This review contains spoilers
My relationship with Pikmin has been as spread out and short lived as the games themselves. I played Pikmin 2 and 3 around release but never even finished them or went back to them. So I don't exactly know what a Pikmin game is TRULY about, or have confidence in what is or isn't new.
But this time I went as far as going just short of 100%'ing Pikmin 4 (no way am I platinuming all those challenges), so I have a very good idea of what Pikmin 4 is. It's a comfy as hell game where death of Pikmin has almost no consequence. A good or bad thing? I guess it depends how the series has developed your taste and expectations. It's so easy to build up huge herds of Pikmin that it becomes trivial to replace any lost ones[1]. And if you didn't want to replace them there's always the rewind feature, undo any mistakes up to the last major event you completed, or 2 real-time minutes. It is 100% optional so there's no point complaining about it, but the game doesn't give you much consequence for not babysitting properly. To put the final nail in the coffin of this is that you're handed so much juice-spray, or whatever it's called, that temporarily powers up your Pikmin AND blooms them to full that even that tiny drawback of having to replace a flower Pikmin with a newly sprouted leaf one is negated by simply pressing a button.
[1]This mostly only applies to the red, blue and yellow ones, because you can't farm Pikmin easily until you get their onions. And for some reason, despite the game giving you those 3 coloured onions in level 1, you don't even START getting extra ones until 4/6ths of the way through the game. And it's only in the post-game's bonus content do you finally get the last 2. It's a very weirdly paced system. I guess they really wanted you to feel like the non-Pikmin 1 Pikmin were special, but it made an unbalanced system where 3 types of Pikmin were completely disposable, while the other 5 types ranged from "Oh damn it died, but luckily I have 60 more of them" to "Oh my god the game has only given me 5 of those!" because ice Pikmin are in every other cave while Pink ones are only in like 2 caves until you finally get their onion.
Enough rambling about the struggles of death, or lack thereof. The game, for me, wasn't about trying to carefully navigate every encounter as strategically and death-free as possible. It was about a comfy atmosphere doing tasks that required very little brain power to make little cute creatures do repetitive, but addicting, actions all the while cleaning up non-respawning enemies, building bridges and moving crates to create shortcuts so every time you go back through an area it's just that much easier. It's a surprisingly compelling system.
The game has strength in its variety though, because when you do want the game to push you to go at its pace, rather than your own, there's Dandori challenges. Collect as much stuff in an area under a strict time limit, or go head-to-head with an AI to collect more than them. Both are great concepts that don't put the game in any kind of shift gameplay wise, but still make the player engagement a completely different beast. I will say though that the later versus battles get way too messy, because there's Pikmin everywhere, both yours and your opponents, and it's hard as hell to keep track of what's going on. If their dog charges into your Pikmin they just become kind of inactive until you whistle at them, but the problem is you can't KNOW they've been attacked because you don't always have them with you. The AI of course has knowledge of everything going on in the field at a time since they have the advantage of being fed data directly into its artifical brain, while a human will just run across some Pikmin laying on the floor and think "how long have you guys been there?!".
There's also night stages which provide a simple tower defence style game. So yeah, despite never needing to deviate much from the core of what makes Pikmin Pikmin, the game still manages to give you so many ways to play with its mechanics.
There's a decent amount of content in the game, even if the game has the most forced "post-game" I've ever seen by having a whole credits sequence followed immediately by the plot continuing until an actual final boss (which the plot to the credits lacks). Throwing the last 2 levels of the game after the credits doesn't make it look like your game is packed with content just because it can be described as having "a long post-game". Especially since Olimar's quest and the Sage challenges would make for decent post-game content by themselves.
Speaking of Olimar's quest, I like that every 'treasure' in that directly ties into the completion. In the main game collecting treasure is fine at first as everything gets you a bit closer to unlocking the next level. It's just that there's no real direction to it all. The amount of treasure you need to unlock all the levels is laughably small for the amount the game hands you, and after that you're only collecting them for the sake of it. The worst part of this is in the 4th level (aka final one before the credits) there's 3 treasures that make up a code that you need to enter at a safe in the level. That was SUCH a clever idea. The fact that treasures that are seemingly as random as any other actually get used in the field is so engaging, and the fact it ONLY happens here is just devastating. It made me think how much better these levels would be if instead of just finding "rubber duck" I found "Raft to get me across huge body of water" or instead of "bicycle bell" I found "thing to lure titanic, unbeatable enemy which will move them out of the way to access a new area". There's so many ideas you could do with this, and the worst part is I probably wouldn't have even thought of it if you didn't give me this tiny taster.
Even just minor interactions with some of the treasures would be nice. One series of treasure is a bunch of Jigsaw pieces. Instead of just showing me the completed puzzle when I've collected them all, why not let me do the puzzle myself?
Anyway, enough about what the game could have done better. I liked the system the games give you in regards to upgrades, both for your player character and Oatchi, your canine companion. I do enjoy games like this which have you playing through the same areas over and over, while slowly providing you with ways to get more powerful so you can feel the stage getting easier each time you visit it.
As you find castaways in caves the majority of them will also give you quests (this stops by the time you find half of them, with the latter half of the characters you can save serving to just be a number in the completion rating...which is a common trend in this game). The quests are nothing special, mostly just stuff you were going to do anyway if you were going for more than the bare minimum completion. Granted 99% of the rewards are just something which can be farmed in any level anyway but it's fine.
