Playing Pikmin 1 and 2 gives much to invest in. There’s the high score system encouraging you to play better every time you boot up the game and the completionist aspect of collecting every ship part or treasure. Each game has a unique approach to Dandori and gives you the grace to come at it in whichever way works best for you. Pikmin 3 is no exception when it comes to day planning and resource gathering. After skipping the Wii and going straight into the Wii U, Pikmin 3 makes for an average experience that combines key aspects of its predecessors. This is accomplished with new gameplay features, new Pikmin types, dialing back the presence of indigenous lifeforms, and giving you a more concise narrative.
The story in Pikmin 3 is the most articulated thus far. You have an opening narrative that describes the people of Koppai and their need for new food to save their civilization. The planet that the Pikmin inhabit is given an official name (PNF-404) and the opening scene perfectly sets the premise. Due to a crash landing, you lose all but three jars of food and the cosmic drive key needed to go home. With such a limited supply, you must quickly find edible food for your crew to consume while you search for your cosmic drive key. The game plays out chasing after signals that are detected immediately after the last is found. On one hand, this allows for a more involved story, but on the other, it takes away from the feeling of being stranded and having to find your way. This makes for a more linear experience than before which also translates into some of the environments.
As is expected with console generation jumps, Pikmin 3 sees a major face-lift in its environmental design. With the lack of caves, the four major areas you explore are once again the object of focus when interacting with the world. The updated graphics work incredibly well to bring out the beauty of PNF-404. The chief concern of these environments lies in the noticeably fewer enemies populating it. There are spaces where you encounter nothing or a single enemy. While there remains a wide variety of enemies, the sparse representation gives a hollow feeling to these areas. Each area gets a small introduction and immediately inundates you with obstacles that you cannot clear until you get further into the game. This heavily detracts from the experiences garnered in the first Pikmin games because you don’t feel like you are allowed to set your own pace. The design of these areas is made to hold your hand and lead you to each objective. The longer I played, the more obvious it felt that the core focus of the game was for you to complete the story instead of collecting the food which is misleadingly presented as that core focus.
Foraging for food feels like it should have been the primary objective as that’s the whole reason you came to this planet. Upon beating the game I found that food only really mattered to give yourself enough time to beat the story. The amount of time that food gives is ridiculous though. By collecting every piece of fruit, you are given an extra ninety-five days to complete the main story objective. It took me 34 in-game days to collect every piece of fruit and complete the story. Thirty days in the first Pikmin was ample time while still giving you a sense of urgency when collecting your ship parts. With Pikmin 3 I only felt the tension of the time limit during the first couple of days and during a segment towards the end where all of your stored food gets stolen. After a day of foraging that fear is immediately assuaged. This feels like a deep-rooted issue because even on the harder difficulty (Ultra Spicy mode) where food supplies are halved, you still have an absurd amount of time to complete the story
Difficulty settings are a feature unique to Pikmin 3 Deluxe. Continuing the trend of bundling games with their DLC for a Nintendo Switch release, Pikmin 3 offers quality-of-life changes that the original release doesn’t see with difficulty being one of them. This is potentially a great way to encourage people who played the original Wii U version to challenge themselves to play again or to sell people on the DLC that they may have missed initially. When I first started I selected Normal as I wanted to experience the original difficulty. As I was playing I noticed that days felt much longer than before and nothing challenged me like the previous games. I looked this up and found out that Normal is effectively Easy. Normal gives you an extra five minutes each day and nearly halves the health of every enemy in the game. I replayed half of the game to experience the game on Hard mode because it’s the closest difficulty to the original Wii U experience. This game was easy enough on Hard mode and to make it that much easier while giving a label that suggests an intended experience is unbelievable without first researching it. This is compounded by the lack of a threatening presence in general since there are significantly fewer enemies in this game.
