Splatoon Koshien 2017: dates, rules, maps

Splatoon Koshien is the name of a nation-wide tournament for Splatoon, which is named after Koshien (the Japanese High School Baseball Championship). The first one, held from September 2015 to January 2016 was extremely popular, and so it’s not surprising that in April, Nintendo confirmed there would be another one this year.

And today, during a livestream, Nintendo revealed all the details about Splatoon Koshien 2017. Just like last year, there will be two parts:

• Various tournaments across Japan, with dates at several major cities (see below for the full list);
• A major tournament where the winners of the local tournaments will battle. It will be at the Games Party Japan, which is taking place in February (on February 11th and 12th) next year.

Here’s where the various local tournaments will take place:

• September 25th: Toukai (Aichi Prefecture): 112 teams
• October 16th: Sapporo (Hokkaido Prefecture): 56 teams
• October 22nd: Morioka (Iwate Prefecture): 56 teams
• November 5th: Sennan (Osaka Prefecture): 112 teams
• November 20th: Takamatsu (Kagawa Prefecture): 56 ttams
• November 23rd: Hiroshima (Hiroshima Prefecture): 56 teams
• December 3rd: Fukuoka (Fukuoka Prefecture): 112 teams
• January 21st and 22nd: Tokyo (Tokyo Prefecture), at the Game Party Japan 2016, 192 teams

You can find links to the livestream for each tournament on this page!

Next, here’s the rules:

• Battles: Turf Wars (1 round, except semi-finals and finals which have 2 rounds)
• Stages are chosen at random among the following: Urchin Underpass, Walleye Warehouse, Kelp Dome, Flounder Heights, Museum d’Alfonsino, Mahi-Mahi Resort, Piranha Pit, Ancho-V Games). Fans voted for those during the livestream that was held today: check out below for the results of the votes!

• Weapons: no restriction
• Gear: no restriction (but default version of gear)
• Splatoon version: the version available before the day of the tournament will be used
• Controller: Wii U GamePad (special wired Wii U GamePad will be used)
• Settings: you can change camera settings, but you have 90 seconds to do that and pick up your weapon and gear

During the livestream, they showed what the Tourney Truck would look like for the Splatoon Koshien 2017:

And here’s the bandana all participants will receive:

Here’s the uniforms the players of each region will get to wear:

Next, a look at the trophy the winners of each tournament will receive:

During the livestream, viewers had the opportunity to vote for the 8 maps that would be played during the Splatoon Koshien 2017. The vote worked that way:

• fans had to vote YES or NO for each map. Naturally, the maps which received a “NO” vote were excluded;
• among maps which received a YES vote, only those with the highest amount of YES votes were kept.

Here’s the results of the votes for each map:

Source: Nintendo / NicoNico