Good game, but I just cannot get over how patronized I feel while playing this game, and in the worst possible way. The amount of time I've spent in my playthrough wrestling the controls due to the reticle snapping to something I didn't want is too frustrating to ignore. I think this might be one of the most frustrating control schemes I've ever dealt with, not because it's outright broken, but simply for how often it wants to wrestle control away from you. I got Pikmin killed because the reticle would snap away from what I aiming at to something completely different and I failed Dandori challenges by a matter of seconds due to spending a good chunk of the time correcting issues the autoaim created. The game wants to make aiming easier, but it fails spectacularly and makes it a worse controlling game than the two decade old Pikmin 1, which was far from perfect itself.

It doesn't help that the messages from your new roster of side characters will pester you while you're fighting the controls. This used to be a series in which you could wipe out dozens of your Pikmin and the game wouldn't say a word, because the act of these cute little creatures dying from your negligence spoke for itself as a bad thing. Now your obnoxious peanut gallery will chime in to lament your failure if so much as a single pikmin died, as if Nintendo thought you'd forget that you don't want your Pikmin to die. Imagine if every time you took damage in something like Metal Gear, someone would chime in on the Codec just to say "Poor Snake..." (on second thought, don't imagine that scenario, because that would be very funny).

The rewind feature is handy in caves where you're probably going to reset after major losses anyway, but wholly unnecessary in the overworld where your punishment for losing pikmin is supposed to be that you have to work to build their population back up. This is a game that wants to baby you as much as possible, and that wouldn't be an issue if this stuff was optional. I would love a feature to disable rewind outright when I begin a playthrough, turn off the additional dialogue, and most of all I would love if I could be trusted to actually aim my reticle myself.

And it's funny because in spite of this stuff the game is great fun. It features close to everything I would want in a Pikmin sequel. It should be a testament to how solid the foundation of this game is that I still scored it highly despite how angry it often made me. I can very easily get over annoying popups from characters or ignore the rewind feature, but one thing Nintendo made 100% sure to do was make sure I couldn't actually control the game how I wanted to, and that affects EVERY aspect of gameplay. I wanted to adore this game, but Nintendo decided they don't trust me to play the game correctly, so I couldn't. When it works, it's perhaps the peak of the series, when it doesn't, it's downright maddening.

Nintendo has outdone themselves by making an aiming system worse than the one they made over twenty years ago with Pikmin 1. Please make all of my decisions for me, Nintendo. I was stupid for ever wanting any semblance of control over the cursor, please play the game for me, and do so very poorly!

Lacking fluidity in many of its systems; constant interruptions combined with constant cursor jumping combined with constant radio chatter make this one of the most annoying games Nintendo has put out in a while.

I'm still really enjoying it, but WOW do I hate being treated like a toddler at every opportunity. Just let me CHOOSE to turn off some messages or the auto target.