Un poquito mas dificil de lo que parece al principio. pero eso lo hace bueno. Lo que mas me impresiona es como basicamente es un RTS pero tan exageradamente diferente del usual clon de AOE. O mas increible que ellos lo hayan hecho es el hecho de que nadie mas haya intentado (al menos exitosamente) hacerlo. #salvenelRTS . Lo mejor es como te sueltan en el nivel y lo haces en el orden y ritmo que quieras, sientas y puedas, y al final puedes incluso tomarte un dia mas en un mundo y un dia menos en otro como compensación. Nota adicional a ser de los juegos que mejor se siente jugarlo con los controles de movimiento

It was fun to experience the first entry in the beloved Pikmin series! It's easy to tell that the first game was experimental, as many ideas weren't completely fleshed out yet and mechanics could be pretty janky. Others have talked about these points ad nauseam, so I'm going to focus more on the experience.

I really enjoyed the atmosphere. Compared to the later games, Pikmin 1 has an incredible sense of loneliness. You're trapped on an alien planet with a limited time to escape before you asphyxiate, and you're forced to place your trust in a hive mind species to survive. It's a great hook for a minimal story! Most of the dialog is revealed through daily logs and ship parts, which adds to the mystery surrounding Pikmin 1. Who is Olimar, why is he here, why do the pikmin help him etc etc.

When you finally get all the ship parts to return home, Olimar seems almost sad that he has to leave the pikmin behind. Again, no dialog (which is a good thing!) These moments made Olimar feel more human. This might be the last time he would ever see the species that would save his life! Of course, we know that's not true, but the subtle storytelling is very well done here.

Like many others, I was frustrated by tripping, dumb pikmin ai, and selecting specific pikmin, but Pikmin 1 started the series on a strong note. It was more difficult than I thought, which makes me excited to finally play Pikmin 2 and finish the series!

Pikmin involves the space explorer Olimar crash landing on a planet due to a meteor strike scattering crucial parts of his ship all over the planets surface. Olimar encounters the Pikmin, slightly creepy plant creatures who obey his every command and it's then a case of repairing the ship in 30 days before his life support systems fail.

It's a simple plot, but the mood is surprisingly somber, with the environments doing plenty of the story telling, which still look incredible to this day.

As Olimar you explore one of 5 areas and use the Pikmin to recover the pieces of the ship. You have 30 in game days to locate the parts, with each day working on a timer before you must return to the ship with your Pikmin. If you leave any Pikmin in the field they are eaten and are gone for good. So it's about managing your time, how much can you get away with before sunset?

Using the 3 different types of Pikmin you are simply directing them to pick things up, destroy bridges or kill enemies. The day limit may seem daunting but I feel you have more than enough time to find everything, and you don't even need to get 100%. If you’re efficient, make a plan and choose the right Pikmin for the job, you'll be fine.

I really enjoyed this, it was stressful but serene at the same time, a very different game loop, but one I'm excited to play more of - 8/10

The secret behind Pikmin’s success was not that it somehow outclassed classic real-time strategy franchises, but rather that it was never competing with them to begin with. According to Shigeru Miyamoto, he came up with the idea for Pikmin one day when he observed a group of ants carrying leaves together into their nest. Miyamoto then imagined a game focused on cooperation rather than competition; he asked, “Why can’t everyone just move together in the same direction, carrying things as a team?” Nintendo EAD’s design philosophy went along with this line of reasoning, melding design mechanics from different genres to create an entirely new yet familiar experience. As a result, instead of competing against other players in Pikmin akin to classic RTS games, Pikmin forces players to explore and compete with the very environment itself by introducing puzzle-exploration and survival mechanics. It made sense in the end; after all, real-time strategy is concerned with minimizing time spent to get a competitive edge over opponents, and what better way to translate this than to force players to master their understanding over the terrain itself, managing and optimizing the one resource which governs them all?

Perhaps Nintendo’s greatest challenge was figuring out how to translate a genre considered by many to be niche and technical to an intuitive yet layered game, and even more so, translating classic actions from a mouse and keyboard allowing for such complexity to a suite of simplified controls using a gamepad. Coming from the other side as someone who played Starcraft as a kid and didn’t get into Pikmin until recently however, I’m surprised at how well EAD’s tackled this endeavor. Classic RTS games focus upon base-building and resource gathering through the micromanagement of units. Pikmin’s take upon this is to introduce a dichotomy between the player character Captain Olimar, who is incapable of doing anything by himself but can issue commands to the units only he can create by plucking out of the soil, and the Pikmin, who are essentially brainless but represent the units that must do everything. The player as Olimar must be present to figure out exactly how to best traverse and exploit the environment around him (replacing the base-building with management/prioritization puzzles) while the Pikmin provide bodies to construct, move, and attack the world around them. However, the Pikmin’s AI is fairly limited and as a result, Pikmin will sit around helplessly once they finish their actions and often get distracted by nearby objects while moving around, which is where the micromanagement kicks in. Therefore, the player has to decide how to best build up their supply of Pikmin to allocate tasks to surmount bottlenecks while exploring and opening the world, all while working against the limited thirty-day timer throughout the game’s five areas.

