Pikmin is a fascinating game. You have three different kinds of little guys, who act identically but can each do unique things, and with them you must collect items in large, open levels. This seems simple but it is extremely effective: thanks to the day/night cycle and your limited amount of days to win, you can never afford to waste any time, but you can also never afford to rush: even a single mistake can lose you dozens of Pikmin and a whole lot of progress. This is stressful, but it does end up doing a great job at getting you to feel a sense of urgency. Pikmin never actually asks too much of you, but it incessantly demands your full effort anyways. It's no surprise that the newest game makes a point to focus on the concept of "dandori", essentially the ability to effectively execute the tasks you're given: that need to play well, to minmax every day, to multitask, to play well, is etched into every single one of Pikmin's mechanics with a rare degree of effectiveness.
What really gets me to love Pikmin though is how well those mechanics mesh with the world and themes of the game. There's an underlying somberness to much of the experience: Olimar's logs are relatively light-hearted most of the time, but they're still the words of a man who understands he may end up dying in this odd world without ever seeing his family again, and at the same time he still has a lot of appreciation and interest in its mysteries. This sort of... uneasy awe is at the center of all of Pikmin's main locations; it's like a memory of a good vacation, or a semi-lucid dream, as much as you might want to, you understand you can never stay there. There's an inherent duality to the experience, both thematical and mechanical, and it leads to an ambiguous, ethereal feel.
I could go on longer- I could talk about the sense of a real, breathing ecosystem in each of the levels, about how the real main challenge of every level is the balancing act of prioritization of tasks and navigation of the level, rather than the tasks themselves in a vacuum, or about the fact that the Pikmin are just autonomous enough to make their very existence an interesting moral quandary, but maybe I've already looked too far into the Nintendo game where you chuck armies of cute little critters at goofy-looking enemies. Still, I do feel that it is one of the rare Nintendo games with a strong thematic core- Super Metroid, Majora's Mask, Metroid Prime, maybe a few others, and this one. It's no surprise that just as they all are among my favorites, so is Pikmin now, too.
What really gets me to love Pikmin though is how well those mechanics mesh with the world and themes of the game. There's an underlying somberness to much of the experience: Olimar's logs are relatively light-hearted most of the time, but they're still the words of a man who understands he may end up dying in this odd world without ever seeing his family again, and at the same time he still has a lot of appreciation and interest in its mysteries. This sort of... uneasy awe is at the center of all of Pikmin's main locations; it's like a memory of a good vacation, or a semi-lucid dream, as much as you might want to, you understand you can never stay there. There's an inherent duality to the experience, both thematical and mechanical, and it leads to an ambiguous, ethereal feel.
I could go on longer- I could talk about the sense of a real, breathing ecosystem in each of the levels, about how the real main challenge of every level is the balancing act of prioritization of tasks and navigation of the level, rather than the tasks themselves in a vacuum, or about the fact that the Pikmin are just autonomous enough to make their very existence an interesting moral quandary, but maybe I've already looked too far into the Nintendo game where you chuck armies of cute little critters at goofy-looking enemies. Still, I do feel that it is one of the rare Nintendo games with a strong thematic core- Super Metroid, Majora's Mask, Metroid Prime, maybe a few others, and this one. It's no surprise that just as they all are among my favorites, so is Pikmin now, too.