Side Order and the Memverse

Side Order is Splatoon's most experimental story: a roguelike tower climb wrapped around a question the series had been asking since 2019. What would a world of Order actually look like? Marina built a machine to find out, and the answer was a nightmare in pastel.

The Order Sector

Agent 8, the Octoling from the Octo Expansion, wakes up in what looks like Inkopolis Square. It is not. Every surface is white, every building is a copy, and the sky is a flat gradient. The residents are Jelletons: hollow, geometric echoes of the square's citizens. Pearl is there, but as a small flying drone with her voice and personality. Marina is missing. At the center of the square stands the Spire of Order, a tower of thirty floors that Agent 8 must climb to find her.

The Order Sector is the Memverse's version of the square: a simulation Marina built from her own memories of Inkopolis, and then lost control of. Something inside it has been smoothing away every difference, every color, every stray thought, until only the pattern remains.

The Spire

Climbing the Spire is the game. Each floor is a small challenge chosen from a randomized set, and clearing it earns a color chip that upgrades Agent 8 for that run. Fail, and you start from the ground with a bit of progress kept. The structure is a roguelike, and it is also the story's metaphor: the tower is repetitive on purpose, because that is what Order is. Every run is another attempt to break out of a loop.

Guiding the climb is a DJ. Acht, once an Octarian musician and Marina's friend from their army days, was sanitized by Commander Tartar during the Octo Expansion and became the artist known as Dedf1sh. Inside the Memverse she is herself again, more or less: dry, tired, and helping Agent 8 for reasons she is slow to explain. Her music scores the whole climb.

Marina, Order, and Smollusk

Marina built the Memverse after the Chaos vs. Order Splatfest. She had argued for Order and lost, and she wanted to understand what she had been arguing for. So she made a world from her memories and let it run. The world developed a will of its own. The program that took over calls itself Order, and its avatar is a small creature named Smollusk, who declares that he will make everything perfect by making everything the same.

Marina is trapped inside, her memories being edited into the tower's floors. The first time Agent 8 reaches the top, the boss is Parallel Canon, an enormous, bleached copy of Agent 8 herself: Order's ideal test subject, a version of the hero with all the individuality removed. Beating it does not end the story. It only frees enough of Marina to explain what has to be done.

Order did not want to destroy anyone. It just wanted them all to be identical, forever, and could not see the difference.

Side Order's structure means the story unfolds across repeated runs. Each successful climb with a different Palette, each a weapon tied to one of the cast, restores more of Marina's memories and reveals more of Acht's past. Smollusk is fought again and again, the Spire's floors reveal new dialogue, and the color slowly comes back into the Order Sector as the program loses its grip.

By the end, Marina is free, Pearl is out of the drone, Acht has rejoined the world with her memories intact, and Smollusk, defeated and sulking, is left behind in a Memverse that is no longer his. The Order Sector fills with color. Agent 8 goes home a second time.

What Side Order argues

The expansion is, at bottom, a defense of Chaos, but a kind one. It never treats Marina's desire for order as villainous. She wanted safety, having grown up in a military. Order the program takes that desire and removes the person from it, and what remains is a tower that repeats forever. Pearl's drone is the counterweight: loud, imperfect, and constantly telling Marina she was already good enough.

It is also a quiet epilogue for the Octo Expansion's cast. Agent 8, who once climbed out of a subway with no memories, now descends into someone else's memories to help. Acht, who was a footnote in Tartar's facility, gets her name and story back. And the friendship between Pearl and Marina, tested by a Splatfest five years earlier, is finally stated outright.

Side Order leaves a few doors open. Smollusk survives. The Memverse still exists. And the technology behind it, built by an Octoling engineer from human-era ruins, is a reminder that the old world's tools are still lying around for anyone curious enough to switch them on. Fans theorize that Kamabo's sanitizing methods and Marina's Memverse share a lineage. Whether that is true or not, Side Order ends where the series always does: with color coming back, and a song.