I really loved this game. I enjoyed every part of it. Pretty much all of its flaws ironically just come to mind specifically because the game gives you small glimpses at certain positives and you realise they could have done more of that, rather than being because the game is doing something negative.
But this time I went as far as going just short of 100%'ing Pikmin 4 (no way am I platinuming all those challenges), so I have a very good idea of what Pikmin 4 is. It's a comfy as hell game where death of Pikmin has almost no consequence. A good or bad thing? I guess it depends how the series has developed your taste and expectations. It's so easy to build up huge herds of Pikmin that it becomes trivial to replace any lost ones[1]. And if you didn't want to replace them there's always the rewind feature, undo any mistakes up to the last major event you completed, or 2 real-time minutes. It is 100% optional so there's no point complaining about it, but the game doesn't give you much consequence for not babysitting properly. To put the final nail in the coffin of this is that you're handed so much juice-spray, or whatever it's called, that temporarily powers up your Pikmin AND blooms them to full that even that tiny drawback of having to replace a flower Pikmin with a newly sprouted leaf one is negated by simply pressing a button.
[1]This mostly only applies to the red, blue and yellow ones, because you can't farm Pikmin easily until you get their onions. And for some reason, despite the game giving you those 3 coloured onions in level 1, you don't even START getting extra ones until 4/6ths of the way through the game. And it's only in the post-game's bonus content do you finally get the last 2. It's a very weirdly paced system. I guess they really wanted you to feel like the non-Pikmin 1 Pikmin were special, but it made an unbalanced system where 3 types of Pikmin were completely disposable, while the other 5 types ranged from "Oh damn it died, but luckily I have 60 more of them" to "Oh my god the game has only given me 5 of those!" because ice Pikmin are in every other cave while Pink ones are only in like 2 caves until you finally get their onion.
Enough rambling about the struggles of death, or lack thereof. The game, for me, wasn't about trying to carefully navigate every encounter as strategically and death-free as possible. It was about a comfy atmosphere doing tasks that required very little brain power to make little cute creatures do repetitive, but addicting, actions all the while cleaning up non-respawning enemies, building bridges and moving crates to create shortcuts so every time you go back through an area it's just that much easier. It's a surprisingly compelling system.
The game has strength in its variety though, because when you do want the game to push you to go at its pace, rather than your own, there's Dandori challenges. Collect as much stuff in an area under a strict time limit, or go head-to-head with an AI to collect more than them. Both are great concepts that don't put the game in any kind of shift gameplay wise, but still make the player engagement a completely different beast. I will say though that the later versus battles get way too messy, because there's Pikmin everywhere, both yours and your opponents, and it's hard as hell to keep track of what's going on. If their dog charges into your Pikmin they just become kind of inactive until you whistle at them, but the problem is you can't KNOW they've been attacked because you don't always have them with you. The AI of course has knowledge of everything going on in the field at a time since they have the advantage of being fed data directly into its artifical brain, while a human will just run across some Pikmin laying on the floor and think "how long have you guys been there?!".
There's also night stages which provide a simple tower defence style game. So yeah, despite never needing to deviate much from the core of what makes Pikmin Pikmin, the game still manages to give you so many ways to play with its mechanics.
There's a decent amount of content in the game, even if the game has the most forced "post-game" I've ever seen by having a whole credits sequence followed immediately by the plot continuing until an actual final boss (which the plot to the credits lacks). Throwing the last 2 levels of the game after the credits doesn't make it look like your game is packed with content just because it can be described as having "a long post-game". Especially since Olimar's quest and the Sage challenges would make for decent post-game content by themselves.
Speaking of Olimar's quest, I like that every 'treasure' in that directly ties into the completion. In the main game collecting treasure is fine at first as everything gets you a bit closer to unlocking the next level. It's just that there's no real direction to it all. The amount of treasure you need to unlock all the levels is laughably small for the amount the game hands you, and after that you're only collecting them for the sake of it. The worst part of this is in the 4th level (aka final one before the credits) there's 3 treasures that make up a code that you need to enter at a safe in the level. That was SUCH a clever idea. The fact that treasures that are seemingly as random as any other actually get used in the field is so engaging, and the fact it ONLY happens here is just devastating. It made me think how much better these levels would be if instead of just finding "rubber duck" I found "Raft to get me across huge body of water" or instead of "bicycle bell" I found "thing to lure titanic, unbeatable enemy which will move them out of the way to access a new area". There's so many ideas you could do with this, and the worst part is I probably wouldn't have even thought of it if you didn't give me this tiny taster.
Even just minor interactions with some of the treasures would be nice. One series of treasure is a bunch of Jigsaw pieces. Instead of just showing me the completed puzzle when I've collected them all, why not let me do the puzzle myself?
Anyway, enough about what the game could have done better. I liked the system the games give you in regards to upgrades, both for your player character and Oatchi, your canine companion. I do enjoy games like this which have you playing through the same areas over and over, while slowly providing you with ways to get more powerful so you can feel the stage getting easier each time you visit it.
As you find castaways in caves the majority of them will also give you quests (this stops by the time you find half of them, with the latter half of the characters you can save serving to just be a number in the completion rating...which is a common trend in this game). The quests are nothing special, mostly just stuff you were going to do anyway if you were going for more than the bare minimum completion. Granted 99% of the rewards are just something which can be farmed in any level anyway but it's fine.
I really loved this game. I enjoyed every part of it. Pretty much all of its flaws ironically just come to mind specifically because the game gives you small glimpses at certain positives and you realise they could have done more of that, rather than being because the game is doing something negative.