A part of me expected to really struggle with the gamepad while playing Pikmin, but the available actions on offer allow for a surprising degree of control despite the simplification. For instance, consider Olimar’s whistle; as a substitute for dragging and clicking to select units on PC, the whistle on the GameCube lets Olimar quickly rally groups of clustered units. Holding down B for longer allows the player to increase the size of the whistle’s AOE, which allows the player to better control and target how many Pikmin to rally in any cluster (hence, the analog of clicking and dragging to select boxes of units on mouse and keyboard). The Swarm command is another interesting translation. The obvious use is to allow Olimar to quickly move nearby Pikmin by directing them with the C-stick versus needing to aim and throw them by positioning and rotating Olimar himself. However, because it can be used to shift the position of Pikmin with respect to Olimar, it can also be used to swap the Pikmin on-deck for throwing (since Olimar will always throw the Pikmin closest to him) without needing to dismiss and re-rally separated Pikmin colors, and most importantly, it allows you to directly control the group of Pikmin following Olimar while moving Olimar himself. This second application allows the player to kite the Pikmin around telegraphed enemy attacks, and properly funnel them so the Pikmin aren’t getting as easily stuck behind walls or falling off ledges/bridges into hazards. That said, noticeable control limitations do exist. Olimar cannot pivot to move the reticle without changing his position with respect to the Pikmin around him, which can make aiming in place annoying if the Pikmin types you need to throw aren’t close enough to be moved next to Olimar with Swarm. Additionally, there is no way for Olimar to simultaneously and directly control multiple separated groups of Pikmin, which does make allocating tasks a bit slower. However, given that the tasks themselves usually don’t necessitate more than one Pikmin type at a time, this limitation is understandable, especially since the sequels would tackle this challenge with more expansive controls and multiple playable characters on the field.

Pikmin’s base model as a result is a fantastic translation of an abstract design philosophy, but I can’t help but wonder if the original could have been pushed further. Don’t misunderstand me: I absolutely take pride in mastering a game by learning all about its inner workings and pushing its mechanics to the limits simply by following a few intuitive genre principles. As such, I wish that the game was a bit harder in order to really force me to squeeze every bit of time from the game’s solid premise. For example, combat is often optional in Pikmin given how many full-grown Bulborbs are found sleeping, but given that most enemies don’t respawn within the next day after killing them and I can bring their carcasses back to base to more than replenish my Pikmin supply, combat is almost always in my favor, especially since certain enemies will spawn more mobs if they aren’t defeated. If circumstances existed where it would be unfavorable to engage (such as losing a significant number of Pikmin every time, or having so little time left that engaging would waste time), then I feel that this would add an additional layer of decision-making of deciding when to sneak past sleeping Bulborbs rather than just wiping out as many foes as I could as soon as possible. In a similar sense, I felt that certain design elements such as the Candypop Buds for switching Pikmin colors were a bit underutilized; outside of one environmental puzzle, I never had to use the Candypop Buds, mainly because I had so many remaining Pikmin and time to never justify their usage. I’ll concede here that Pikmin’s one-day Challenge Mode does at least provide a score attack sandbox where I’m forced to take my Pikmin stock and remaining time into higher consideration, but it’s missing the connectivity of the main story mode where my earlier actions would greatly affect how I planned later days in a run, particularly in making judgement calls on which days to spend at each site and which days I dedicate towards building up my Pikmin numbers versus hauling in ship parts. Regardless, I found myself completing the main game with all parts in just twenty days on my first run with minimal resets, and I’d love to try a harder difficulty mode with a stricter time limit and tougher Pikmin margins to really force me to better conserve my working force and dedicate more time to restocking my supply.

Gripes aside, I’m glad that my friends finally convinced me to try out Pikmin, not just to better appreciate RTS games as a whole but to also gain an appreciation of how different genre mechanics can work in tandem to intuitively convey concepts without spelling everything out to the player. It’s classic Nintendo at their core, and while I had my reservations coming in as a fan of older RTS franchises, they’ve managed to convince me once again that the best hook is not simply offering something that’s visibly better, but rather offering something that’s visibly different. I still think that there’s improvement to be had, but given how much I’ve enjoyed the first game, I can’t wait to see what they have to offer from iterating upon their memorable beginnings.