Splatoon Raiders is a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it as I said in my review last month, though a deluge of other games I’ve been stoked for have kept me from engaging much in its post-game content. Part of that post-game is something called the Bottomless Buffet, essentially an “endless” mode with a cranked-up difficulty setting in which you must survive floor after floor after floor of challenging enemies, collecting a certain amount of Power Eggs from kills on each floor before a timer runs out. The floors of Bottomless Buffet quickly get intense, so most players aren’t likely to see much more than the 100 of them required to get to the game’s true ending.
Theoretically, the Bottomless Buffet should be bottomless, implying an infinite number of floors to keep splatting through if you’re dedicated enough. In reality, there are a limited number: 1000. And someone has finally completed floor 1000, reaching the bottom of the so-called “Bottomless” Buffet. An incredible feat for which they received absolutely nothing.
This feat was shown in footage posted to YouTube by 新月, who documented nearly two-and-a-half hours of repeated attempts to clear the final challenge of Bottomless Buffet: floors 998, 999, and 1000. If you haven’t played much of Splatoon Raiders‘ endgame, most of these attempts probably look like a giant mess. What you need to know is that 新月 is basically using a popular build that lets them slurp up all the enemies into one spot, do a bunch of damage to them in the pile, and then float above them, both to avoid damage and to blast the big ones with a charger (aka a sniper rifle) for big damage. They’ve got the Speed Tank on, and a Jump Bomb, a Torqscrew, and a Blast Boot as their equipped gadgets. The Jump Bomb (with modifiers to increase jump height) is what’s letting them get into the air, the Torq Screw is sucking all the Salmonids up and helping propel the player upward, and the Blast Bomb is being used to freeze the Salmonids in the pile. It looks like a mess, but is pretty cool and effective. Though they get through a bunch of failed attempts in this video, their final attempt has them clear floor 1000 with 11 seconds to spare.
Unfortunately, apart from the chat absolutely losing its mind when 新月 finally clears 1000, there is absolutely no reward for accomplishing this. Sure, there’s the usual EXP and trove of rare weapons that you’d normally be able to collect from doing difficult floors like this, but there’s no title, no costume, no dialogue even acknowledging what this player has accomplished. There is, seemingly, absolutely no reason to clear up through floor 1000, a task that seems utterly brutal and thankless if you are anyone other than the very first person to do it.
So congrats to 新月, and a warning to everyone else: if you’re doing Bottomless Buffet in Splatoon Raiders, it’s fine to stop at 100. There is a bottom to the apparently poorly named Bottomless Buffet, but there’s nothing down there but salmon and pain.