Part of exploring the world of PNF-404 is both discovery and survival. Pikmin 2 featured an impressive amount of different enemies. Pikmin 3 has close to the same amount of different enemies but it’s hard to notice when they are more sparse throughout the environments. The new enemies and the changes to existing ones made them interesting and also made me want to see them more. Bulborb eyes stick up out of their bodies now and have become a new weak point for them and the Cannon Larvae have been given two distinct forms based on whether they shoot out a rock or a snowball. There’s a new creature called the Bearded Amprat that charges itself with electricity before running at your Pikmin in an attempt to eat them. Skitterleafs make a return to the series but their more aggressive counterparts, the Dissected Skitterleaf, is an interesting addition that threatens your forces. All of the new enemies were worthy additions to the cast of oppressive forces. Were they more abundant they would have been more fun to engage with. Making the Pikmin bring back the entire enemy’s body was also fun because some enemies are much larger than others. This is particularly true for the bosses we encounter.
Pikmin 3 has six story-specific boss encounters. Each of them has specific attack patterns that require you to observe before you launch your assault. The quality of each battle lacked consistency. The Armored Mawdad consumed a large space in the arena and gave you short time windows to attack it while the Vehemoth Phosbat gave plenty of space to expose its weakness and attack. The latter was the more interesting of the two as it’s the first to incorporate the environment as part of its battle. Having to restore the light in the cave to expose the monster and make it vulnerable allows you to utilize the multitasking skills that you’ve been developing with your two leaders. The Sandbelching Meerslug is perhaps the least inspired of these big baddies since the battle demands you to wait until it surfaces and then rush it with your Pikmin. None of its attacks are incredibly threatening to your Pikmin and even the one that does kill them will only kill a few at a time. This is a consistent throughline of each battle. The final boss was, in some ways, better than the original Pikmin’s Emperor Bulblax but far inferior to the Titan Dweevil. Where the Titan Dweevil excelled was demanding the use of the various Pikmin types. This fight feels more generic and seemingly out of nowhere. Every boss in this game has had a reasonable belief to inhabit this planet whereas the Plasm Wraith doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere. The fact that it will most likely take you multiple in-game days to beat it is also a more frustrating aspect. The best fight was against the Quaggled Mireclops. This is the only boss (other than the Plasm Wraith) that was able to kill a significant portion of my Pikmin. It has multiple stages to its fight and was the most effective in both scale and battle mechanics. The other more interesting battle was an optional boss.
There are four optional boss encounters in Pikmin 3. There is a large Crawmad called the Bug-Eyed Crawmad which requires you to damage its eyes to expose its weak point and there’s the return of the Burrowing Snagret which has become trivial due to the lock-on feature and new Pikmin types. The most interesting of these optional bosses are the new Arachnorbs called the Shaggy Long Legs and the Baldy Long Legs. There isn’t much difference between these two as one leads into the other but they make for a more interesting approach to the Arachnorb family. Usually, you would attack their bulbous mid-section but the Shaggy Long Legs requires you to send Pikmin to climb up its legs and attack its leg joints before you can expose its belly and change it into a Baldy Long Legs. These changes are a great way to take something older and make it feel fresh again which is one of the more refreshing aspects of the game and makes good utilization of the new Pikmin types.
Very early on in the game, you are introduced to one of the two new Pikmin types. Rock Pikmin are needed almost immediately as you get going into the game. There are crystal barriers that only the Rock Pikmin are capable of destroying. They are also useful for combat as throwing them at creatures does more damage than their standard attack does. This allows you to dispatch enemies with ease quickly. They’re not as strong as the Purple Pikmin in Pikmin 2 were but they make for a valuable resource. It’s important to note that Purple Pikmin, along with White Pikmin, are not present in the story mode of Pikmin 3. They are included in other content but remain nowhere to be seen otherwise. The other new Pikmin type that you experience is Flying Pikmin. These Pikmin are the strongest Pikmin you will use despite them having the lowest attack modifier. Their strength comes not from their ability to deal damage to enemies but from their versatility in their flight. Creatures on the ground can’t reach them and they can carry fruits and corpses over water. Certain enemies were completely trivialized by these Pikmin being able to fly directly to their weak points. For the sake of difficulty, it’s a good thing they are obtained so late in the game as they could have undermined the usefulness of our core Pikmin types.
