Key Takeaways
- Splatoon games received enhanced features like map lists, rewards programs, and a tournament manager.
- Animal Crossing: New Horizon’s NookLink service provides quality-of-life enhancements for multiplayer and unique Nook items.
- Smash World is a fun way to view clips uploaded by other players but recently lost its screenshot-sharing capabilities.
Nintendo’s bizarre decision to relegate the Switch’s voice chat to smartphones meant that the Nintendo Switch Online app created as its conduit was dead on arrival. Yet while its story ended there for most people, development did not. Four games received expanded functionality that you might have missed out on.
1 Splatoon 2
Days following the NSO app release, Splatoon 2 was released and along with it SplatNet 2 (cleverly named Ikaringu 2 in Japanese, which translates to “Squid Ring 2”).
This smartphone app extension of the 2017 Splatoon entry provides a handful of useful features, including a list of map rotations for the next 24 hours, personal stats & rankings, and currently-equipped gear. These stats offer quite a bit of depth, including information on your performance with every weapon and on every stage. There’s also a gear store that allows you to order one item at a time to purchase in-game, though they’ll cost you a premium.
My favorite feature of the service is a comparison of how much cumulative turf you’ve inked to the surface area of famous real-world locations such as Central Park, Machu Picchu, and the CERN Large Hadron Collider. Reaching each milestone awards you the ability to share a cute image of an Inkling or Octoling posing in appropriate attire next to the landmark, and at a few junctures offers some highly detailed wallpapers.
It’s nothing groundbreaking as all of these images can easily be found online, but it’s still a fresh way to engage with Splatoon 2. This was a strong first effort for the NSO app’s integration with Switch games, but the sequel would take it to a whole other level.
2 Splatoon 3
Splatoon 3 received a similar service that builds upon its predecessor, retaining the aforementioned features while adding a whole slew of new ones.
SplatNet 3 is laid out like a smartphone home screen with apps for each feature (almost ironically so, as Splatoon 3’s denizens all use flip phones). In addition to SplatNet 2’s features, this interface lets you check the results of past Splatfests, single-player campaign stats (including for the Side Order expansion pack), and progress on the game’s free season pass.
In addition, the reward system has been revamped to offer exclusive in-game clothing options for clearing milestones (though you’ll need to drop hundreds of hours to obtain them all). If you’ve seen anyone wearing an outfit resembling the franchise’s referee cat Judd, this is where they got it.
New features include the ability to create outfits and see the percentage by which its gear abilities buff your character, view photos and replays, and create private rooms that can be uniquely accessed through a URL. The most impressive addition, however, is the Tournament Manager. This is a fully featured tournament creator that lets you mix and match any game mode, rule set, and three different bracket formats.
To be frank, there are far more competitive games with lesser tournament organization tools out there; Nintendo outdid themselves here on a niche feature.
My favorite feature of SplatNet 3—and one no other NSO app-supported game has—is widgets. These allow you to showcase upcoming maps, your recent battle history, current gear, and in-game photos on the home screen of your iPhone, Android, and Mac.
Using this, I was able to check when my favorite maps were in rotation at a glance, allowing me to pick and choose the optimal times to grab my Switch for a few rounds. It’s surprisingly forward-thinking functionality for a company that’s often technologically behind the curve.
3 Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Most of us have already moved away from Animal Crossing: New Horizons by now, but the NookLink app is a great way to reminisce about our past island lives (or enhance them if you’re still playing).
This interface is a fitting recreation of the in-game smartphone menu. You can check your passport, which includes your custom design, dream island, Happy Home Paradise expansion creator codes. There are also tips for new players, a daily log-in reward currency that can be spent on exclusive Nook-themed furniture and clothing, and a QR code scanner for downloading patterns.
A pseudo-newspaper serves to highlight your feats (which you can swap out at your discretion), upcoming events, and turnip prices. This also acts as a time capsule for absent Resident Representatives who want to relish the good ol’ times with their anthropomorphic animal buddies.
The two coolest features are the keyboard and catalog. The keyboard is self-explanatory but also transformative, enabling your phone to type out chat bubbles in multiplayer instead of the Switch’s software keyboard. You can also perform reactions through the app interface as part of this social package.
Meanwhile, the catalog displays every item you’ve ever acquired and their color variants. This is a feature that begs an “order” function like the Splatoon in-app shops, but it’s still fun to explore as a personalized museum.
4 Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
Of all the NSO app services, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate’s Smash World is the least feature-rich. Its main function is to act as a repository for gameplay clips uploaded to YouTube through the game’s video editor, presented as a collage.
You can sort by character and stage, upvote clips, and look at further clips by fellow Smashers, but due to Nintendo’s termination of its social media sharing service, you can no longer view screenshots. Unfortunately, this takes some of the bite out of the app as quick, funny visuals offer more immediate gratification than watching videos.
There are a few other features as well, albeit ones that are niche in appeal. These include viewing a random assortment of custom stages which you can queue for download and putting together Spirit teams in a user-friendly interface. These teams can’t be sent to your game, but then again, I wager there aren’t too many people playing Smash with this enabled.
This smartphone functionality is a huge value-add to Nintendo’s subscription service and one I hope to see the company not only continue in the future but also better promote. There are numerous franchises in its catalog that could benefit from this, such as Mario Kart and Pokémon. Even single-player games could use this to display helpful information.
The NSO app is ripe for the return of a Miiverse-esque social service which could itself propagate to supported games, especially given how a touch screen is perfect for drawing on. Let’s add this to my list of things Switch 2 should do to ensure its success.
