Nijisanji’s Team 8 Spends Its First Meeting on Four Hours of Splatoon 3 Practice

NIJISANJI — Sumeragi Reo, Shikinagi Akira, Milan Kestrel and Luis Cammy met as a team for the first time on Friday night, playing Splatoon 3 together for about four hours to prepare for the #にじイカ祭り2026 tournament, the Niji Ika Matsuri, or “squid festival.” The four make up Team 8, and each streamed the session on their own channel.

The tournament uses only Tower Control and Splat Zones on about five fixed stages, with Splat Zones coming up more often, the group explained as they got started. Each member opened with a favorite weapon to see how the lineup balanced, and the evening turned into a long round of reshuffling front-line and back-line roles and trying out weapons, the Hydra Splatling and Blasters among them. Milan agreed to call out the opposing team’s status lamps, how many players were down and whose special was charged, and chat praised the quality of the callouts.

“I realized something important. I’m good at moving, but I’m bad at stopping.” — Sumeragi Reo, in solo practice after the team session

Milan’s own stream, meanwhile, showed a tatami-mat picture instead of the game. Chat made jokes about it for the opening minutes, and he found out about 20 minutes in. Around the three-hour mark his stream went quiet for a few minutes, and he later summed up the night as the tatami followed by the mute.

About an hour in, the team opened a custom room, and from there it traded close matches in Tower Control and Splat Zones with an opposing side for roughly ninety minutes, winning the last match of that block. Blasters on the other side gave the team the most trouble. The team then opened a room to viewers with a rank requirement and played on until just before the four-hour mark.

Luis, who has a seventh-anniversary 3D collaboration that evening, asked for a final match before the group wrapped up. Akira said Milan was honestly three times stronger than he had imagined. The question of a team name came up only at the end, with “Sumeragi Gundan” floated and teased as unimaginative, while chat had already started calling the team “Sumeragi Gunkan,” a pun on the Japanese word for battleship. A running joke about “friendship power,” which began during a tight match, stayed with the team to the close.

Reo kept going alone for more than an hour after the others left. He looked for practice opponents, then queued solo, and said he had learned that he moves well but struggles to stand still and watch the field. He signed off after about five hours, thanking viewers and promising to keep improving, with “friendship power” as his last words. Milan closed his own stream saying he hoped to practice again from the early afternoon the next day.