PIKMIN!

They's so cute, it's so hard not to get attached to these guys. Damn shame they'll be constantly dying. There's lots of strategy to be had here in your 30 day quest to get the ship parts back and, if you've never played it before, 30 days doesn't feel like a lot of time, so every moment counts. Despite the calm nature surrounding you, there's always this tenseness about, it's great. The enemies offer many unique challenges to tackle too. The only one I'm not a fan of is the final boss since your approaches are limited and it's in-game time consuming.

The story is simple fun with Olimar's loneliness in it too. The story was so enjoyable to me as a kid I copied it for an assignment and got an A+. I'm surprised my teacher didn't just google to see that I copied it.

this ended up being more of a view into my personal foilbles as a gamer than anything: that ticking 30 day timer pushed me into a level of perfectionist agonizing I wouldn't have expected from a nintendo game. it was really to the point that I got to distant spring, took a look around, and promptly put the game down for nearly a year due to the anxiety. totally a needless drive too, considering I had ended up with something like seven items left and 12 days to grab them in, so I was really under no pressure at all! but sometimes it requires a break to regroup and put things into perspective.

the design here is all good though; it's absolutely novel and toys with RTS tropes in a way only nintendo at their creative peak could capture. base-building is eschewed in favor of exploration, experimentation, and plenty of pikmin micro-management, most of which the game neatly handles for you. the pikmin AI vascillates between intuitive and incomprehensible at a moment's notice, meaning that sometimes the pikmin will clue in to exactly what they're supposed to be handling and then minutes later decide to frolic off on their own to pull up weeds or stand stock-still in front of wily beasts on the move. combat also can quickly switch between these two extremes: sometimes you'll nail the throws and your pikmin will rack up damage, whereas other times it feels they're unresponsive and helpless. this is where the limited day count really hurts the game, as it made me feel like every major pikmin loss was a major reset point. it perhaps would have felt more immersive if I could take my survivors and lick my wounds back at base, all the while devising ways to get my numbers up again or try to take on the opponent a new way. instead I often reset if I couldn't get through my chosen encounters with an acceptable amount of losses, which led me to redoing numerous other objectives along the way past the point of frustration.

when the game works though, it's a surprisingly clever take on puzzles and resource management from the big N with a lot of heart and an elegant internal ecology that adds to the mystique of the alien planet. lining up two pieces in a single day always made me smug, enraptured in my own success even when on the heels of multiple resets. eventually I convinced myself to eat losses here and there as long as I kept things moving; after all, the game smartly lets you take any enemy you've killed back to base to sprout new allies. occasionally these puzzles push at the limits of the controls on gamecube -- for example, in the final trial where you must throw yellow pikmin carrying bombs across water while making sure they don't drop in and also without signalling them for some odd reason -- but the game is generous with how most thought-intensive puzzles are light on enemies. I wish that I could've pressed on originally instead of having this awkward gap in playtime, but this return visit to cleanup the endgame has left me overall much more positive on where the game truly sings rather than preoccupied with the hidden frustrations behind it.

This is a perfect video game. I fully understand people's issues with the time limit and micromanagement. I understand the pikmin's AI not being refined enough. But that's what makes this game perfect.

I cannot tell you how much satisfaction I get from knowing that my little friends are fine being left alone doing a task while I focus on something that needs my active attention. I love giving them an objective, and them doing it without any intervention from me (besides clearing the path for them prior).

Hajime Wakai's score is timeless and incredibly effective. Every single track on the soundtrack instantly transports me to its corresponding level, and the different stems that fade in and out depending on what you're currently doing honestly puts Banjo-Kazooie to shame. It's subtle, non-obtrusive, but amazingly successful.

Pikmin has atmosphere like no other; early mornings feel like early mornings in this game. Despite its low graphical fidelity, it does a great job of communicating those early hours, where the sun is barely peeking in, morning dew not yet evaporated, and a chilly mist covering the air around you. It's truly amazing.

I often fight the urge to be dismissive at people who say the time limit is oppressive and anxiety-inducing. I want to say to these people "just be better at the game", but I also understand that not everyone can love my favorite game. I think its challenge is well-balanced and very effective at making you develop strategies and get yourself acquainted with the systems that you'd otherwise be way too trepidatious to experiment with.

I have so much to say about Pikmin. It's the perfect gameplay loop, perfect design, perfect objective, etc. There's nothing like it, and I don't think there ever will be.

