Guessed by @Ultrashroomz
We were just talking about this the other day here on VGC, but the first Splatoon game really was amazing and might still be the best entry in the series. I hadn't really touched it since I got my hands on its sequel, but this year I went back to play some of it again and it holds up, the multiplayer still has enough people to find matches quickly and playing it is still a blast even after the third game in the series. There's something about it that hasn't quite made its way into the Switch games, it feels raw and wild, freeing even. Or maybe it's just it having better netcode and gyro controls that makes it feel more magic than its sequels, but either way, it is lots of fun to play, even all these years later.
And that isn't even getting into how exciting it was back then, how fresh and original it felt. To be fair, sequels can never match up in that department, but they haven't come close either. Everything about this game was a breath of fresh air, the Splatfests were a magical time, what with the silly Miiverse posts lighting up the sky (an aspect that has been thankfully maintained, to an extent), the soundtrack was wacky in all the best ways, and living the game as it evolved with each of its many updates felt like you really were on a journey along with the game itself, unlike now where it just feels like they're holding back content (and this may as well have been the case already, but it really felt like it was all being made as the updates came out). And there was the single-player campaign, full of interesting and creative ideas, maybe not quite realized to their full potential, but eventually leading up a final boss that was an absolute delight.
This game was great to live in, and it is still great today. It is undeniably the console-defining game of the Wii U, and it's hard to argue that the series hasn't lost at least a little of its shine outside of the system it was born in. I was wrong to write it off last year's list, that's for sure.
