Music and art make up a huge part of Splatoon 3's identity, and now a new artbook and album have been announced. The Splatoon 3 releases will follow in the footsteps of prior Splatoon games which have also seen collections of art, behind-the-scenes footage, and CDs released.Splatoon 3 has become a major success in a short period of time. There were plenty of major Switch releases in 2022 vying for attention, and more are set to come this year, but that hasn't stopped the shooter from moving millions of copies. Now, Nintendo of Japan has officially unveiled an upcoming artbook and soundtrack album from Splatoon 3. The artbook will contain content focusing on weapons, gear, story mode characters, Salmon Run, and the Splatsville region itself. The company has released a few pages of the book for fans to enjoy, but it's just scraping the surface, as the artbook will be 400 whopping pages.
The soundtrack, entitled Splatune 3, will be a four disc set containing the music from the game. The booklet will feature details about Deep Cut, Splatoon 3's idol group, and their live performance held in 2022 in Japan will also be included in the CD set. Fans will be able to get their hands on the artbook starting on March 31, but they'll have to wait a bit longer for the soundtrack, with a planned release on April 26.
At this time, there have been no announcements regarding a worldwide release for either the soundtrack or artbook. Fans can typically order them through services like Amazon, which usually ships worldwide, or other retailers that ship to locations outside of Japan. However, fans have previously lamented that the majority of Splatoon's artbooks have never been translated into English. The images can of course be appreciated regardless, but any details regarding development and the game's world are inaccessible to anyone who doesn't read Japanese.
While this has been the case in the past, there's always hope that might change. With Splatoon 3's increasing popularity, Nintendo may recognize that there's a global audience waiting to scoop up anything they can about the game. If not, fans often step in and provide their own translations for lore-hungry Splatoon players.
Splatoon 3 seems to have a bright future ahead, and this is likely to be the first of several artbooks and CDs released for the game, if prior entries are any indication. With Side Order announced as part of Splatoon 3's Expansion Pass, new music will come to the game, and will probably get a CD collection for itself down the line.
Splatoon 3 is available now for the Nintendo Switch.