Pikmin is so great that its sequels still mange to be really good games even though they completely abandon the first game's core structural feature -- the time limit.

God, the time limit. I love the 30 day time limit in this game so much. It's a stroke of arcade-y genius to have a calendar pressuring you to make every little carrot dude and second of daylight count. And because everything is designed with that 30 day calendar in mind, this game has basically perfect pacing. It doesn't have to add roguelike dungeon crawls or increasingly complicated multi-character micromanagement to stay challenging because the threat of running out of days is the challenge. No need for a side dish when your main plate is a perfect portion.

Also the sounds are all permanently etched into my brain and the water is so watery it makes me want to throw pebbles at my TV.

Pikmin is without a doubt one of the most unique games that Nintendo has ever made and maybe the darkest. Pikmin is a cruel game that is a race against time, seeing how far one would go to save themselves. The Pikmin are your loyal servants, maybe too loyal, and will sacrifice themselves for no apparent reason to help you get back to your family. Olimar is one of Nintendo's best written characters, and this is most prominent in the first Pikmin game; he struggles with his newfound role acting as a god for these creatures while simultaneously grappling with the fact he may never see his family again.

Pikmin 1 is the most unforgiving game in the series, and easily the most unsettling as well. It's a battle against nature that you will lose in many cases, but that's okay, because you can always create more Pikmin, who will never leave your side. The Forest Navel, as an example, is one of the game's most difficult areas, and encapsulates the game's deeply unsettling atmosphere as you march further into the dark, straying away from your ship and any form of safety.

Pikmin is a fantastic strategy game with a significant learning curve and one of Nintendo's most intriguing narrative concepts. This entire franchise is extremely special, but Pikmin 1 in particular nails the disturbing nature of the core concept of the series the best. There are certainly some parts that are a bit outdated and don't hold up as well as the other games, but is a fantastic and unforgettable experience regardless.

8.5/10

Utter nightmare of a game, the struggle of managing ten different problems and projects while the clock constantly ticks down is a level of anxiety I already deal with on a daily basis.

That said, its a classic for a reason and the frustration sort of leads to an addicting gameplay loop. This was still my third attempt at finishing it across five years. I understand the follow-up games don't have a time limit and generally feel a bit easier, which is... a huge relief.

I gotta say though, I'm pretty sure the Pikmin are evil. Beady little eyes, a passion for killing and assimilating enemies, the bad ending... the fact that Pikmin can survive without Olimar in the good ending is actually terrible for that planet I think, and probably not good for the universe. All those new Pikmin copters rising into space at the end? That's an invasion waiting to happen.

Strategic survival in an unknown world

Pikmin isn't a hard game to love but it's easy to dislike sometimes, the charm of the characters, the world and the way the Pikmin and Olimar interact with it is pretty cool in a sense. A fun strategy game with a time limit that is pretty scary at first but more than possible to overcome after learning the intricies and annoyances the game offers.

The whole game oozes of classic Nintendo charm along with the gameplay requiring some decent planning and perfect placements at times. When the gameplay flows, it flows extremely well with multiple pikmin moving one object while building another and gives you the dopamine hit when you finally solve a hard puzzle and obtain one of the pieces for your ship. The whole concept is something really cool too: A pilot that crashed on an unknown planet and has to rebuild their ship in 30 days or they perish when their life support runs out and thus you bond with the natives of the world, the Pikmin as you both work together to rebuild your ship solving what puzzles and defeating what enemies you'll find along the way.

Despite all that, there are a lot of things this game could use at least in the gamecube original. Controlling your pikmin is generally okay but there are some nasty and tedious quirks to it that I found annoying throughout the playthrough. An example is let's say you need to get through a stone wall and the yellow pikmin with bombs are the ones you want to control right now, you can't select which color you'd want to control so you'd have to split them up and select them in order to proceed normally and you'd have to do this for every time you want to pick a specific color for the task at hand. This fails to mention if you have multiple yellow ones, you'd have to split the yellow ones with bombs and without so they don't blow each other up. All of these encompasses with a time limit that gives you another level of stress and anxiety, especially if they're barely learning the basics of the game.

Pikmin isn't a game for everyone but it's an interesting title in Nintendo's repertoire that has mostly been known for platformers and adventure games up until this point. Expect to reset a lot if you don't know what you're doing or suffer a lot of death in a day. A charming strategy game that when it works, it works really well with some hiccups along the way.

How glad I am that I persisted in my search without losing hope...
Now I can leave this planet without any regrets.