I will be honest: my worry, for the first few hours, is that Octo Expansion, the new single-player DLC for Splatoon 2, was going to be Splatoon 2: The Lost Levels. As in Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels.
The Lost Levels are great - on paper, at least. In reality, though, they are kind of annoying. I loved them when I first played them, but that's because they were so hard to get hold of for a while. Imagine, a sort of pseudo-sequel to Super Mario Bros with a handful of new gimmicks: poison mushrooms, wind that has to be factored in to platforming. Just one glimpse of that poison mushroom in an old Mean Machines would have been enough to send me into sweet delirium. Games used to be like this: a thing of rumours and blurred photographs.
With the benefit of time, let me announce my final position on The Lost Levels. They are a thrill to think about, but a chore and a bore to play. Poison mushrooms are the chance for something bad to happen in a game that previously thrummed with the potential that something good might happen. And that wind? That wind picks up out of nowhere and messes your jumps - jumps which you have planned and executed perfectly, because this is Super Mario Bros, and its world always used to make sense, always used to be reliable. The Lost Levels introduce an element of unreliability. It's not that they're hard. It's that they're jerks about it.
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