The regularly occurring Pikmin have seen fewer changes this time around. The usefulness of their abilities dwindles considerably with the lack of hazards that they are equipped to handle. Red Pikmin are still immune to fire, Yellow Pikmin are still immune to electricity, and Blue Pikmin can still survive in water. These remain great features except for there are few instances in which you can properly utilize them. Red Pikmin are still the strongest of the bunch so you should always be bringing some along with you for that purpose but there are only a couple of fire hazards this time around. You can’t destroy them either so you’re still having to bring your group through making sure to save any that catch on fire. Although Yellow Pikmin are still immune to electricity, electricity is no longer lethal to Pikmin. They also have a new obstacle they are meant to handle where they can chain together and touch the open ends of wires to complete a circuit. Electricity now stuns your Pikmin which is less threatening than before. Yellow Pikmin also have been given the White Pikmin’s ability to dig faster. Consistently Water Pikmin have only been useful because they can exist in water. While that ability has been proven invaluable, the idea that they are only good for that is frustrating. The most important aspect of the Pikmin abilities is how they are used when directed by one of the leaders.
Continuing the trend of giving us more ways to interact with the world, Pikmin 3 offers three captains to switch between. At face value, this seems like it can be too much to handle but the game does a good job of easing you into it by giving you enough time with only two of these leaders until you locate and rescue the captain of your team. The gradual increase in control allows for you to learn and get comfortable with new mechanics like “go here” where you can direct a leader to go independently to a visited location. They travel slower than if you were in control but it’s a great way to set up for retrieving fruit or clearing obstacles while you control a different leader. The verticality in the maps makes for a dynamic that requires planning and strategy between characters pursuing individual projects and working together to overcome larger obstacles. There is at least one instance in each area that requires your captains to throw each other forward to cross two gaps so they can open up a path that allows for conventional travel. While having the ability to do more in a day is nice, I don’t think the environments are quite expansive enough to make full use of this mechanic. If there were any more of these types of obstacles the areas would feel either crowded or linear.
Playing Pikmin 3 feels better than playing the previous two games despite its shortcomings. However, when you look at Pikmin 3’s accomplishments, the game is disappointing in many ways. Even new features like charge or lock-on, no matter how great they are, cannot make up for an incredibly short narrative and objectives that mean virtually nothing. Some side missions allow you to revisit boss fights and challenge your ability to operate under a time limit. There is also a new iteration of versus mode where you can compete against your friends by completing objectives on a Bingo board. Ultimately I’m left wishing there was more to the main story though. Considering the consecutive successes of the first two games, I’m left wondering how we got to disappointing boss fights and a brief narrative. I would like to maintain that this game is still good by all means but it falls below the standard established by the series as a whole. While Pikmin 3 makes good use of the foundation laid before it, the sum of its parts makes for an average experience overall.
The story in Pikmin 3 is the most articulated thus far. You have an opening narrative that describes the people of Koppai and their need for new food to save their civilization. The planet that the Pikmin inhabit is given an official name (PNF-404) and the opening scene perfectly sets the premise. Due to a crash landing, you lose all but three jars of food and the cosmic drive key needed to go home. With such a limited supply, you must quickly find edible food for your crew to consume while you search for your cosmic drive key. The game plays out chasing after signals that are detected immediately after the last is found. On one hand, this allows for a more involved story, but on the other, it takes away from the feeling of being stranded and having to find your way. This makes for a more linear experience than before which also translates into some of the environments.
As is expected with console generation jumps, Pikmin 3 sees a major face-lift in its environmental design. With the lack of caves, the four major areas you explore are once again the object of focus when interacting with the world. The updated graphics work incredibly well to bring out the beauty of PNF-404. The chief concern of these environments lies in the noticeably fewer enemies populating it. There are spaces where you encounter nothing or a single enemy. While there remains a wide variety of enemies, the sparse representation gives a hollow feeling to these areas. Each area gets a small introduction and immediately inundates you with obstacles that you cannot clear until you get further into the game. This heavily detracts from the experiences garnered in the first Pikmin games because you don’t feel like you are allowed to set your own pace. The design of these areas is made to hold your hand and lead you to each objective. The longer I played, the more obvious it felt that the core focus of the game was for you to complete the story instead of collecting the food which is misleadingly presented as that core focus.
