The Square Alphabet

The Square Alphabet, as I have been calling it, is a set of glyphs that contain a lot of right angles and boxes. It's seen frequently in Splatoon 2, and it seems to me to be more associated with the Octarians.

Like many of the other "alphabets" I'll be covering, our first clues start in the original Splatoon with Callie and Marie's amiibo performances. The trucks that they dance on flash logos/titles of the songs that they sing; there are different ones for each song.

This one starts with the logo for "Ink Me Up", the song that would play during Splatfest battles in the first game. When you load it up through the amiibo, this is what you'll see:

(taken from the Tumblr blog Splatoon Script Analysis, because my Wii U is long gone)

This logo lines up with the romanized title of the song in Japanese, "kimi iro ni somete" (キミ色に染めて, dye me in your color). These letters each have a consistent equivalent (i.e. the Is are always the same glyph.)

(our progress so far)

Next, we'll look at a poster for the Squid Sisters' live performances. Live as in "irl". Using those same screens that are used for Hatsune Miku performances, Nintendo put on a concert for the Squid Sisters. They even gave them official signatures too, but that's a topic for another time.

Let's look at the bottom portion of the poster:

Plugging in the letters we currently know, we get "///:se/o/o/ors:/om". The Squid Sisters' Japanese name is "shiokara-zu" (シオカラーズ), which is a pun on a dish called "shiokara" and the Japanese transcription of the phrase "Sea O' Colors". With that knowledge, we can find that the middle part says "seaocolors", and from there we get "///:seaocolors.com". Given that it ends in ".com", we can assume that the first few letters are "www". Unfortunately for many of us, www.seaocolors.com does not seem to be an active website.

Now it's about time for me to mention that this alphabet (and others too) have duplicate letters. Specifically, there are glyphs representing the 26 letters in the English alphabet, and while every English letter gets a glyph, some letters share a glyph, similarly to this Hylian alphabet in Skyward Sword.

With that in mind, take a look at the Squid Beats game starting screen:

The text on the green portion reads "/owewames", but if you switch the 'w' for a 'g' you get "/ogegames". "hoge" is an actual thing, specifically the name of a placeholder variable used in code (the equivalent of "[insert name here]", but in computer code.) So this would be read as "hoge games".

That might sound like a stretch, but it works out when you look at out next image. It's some tiny text visible during the Inkopolis News broadcasts given by Pearl and Marina:

Looking at this with the supposed 'h' and 'g', we'd get "highcolortl". 'high color' is actually the name of Inkopolis in Japanese: "haikara" (ハイカラ, which means "high collar" but sounds the same as "high color"). And, we can deduce the 'l' to be the same as a 'v', making this say "high color tv".

(our progress so far)

From this, we can decode one of the Sunken Scrolls in Splatoon 2, the one with Flow (the headwear shop owner) and a plane ticket.

Decoding this gives us some letters when we look at it in the context of it being a boarding pass: the 'f' in "flight", the 'p' in "passenger", and the 'd' and 'u' in "departure". The name of the passenger is "miura", which is (surprise surprise) Flow's Japanese name.

We're nearing the end, so bear with me a little longer!

Now we'll look at the "post box", the little space where you can draw messages to be displayed in the plaza. Near the bottom is this text:

The first word is "something", the word to the right of it is "te/t", and the bottom word is "splatoon". It's not very hard to assume that this unknown letter is an 'x', making the word "text".

Now, we'll go on to something that can probably solve a lore mystery or two: Sunken Scroll #24.

Just by reading this text, we can get an idea of how the bosses in the campaign work: DJ Octavio's arm with the 'X' on it is cloned, and is then fused with a machine. The Zapfish is used to power the newly fused creation.

Out of this text, we can get the 'b' in "boss", the 'd' and 'j' in "DJ", and the name of the person who drafted the file, Manabu Hiraoka. From what a quick search tells me, that's the name of a graphic designer who works at Nintendo. Cool, eh?

Let's move on to the last "actually found" letter: Z.

So, in Japan there's a CD called Splatune 2 that has all of the tracks from Splatoon 2 in it, plus a bonus track of Pearl and Marina critiquing Cap'n Cuttlefish's rapping. One of the album covers in the CD is one of Callie and Marie, and it contains some text as shown here:

It says "shiokarah aori to hotaru", but the 'h' may be the letter 'z' instead. Hark back to their name, "shiokara-zu". The 'u' sound in 'zu' isn't pronounced very firmly, as it is devoiced. This basically means that it's pronounced the same way as the 'u' in "desu", which is to say it isn't. (Although this doesn't really happen with 'z's normally in Japanese, it could be because "Sea O' Colors" doesn't have an ending vowel sound. We know this is the case because the voice lines for Callie and Marie when they say "Stay fresh!" in the original game is them saying "shiokara~z". Though, if anyone does have any better proof of it being or not being a 'z' please write a comment.) Also mentioned is composer Shiho Fuji, who composed the Squid Sisters' songs.

And lastly, we come to our final letter, Q. And although it's not easy to find evidence pointing one way or another in-game, the font they use is what is crucial here. Why? Because...

You see, I made those earlier charts using the official Splatoon 2 font. That is, the one ripped from Splatnet 2, the Switch Online app for Splatoon 2 that lets you order clothes and... do other stuff too.

All of these characters were part of the private-use section for this font. That is to say, you can't really type these. When you type an 'h' for example, no matter what you change your font to, you'll always see 'h' in the selected font. But the private use area for each font is used to house characters that don't correspond to any letters: when you change the font on a private-use character in one font, it might show a totally different pictogram, or even none at all if there aren't any. I hope that explains it well.

All of the ones visible in the above image are part of the private-use section of this font, but that's all of them. And we've used all of them for other characters, except for this one. And since there's only one letter left, this is probably it.

Here's the completed alphabet:

(tada!)

Before I end the post, I just want to address the question of other glyphs that are clearly of the same set, but which aren't listed here. To which I'd say: I don't know what they're for, but I'm going to stick to these only just because they were the only ones shown in the private-use area. But, once again, please let me know if you've found evidence about one making sense!

And, I also know that there have been instances of this alphabet not holding up to this alphabet and forming nonsense words, but that can be seen a lot in the original Splatoon, where glyphs were used to type stuff like "abcde" or "pqrstuv". I think that the first game, where a lot of these instances are found, is when the developers were still exploring their options with these alphabets, and that these new cases are still probably placeholder text for times when it would be needed.

And that's a wrap!