From our other sites
The story
It started with a post declaring “I want to teach people who only play Splatoon,” which spun into an argument that APEX is the “upgraded version” of Splatoon, and Helldivers 2 is the “upgraded version” of Splat Raiders (the poster’s nickname for Splatoon’s co-op mode). The poster backed up the claim with self-reported stats like hitting the S+50 rank cap and figures like “nearly 100,000 concurrent players,” but other users fired back one after another with lines like “someone who can’t get specific” and “reeks of never having played it, lol.” The thread eventually spiraled into a broader debate about the differences between the game genres themselves.
What people said
And also, you never even cleared floor 100 of the Mess Hall
There's a concept called Area Control — it's basically territory fighting
And what, is this a showdown between dying, low-pop games like Helldivers 2 and Raiders? lol
Helldivers 2 isn't dying. It's got concurrent player counts close to 100,000
It's locked at 60fps, so you'll get outgunned by PS5 players
I'd say Splatoon's tactics and teamwork are shallower than APEX's
A 'concept,' huh?
If you're gonna call it an upgrade, it better let you paint turf
Three players securing a wider area, getting sightlines across a broad range, and denying the enemy anywhere to hide — that's basically the same thing, right?
If it's just part of the map instead of the whole thing, isn't that more like Area Control than Turf War?
Anyway, hurry up and actually teach us about Apex already.
All you've done is talk about Splatoon this whole time lol
Apex's current meta is Axel, Sia, and Loba
You're probably just watching Splatoon 3 videos for a smear campaign lol
That's why you can't even give an average X Power off the top of your head, and your answers about other games are just as vague
Seriously, that's exactly the vibe I get.
It just sounds like empty talk — 'I bought it,' 'I played it,' and that's it
Be specific.
You've probably never even played Ranked Clam Blitz
'Even Clam Blitz,' huh?
If you're gonna say that, it should be 'even Area Control'
Here's some knowledge you won't get from videos: X Match didn't even exist in Splatoon 3's first season.
So when I hit S+50 max rank, I didn't get a single badge for it — pretty disappointing
That 'garbage' Bangalore tutorial actually does teach you how to shoot.
Are you one of those old-timers still going on about Season 1 or something?
It's locked at 60fps and the Pro Controller quality is bad, so it's not even worth discussing
Yeah, fair enough
Same here (lit. 'comrade').
Even though they're both co-op PvE, the concepts and the skills they demand are totally different.
I'd love to grill these never-played-it types on it, but that type has nothing but time to burn — digging through videos, and these days you can even fake it with AI
I see. Simply put, it's a 3-team battle royale.
A battle royale is a game where you fight to be the last team standing inside a map whose playable area keeps shrinking.
Honestly, you can just run and hide until it's down to the last two teams
That's not an 'upgrade' at all lol
It's basically the same kind of thing.
I guess you could also call it Overwatch-like, but people who played Splatoon will probably get more into APEX
Overwatch is also a completely different game
It's a game where you swap heroes mid-match — even within the same game — based on the enemy/ally composition and the map, so how do you end up saying that's the same as Splatoon?
If it were the same, it'd just be a ripoff.
If that were the case, people would be calling it a 'Formstar' clone or something
Where's this 'similar' or 'upgrade' claim of yours even coming from?
Is it the same game just because you wipe things out?
It's not some contest over how fast you can mow down Terminids — you're allowed to just complete the objective and bail.
That's not to say Raiders is inferior either — something like the Mess Hall lets you build your own strategy on top of the base spawns plus random spawns, giving it that L4D-style appeal too.
You really don't have an eye for games, do you?
Of course — since they're different games, I never said they're exactly the same.
What I mean by 'upgrade' is that there's a good chance you'd be fine just playing that one instead.
If you haven't tried it, you should — I'm just being nice here
That's exactly why you're getting mocked here — because it's off the mark
Background and Key Points
Splatoon is Nintendo’s territory-painting shooter franchise, one of Japan’s best-selling family-friendly series, built around Turf War (color the map) and ranked modes that top out at S+50 before “X Power” numerical rankings begin — a detail the thread leans on when questioning the poster’s cited rank. Its co-op mode, Salmon Run, has players fend off waves of enemies for a shared score, which is why some posters compare it to Helldivers 2, Arrowhead’s PvE horde shooter, rather than to APEX Legends, Respawn’s free-to-play battle royale where three-player squads fight to be the last team in a shrinking zone. These are three genuinely distinct Western/Japanese titles with different business models (Splatoon is a paid Nintendo exclusive, APEX and Helldivers 2 are live-service games with different monetization), which is part of why “upgrade” as a label struck so many posters as nonsensical.
The thread didn’t split over whether the games share DNA — most agree they’re different genres — it split over whether “Area Control,” one specific APEX mode involving zone control, is close enough to Turf War to justify calling APEX an “upgraded Splatoon.” Posters increasingly focused less on that comparison and more on discrediting the OP, since he couldn’t produce specifics (average X Power, meta details) despite claiming deep experience in both games.
What outside readers likely miss: the jab about APEX on Switch being capped at 60fps isn’t trash talk, it’s a real hardware limitation versus the 120fps ceiling on PS5, which meaningfully affects competitive play — a technical detail nobody in the thread bothered to explain plainly.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Hardware & Industry (Geha)) thread “APEX, the Upgraded Version of Splatoon, and Helldivers 2, the Upgraded Version of Splat Raiders”.
Leave a Reply