Foraging for food feels like it should have been the primary objective as that’s the whole reason you came to this planet. Upon beating the game I found that food only really mattered to give yourself enough time to beat the story. The amount of time that food gives is ridiculous though. By collecting every piece of fruit, you are given an extra ninety-five days to complete the main story objective. It took me 34 in-game days to collect every piece of fruit and complete the story. Thirty days in the first Pikmin was ample time while still giving you a sense of urgency when collecting your ship parts. With Pikmin 3 I only felt the tension of the time limit during the first couple of days and during a segment towards the end where all of your stored food gets stolen. After a day of foraging that fear is immediately assuaged. This feels like a deep-rooted issue because even on the harder difficulty (Ultra Spicy mode) where food supplies are halved, you still have an absurd amount of time to complete the story
Difficulty settings are a feature unique to Pikmin 3 Deluxe. Continuing the trend of bundling games with their DLC for a Nintendo Switch release, Pikmin 3 offers quality-of-life changes that the original release doesn’t see with difficulty being one of them. This is potentially a great way to encourage people who played the original Wii U version to challenge themselves to play again or to sell people on the DLC that they may have missed initially. When I first started I selected Normal as I wanted to experience the original difficulty. As I was playing I noticed that days felt much longer than before and nothing challenged me like the previous games. I looked this up and found out that Normal is effectively Easy. Normal gives you an extra five minutes each day and nearly halves the health of every enemy in the game. I replayed half of the game to experience the game on Hard mode because it’s the closest difficulty to the original Wii U experience. This game was easy enough on Hard mode and to make it that much easier while giving a label that suggests an intended experience is unbelievable without first researching it. This is compounded by the lack of a threatening presence in general since there are significantly fewer enemies in this game.
Part of exploring the world of PNF-404 is both discovery and survival. Pikmin 2 featured an impressive amount of different enemies. Pikmin 3 has close to the same amount of different enemies but it’s hard to notice when they are more sparse throughout the environments. The new enemies and the changes to existing ones made them interesting and also made me want to see them more. Bulborb eyes stick up out of their bodies now and have become a new weak point for them and the Cannon Larvae have been given two distinct forms based on whether they shoot out a rock or a snowball. There’s a new creature called the Bearded Amprat that charges itself with electricity before running at your Pikmin in an attempt to eat them. Skitterleafs make a return to the series but their more aggressive counterparts, the Dissected Skitterleaf, is an interesting addition that threatens your forces. All of the new enemies were worthy additions to the cast of oppressive forces. Were they more abundant they would have been more fun to engage with. Making the Pikmin bring back the entire enemy’s body was also fun because some enemies are much larger than others. This is particularly true for the bosses we encounter.
Pikmin 3 has six story-specific boss encounters. Each of them has specific attack patterns that require you to observe before you launch your assault. The quality of each battle lacked consistency. The Armored Mawdad consumed a large space in the arena and gave you short time windows to attack it while the Vehemoth Phosbat gave plenty of space to expose its weakness and attack. The latter was the more interesting of the two as it’s the first to incorporate the environment as part of its battle. Having to restore the light in the cave to expose the monster and make it vulnerable allows you to utilize the multitasking skills that you’ve been developing with your two leaders. The Sandbelching Meerslug is perhaps the least inspired of these big baddies since the battle demands you to wait until it surfaces and then rush it with your Pikmin. None of its attacks are incredibly threatening to your Pikmin and even the one that does kill them will only kill a few at a time. This is a consistent throughline of each battle. The final boss was, in some ways, better than the original Pikmin’s Emperor Bulblax but far inferior to the Titan Dweevil. Where the Titan Dweevil excelled was demanding the use of the various Pikmin types. This fight feels more generic and seemingly out of nowhere. Every boss in this game has had a reasonable belief to inhabit this planet whereas the Plasm Wraith doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere. The fact that it will most likely take you multiple in-game days to beat it is also a more frustrating aspect. The best fight was against the Quaggled Mireclops. This is the only boss (other than the Plasm Wraith) that was able to kill a significant portion of my Pikmin. It has multiple stages to its fight and was the most effective in both scale and battle mechanics. The other more interesting battle was an optional boss.
There are four optional boss encounters in Pikmin 3. There is a large Crawmad called the Bug-Eyed Crawmad which requires you to damage its eyes to expose its weak point and there’s the return of the Burrowing Snagret which has become trivial due to the lock-on feature and new Pikmin types. The most interesting of these optional bosses are the new Arachnorbs called the Shaggy Long Legs and the Baldy Long Legs. There isn’t much difference between these two as one leads into the other but they make for a more interesting approach to the Arachnorb family. Usually, you would attack their bulbous mid-section but the Shaggy Long Legs requires you to send Pikmin to climb up its legs and attack its leg joints before you can expose its belly and change it into a Baldy Long Legs. These changes are a great way to take something older and make it feel fresh again which is one of the more refreshing aspects of the game and makes good utilization of the new Pikmin types.
