Ahead of the launch of Splatoon 2 this Friday for the Nintendo Switch, the Nintendo Switch Online (Free) companion app is now live. It’s a super quick download, and seems to seamlessly link to your Nintendo account… But (as of this writing) it doesn’t seem to do a whole lot yet. I can sort of link my account, then it tells me the service is down for maintenance.

Regardless, if you want to get ahead of the game, you can go ahead and grab it right now. Once the service is fully functional you’ll be able to use the app to do voice chat with Nintendo friends as well as use the various social networks to find and invite people into your game. I’m still not super sold that it’s a better solution to having a full-featured dashboard for the Switch like the Xbox and PlayStation have, but, eh, we’ll see how it works in practice.

Anyway, I’ll be rapidly switching back and forth between being a kid and a squid later this week, and I’m super curious how the app voice chat is going to be any better than just using Discord.