Nintendo dropped Splatoon Raiders onto Switch 2 last week without much ceremony. No massive marketing push, no hype cycle. Just a single-player Splatoon spinoff quietly landing in the summer lull before the bigger fall releases. Four days later, it has the highest Metacritic user score any Nintendo game has ever received.
A 9.3 that puts every Nintendo classic in the rearview
The number is 9.3. That places Splatoon Raiders seventh on Metacritic's all-time user score rankings, and at the very top of every Nintendo-published game the site has tracked since the N64 era.
Here's the thing: the titles it beat are not obscure. The previous Nintendo record holder was The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask with a 9.2. Behind that sits Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver at 9.1, alongside the original Xenoblade Chronicles, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and its 3DS remaster, all also sitting at 9.1. Super Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wild, the two games most people would guess sit at the top, don't even hold the previous record.
Raiders walked past all of them.
What makes this record unusual
The critic side of the equation tells a different story. Raiders settled at an 81 on Metacritic from press reviews, a solid number that lines up with the rest of the Splatoon series. Decent, not legendary. The gap between that and the 9.3 user score is striking, and it points to something specific about who this game was made for.
Splatoon as a franchise has always been multiplayer-first. The three mainline entries are built around competitive ink-splatting, and that's where the series built its audience. Raiders is a deliberate pivot: a story-focused, single-player action game set in the same world. Nintendo EPD was testing whether Splatoon could carry a solo experience without the competitive hooks.
The user score says the answer is yes, loudly.
Nintendo's anti-trend strategy paying off again
The timing of this milestone is worth noting. Shigeru Miyamoto recently commented on Nintendo's design philosophy, specifically its focus on understanding what players actually want rather than chasing industry trends. The broader games industry has spent years and enormous resources trying to build the next live service hit. Raiders went the opposite direction entirely.
A single-player, story-driven game built around a franchise most people associate with multiplayer, released in the middle of summer without a blockbuster launch window. That's a risky move on paper. The user score suggests players recognized exactly what Nintendo was doing and responded to it.
Sales figures will matter too, and those take longer to surface. But the player reception is already a data point Nintendo will find hard to ignore when planning the next chapter of the franchise.
If you're already deep in the game and want to get the most out of it, the Splatoon Raiders strategy guides cover everything from weapon unlocks to endgame loadouts to help you work through the tougher Salmonid raids.
