Subtle Foreshadowing in the Music of Splatoon 2: 7 Years Later
Ok, yeah, so I’m a little late to the party on this one. Maybe a little more than a little– but who’s counting, really? Minor spoilers ahead!
I’ve been letting my roommate play through the single-player campaign on my old copy of Splatoon 2 recently, and I’ve had a lot of fun watching her play (and occasionally pointing out the location of a secret, or helping her clear a level). But as she progressed through the game, I noticed something I’d missed when I first played through the game all those years ago.
In the single-player campaign, you are a young inkling recruited by famous pop-idol Marie of the famous Squid Sisters to help find her missing cousin and pop-star partner Callie, who has recently gone missing. In search of her you delve into Octo Canyon, a location overrun by the fearsome Octarian Army. You delve deeper and deeper into the canyon as you clear levels, gain new weapons, and defeat bosses, all while accompanied by some of my favorite soundtracks in the game. But as I watched my roommate play, I noticed something peculiar. In the background of one of the songs, I heard a voice– an inkling voice, in an area otherwise populated solely by Octarians. It took me only a moment to recognize the voice itself– it was Callie, singing in the background of the song!
At the end of the campaign, it’s revealed that Callie was kidnapped by the Octarians and brainwashed using a high-tech pair of sunglasses. The soundtrack, all along, had been hinting to us that Callie was indeed within the depths of Octo Canyon. Now that’s what I call musical foreshadowing!
For me this realization coincided with the release of the Splatoon 2 music on the Nintendo Music App, giving me the perfect opportunity to investigate further– and it turns out that Callie’s voice wasn’t just present in that one song, but several! Out of the ten songs by Turquoise October (the fictive band which made the music in the singleplayer campaign) Callie features as background vocals on four of them: Octo Eight Step, Girl from Inkopolis, Buoyant Boogie, and Shooting Starfish. In all of these, you can hear her background vocals before the first 20 seconds, and again after a just about minute in! (I'd say I was confused how I missed them for so long, but background vocals tend to get lost when you're focused on firing your paint gun at hordes of enemies.)
If you haven’t yet given Splatoon music a listen, I highly recommend it: the game is filled to the brim with fictional bands, all with their own albums and distinctive music styles. From heavy metal to pop to even vaporwave and lofi, there’s bound to be an artist you’ll love!
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