systems are built for.
Splatoon Raiders is a Splatoon 3-universe spin-off that leans hard into looter shooter mechanics, and Pudyin Den might be the clearest example yet of how deep that system runs. The fight doesn't ask you to be faster or have a higher level. It asks you to be smarter about your loadout.
Why this fight matters for the broader game
Pudyin Den sits near the end of the main campaign's unlockable Salmonid Dens, which means most players won't encounter it until they've already put serious time into the game. Hitting that wall after 40-plus hours of progress is a genuinely memorable moment, and the community reaction suggests Nintendo landed exactly the right kind of difficulty spike.
Splatoon has a history of hiding brutal superboss encounters in its single-player content. The secret Agent 3 fight in Splatoon 2 had a similar reputation for punishing overconfident players. Pudyin Den feels like a deliberate continuation of that tradition, just dressed up in looter shooter clothing.
The key here is that beating Pudyin Den on Ultra Spicy isn't about raw stats. Players at level 50+ with maxed weapons are still failing it. The answer is in build creativity, specifically finding gadget and weapon combinations that can reliably freeze, stagger, or burst down a fast-moving target in under a minute.
If you're gearing up to take on John Smallfry, the Splatoon Raiders strategy guides cover loadout optimization and gadget combinations that are worth studying before you step into that arena.
