Seems about what I expected, going from the tests last week. The game seems like a lot of fun, but not necessarily everyone's cup of tea. I'll probably buy it when it goes down in price, and gets some new content added. 

Doesn't seem worth taking much stock in review scores given Splatoon is still sitting at an 81 despite being one of the best games released in the last few years.

Seeing that ARMS follows the Splatoon mold and comes with free updates down the line the most prominent complaint of 'lack of content' doesn't worry me in the slightest.

I get that reviewers have to work with whats there and cant really speculate on future updates but this and Splatoon are some of the rare cases where adjusted review scores would make sense in a positive way. (Loads of games would actually need to be adjusted down because of retroactively patched in microtransaction bs.)

But yeah, this seems like a decent enough score for what it is and game reviewers tend to be a bit confused by brand new concepts anyway. I'm pretty sure that Splatoon 2 will score significantly better than Splatoon even if it only offers incremental imrovements on the core gameplay.
The best reviewed games tend to be the ones that improve and refine upon well tread and familiar territory like TLOU and BOTW. Both games don't actually do anything that hasn't been done before, at least in concept, but they refine it to perfection, hence great scores.

"may just give Arms some additional legs"

lol

Just like Splatoon. This is going to do better than most NEW Nintendo IPs on the Wii U and 3DS.

Sounds about right, looking at Street Fighter 5, Splatoon, and Pokken, all games that launched in similar states. And it's position amongst those - higher than Pokken and SF5 and lower than Splatoon - also sounds about right, given the basicness of the arcade mode. The score is right within the range I expected and the majority of reviews speak to the exact reasons I expected: what's there is quite good, there's just not quite enough. This game getting the Splatoon treatment could give it really good legs though.

The Splatoon model seems to work, and because the later additions are free they don't screw over early adapters. Still rather wait for the more complete version, like I was glad that I couldn't play BOTW until many of the framerate problems were fixed.

That's actually why I was sure it would score higher, but it seems having way more modes and variety only amounts to 2 points more than Pokken.

If it was Sakurai, I doubt it. He usually wants to get as much out of the next Smash as he could possibly handle, even to the detriment of his health. For Smash 4, he initially started with about 48 characters not including the Mii Fighters. Then added 7 DLC. Where do you go from possibly the greatest video game crossover of all-time?

To go significantly down to about 20-30 would be a massive disappointment for most fans of Smash. Though it would be fine for some in the competitive scene as it gives them less characters to work with in terms of matchups.

I forgot about that. I already had you guys checkmarked as trusted.