I played the full hour with only two or three disconnections as the match started, and one or two instances of the standard Splatoon experience of creaming the other team only to realize, as the scoreboard comes up, that you had a 4v3 advantage all along.
Some remarks:
- Split Joy-Cons are amazing. I tried switching to the included grip and found it far too cramped for my wrists to sit at a comfortable angle, something that was never the issue with the immense width of the Wii U GamePad or the relaxed angles of split Joy-Cons (trained over three weeks of BotW). The Splattershot and Dualies felt incredibly responsive—it was like snap aiming on the Wii. The Charger, not so much, but that's because I'm terrible with the Charger. The Roller doesn't benefit from this so much, but I was still getting the hang of rebuilding habits of using the Y button to adjust my camera height for a good field of view, and with the split controllers this was a little unfamiliar.
- Sensitivity: +4 motion, +2 with the right stick, and I think I'll turn up the latter even further. With split Joy-Cons, I have such a wide firing angle with motion aiming alone that I never want to press the R-stick for more than a flick at a time, just for quick adjustments and escapes. (Sustained pressing on the stick doesn't work well with me; in the first Splatoon I had a bad habit of triggering the click for the special.) I'm flicking it two or three times in quick succession often enough that it tells me my stick sensitivity is too low. I intend to check in the second session today whether I need different sensitivity settings for the TV or the tabletop mode, or if the aiming feels right regardless of the screen size.
- HD Rumble is a palpable presence. I didn't notice it at all at the Switch preview event, but today I started noticing things like a forward ripple when a teammate activates a jump next to you, a directional sensation based on whether they are to your left or right. The vibration of bombs going off also seems directional.
- Muscle memory from the first Splatoon (X to jump) was apparently a lot stronger and harder to break than I imagined. I didn't think I played the original that much.
- I still prefer the Wii U GamePad map to the new toggle, as with the toggle it takes me too long to find my own position on the screen. But I'm beginning to figure out how to use the new Super Jump effectively. You can use motion aiming to target your teammates for the jump, meaning you can use their map position rather than their nameplate, just like in the first game. And while my motion sensitivity was too high to click on precise points on the map, it turns out you don't need to: if you activate a jump anywhere on the map, the jump locks to the nearest teammate. For example, if I want to jump to somebody on the west-central part of the map, and I flick my cursor to the left and I way overshoot, it doesn't matter: I'll land where I intended. It feels imprecise at first, and the motion cursor (a white circle) is hard to see until you get used to it, but I'm finding it much more user-friendly than using the D-pad to target nameplates.
- Don't neglect the underpass in The Reef. There are horizontal surfaces in this game that overlap in elevation, and I think they all count; I also don't remember anything similar in the first game's maps, though I didn't spend much time with the ones that were patched in late in its life.