It's an iterative series, each game building on the predecessor's mechanics, so there's not any one major twist. But there are a lot of little things that add up. The new movement techniques are great, Salmon Run has been significantly expanded, and just in general the QoL is night and day.
Also, the fact that Ink Armor, Sting Ray, and Main Power Up are not in the game might be the true biggest step forward. S3's meta is in a pretty good spot now.
Large parts? It's been a while since I played Octo Canyon, but I'm pretty sure the only thing that reappeared from Valley was the Octostomp boss, but it's a different fight anyway so not really.
It'll never happen, but I'd honestly prefer for S4 to move on from Splatfests and do something else entirely. They've run out of ideas, a lot of the themes feel like filler just to keep it going out of obligation. At this point I just see Splatfests as a weekend where they take away Ranked and make everyone play the worst game mode.
How many years do you expect them to keep pumping out content for the same game? They've gotta wrap it up somewhere. Two years is plenty.
Back in my day, games were released and we played them for what they were.
Under Night In-Birth II [Sys:Celes] - Haven't had a whole lot of time to practice, but I'm working on charge partitioning. Managed to get double ball a few times in a match.
Mahjong Soul/Riichi City/IRL mahjong - After getting demoted to Expert I went on an even worse losing streak for a bit, but I seem to be clawing my way back now. It's just sample size, or so I keep telling myself.
Splatoon 3 - Grand Festival was rad. Not the Turf War part, Turf still sucks, but it was the second best concert I saw all week.
S2 was 2017, S3 was 2022. Five year gap is pretty reasonable for sequels.
S4 likely won't happen until after the next Animal Crossing, since it's the same team working on both IPs.
They really made sure to reference the number 3 in every possible place except the kit system.
F-Zero GX - As far as pure racing goes, GX is perfection.
Kirby Air Ride - The actual racing mode is... mid, honestly. But City Trial? One of the most interesting and unique game modes ever conceived. Sad this game never got any kind of successor.
I like X so X can't be bad
I didn't say that. What I said was "these are not the same thing, and drawing a false equivalence between them muddies the message."
Partitioning is an advanced technique that takes advantage of leniency in charge input detection to do things you otherwise couldn't. Exists in a few different games, 3rd Strike Urien is probably the best known example for heavily relying on it.
TFH is legit, one of the best fighting games I've ever played. Mechanically the closest comparison I'd give might be to call it a more grounded BlazBlue, just without a trillion system mechanics. It's also one of very few Switch ports to have full crossplay, something even ArcSys apparently can't figure out.
Team Future.
FWIW, all three Boktai games do have patches if you can't play on original hardware.