Very early on in the game, you are introduced to one of the two new Pikmin types. Rock Pikmin are needed almost immediately as you get going into the game. There are crystal barriers that only the Rock Pikmin are capable of destroying. They are also useful for combat as throwing them at creatures does more damage than their standard attack does. This allows you to dispatch enemies with ease quickly. They’re not as strong as the Purple Pikmin in Pikmin 2 were but they make for a valuable resource. It’s important to note that Purple Pikmin, along with White Pikmin, are not present in the story mode of Pikmin 3. They are included in other content but remain nowhere to be seen otherwise. The other new Pikmin type that you experience is Flying Pikmin. These Pikmin are the strongest Pikmin you will use despite them having the lowest attack modifier. Their strength comes not from their ability to deal damage to enemies but from their versatility in their flight. Creatures on the ground can’t reach them and they can carry fruits and corpses over water. Certain enemies were completely trivialized by these Pikmin being able to fly directly to their weak points. For the sake of difficulty, it’s a good thing they are obtained so late in the game as they could have undermined the usefulness of our core Pikmin types.
The regularly occurring Pikmin have seen fewer changes this time around. The usefulness of their abilities dwindles considerably with the lack of hazards that they are equipped to handle. Red Pikmin are still immune to fire, Yellow Pikmin are still immune to electricity, and Blue Pikmin can still survive in water. These remain great features except for there are few instances in which you can properly utilize them. Red Pikmin are still the strongest of the bunch so you should always be bringing some along with you for that purpose but there are only a couple of fire hazards this time around. You can’t destroy them either so you’re still having to bring your group through making sure to save any that catch on fire. Although Yellow Pikmin are still immune to electricity, electricity is no longer lethal to Pikmin. They also have a new obstacle they are meant to handle where they can chain together and touch the open ends of wires to complete a circuit. Electricity now stuns your Pikmin which is less threatening than before. Yellow Pikmin also have been given the White Pikmin’s ability to dig faster. Consistently Water Pikmin have only been useful because they can exist in water. While that ability has been proven invaluable, the idea that they are only good for that is frustrating. The most important aspect of the Pikmin abilities is how they are used when directed by one of the leaders.
Continuing the trend of giving us more ways to interact with the world, Pikmin 3 offers three captains to switch between. At face value, this seems like it can be too much to handle but the game does a good job of easing you into it by giving you enough time with only two of these leaders until you locate and rescue the captain of your team. The gradual increase in control allows for you to learn and get comfortable with new mechanics like “go here” where you can direct a leader to go independently to a visited location. They travel slower than if you were in control but it’s a great way to set up for retrieving fruit or clearing obstacles while you control a different leader. The verticality in the maps makes for a dynamic that requires planning and strategy between characters pursuing individual projects and working together to overcome larger obstacles. There is at least one instance in each area that requires your captains to throw each other forward to cross two gaps so they can open up a path that allows for conventional travel. While having the ability to do more in a day is nice, I don’t think the environments are quite expansive enough to make full use of this mechanic. If there were any more of these types of obstacles the areas would feel either crowded or linear.
Playing Pikmin 3 feels better than playing the previous two games despite its shortcomings. However, when you look at Pikmin 3’s accomplishments, the game is disappointing in many ways. Even new features like charge or lock-on, no matter how great they are, cannot make up for an incredibly short narrative and objectives that mean virtually nothing. Some side missions allow you to revisit boss fights and challenge your ability to operate under a time limit. There is also a new iteration of versus mode where you can compete against your friends by completing objectives on a Bingo board. Ultimately I’m left wishing there was more to the main story though. Considering the consecutive successes of the first two games, I’m left wondering how we got to disappointing boss fights and a brief narrative. I would like to maintain that this game is still good by all means but it falls below the standard established by the series as a whole. While Pikmin 3 makes good use of the foundation laid before it, the sum of its parts makes for an average experience overall.