note: was originally intending this as a flapjack, but I couldn't stop writing lol. didn't finish true ending and got lazy so I sorta put off writing this for a while. a little sloppy but I figured something this long should get posted as a full review.
once I finished the sage leaf dandori challenges + the olimar mode I sorta got what I wanted out of the experience. playing mario wonder a bit recently I noticed that that game has the good grace to offer some of its """hardcore""" content out of the gate as you explore; why didn't they do that shit in pikmin 4? could've tolerated the slow difficulty curve better in a tighter linear structure a la pikmin 3, but the shift back towards the pikmin 2-style cave progression prolongs the wait for the fun stuff. shocked by how rarely the caves incorporate room layouts that get more complex than the humble nuzzle; could've fooled me into thinking they had returned to randomized layouts as well given the plain feeling of many of these. overworld gameplay is fine but never evolves beyond idle busy-body gameplay, the dandori battles descend into chaos with their randomly spawning items and point bonuses, and the night missions strip out the normal routing focus in favor of clicker combat.
the challenges is where the designers flex their mental muscles quite a bit more. across the board rather fun to get perfect scores on (even the first few!); my pick for favorite of the non-sage leaf bunch is definitely the blue/ice one about halfway through where you trade off between gathering items in various underwater pools with freezing said pools to make walkways and shortcuts to other items. the new flaming pinecone idea is also a great twist on the old bombs, where the old limited-use mechanic is traded for reigniting the pinecone at little firepits strewn throughout a level. fits better with the new focus on short-term routing vs the long-term resource management of pikmin 1. the olimar mode scratches the latter itch by form-fitting the first four areas into a truncated version of the original and its limited day system. it reinterprets the overworld area from the campaign as actual routeable levels with limited resources (specifically with no shop), and for the couple hours it lasts I felt much more invigorated about thinking through my decisions.
dunno how I feel about oatchi. new swiss army knife tool that sorta turns off the game even without the many power-ups you can purchase for him. only works well in multitasking settings (as seen in the challenges) where choosing where to allocate him is more of a driving issue. he not only can deal with virtually every obstacle but also serves as a pikmin leader, although I found the method of dividing up the pikmin army between your avatar and oatchi to be more cumbersome than the buttery-smooth leader switching of pikmin 3. given that the caves follow pikmin 2's pattern of being best suited to tackling in a large ball rolling through each room one-by-one, I rarely ever felt the need to dismount oatchi. perhaps if his contextual actions were better geared for multitasking, I might have found it more useful; for example, if I send oatchi and a group of pikmin to knock down a dirt wall and then I go off to micromanage somewhere else, it would be preferable if oatchi would stay with the pikmin at the gate so I can switch over once their task is done rather than him immediately running back while the pikmin sit around dumbfounded. I got more comfortable with it in the sage leaf challenges where I was actually forced to play around oatchi, especially in the first few when I was still stubbornly refusing to upgrade oatchi past bare necessities. my positive takeaway is that they made this interesting asymmetric relationship with oatchi where he's the primary locus of your strategizing thanks to his wealth of abilities. on the other hand, in the context of the main campaign it ends up being more of a bulldozer that makes structured routing pointless in favor of just mindlessly throwing oatchi at everything.
combat in general has sorta been given up on. the biggest culprit is having not one but multiple types of pikmin that just turn off combat, with the infamous purples being supplemented by rocks and ice. ice in particular feels like a miss when it comes to explicitly establishing a trade-off: freezing an enemy and then shattering them is very safe but gives you nectar for leveling pikmin instead of a corpse you can trade for pikmin sprouts. would maybe work in a game that didn't freely give you extra and easy pikmin sprouts en masse, but here I was leaving corpses behind left and right out of laziness, so cheesing enemies with ice was almost always the best solution early game (even for bosses!). that plus the new lock-on (which has the dubious honor of both being brainless and annoyingly inaccurate and restrictive) plus oatchi plus charge... they just don't really know what to do with the combat system. which like, totally fine, but then you've gotta play up the routing, and I s2g 70% of this game just doesn't have that at all. at least the bosses are pretty quick?
I think what really killed it for me was the progression, where you're looking for your ship's pilot and you're just looking around the various areas trying to figure out where he is. felt like it was in-game weeks before I finally found him and could wrap up the main story. would've loved to skip a lot of the random-ass caves I did so I would've still felt fresh on the game for the endgame content, but unfortunately I kept getting stuck on optional shit. bet there was signposting I breezed past on accident so I'm not willing to completely blame that on the game. weirdly scattershot and unfocused. discussed more here.
once I finished the sage leaf dandori challenges + the olimar mode I sorta got what I wanted out of the experience. playing mario wonder a bit recently I noticed that that game has the good grace to offer some of its """hardcore""" content out of the gate as you explore; why didn't they do that shit in pikmin 4? could've tolerated the slow difficulty curve better in a tighter linear structure a la pikmin 3, but the shift back towards the pikmin 2-style cave progression prolongs the wait for the fun stuff. shocked by how rarely the caves incorporate room layouts that get more complex than the humble nuzzle; could've fooled me into thinking they had returned to randomized layouts as well given the plain feeling of many of these. overworld gameplay is fine but never evolves beyond idle busy-body gameplay, the dandori battles descend into chaos with their randomly spawning items and point bonuses, and the night missions strip out the normal routing focus in favor of clicker combat.
the challenges is where the designers flex their mental muscles quite a bit more. across the board rather fun to get perfect scores on (even the first few!); my pick for favorite of the non-sage leaf bunch is definitely the blue/ice one about halfway through where you trade off between gathering items in various underwater pools with freezing said pools to make walkways and shortcuts to other items. the new flaming pinecone idea is also a great twist on the old bombs, where the old limited-use mechanic is traded for reigniting the pinecone at little firepits strewn throughout a level. fits better with the new focus on short-term routing vs the long-term resource management of pikmin 1. the olimar mode scratches the latter itch by form-fitting the first four areas into a truncated version of the original and its limited day system. it reinterprets the overworld area from the campaign as actual routeable levels with limited resources (specifically with no shop), and for the couple hours it lasts I felt much more invigorated about thinking through my decisions.
dunno how I feel about oatchi. new swiss army knife tool that sorta turns off the game even without the many power-ups you can purchase for him. only works well in multitasking settings (as seen in the challenges) where choosing where to allocate him is more of a driving issue. he not only can deal with virtually every obstacle but also serves as a pikmin leader, although I found the method of dividing up the pikmin army between your avatar and oatchi to be more cumbersome than the buttery-smooth leader switching of pikmin 3. given that the caves follow pikmin 2's pattern of being best suited to tackling in a large ball rolling through each room one-by-one, I rarely ever felt the need to dismount oatchi. perhaps if his contextual actions were better geared for multitasking, I might have found it more useful; for example, if I send oatchi and a group of pikmin to knock down a dirt wall and then I go off to micromanage somewhere else, it would be preferable if oatchi would stay with the pikmin at the gate so I can switch over once their task is done rather than him immediately running back while the pikmin sit around dumbfounded. I got more comfortable with it in the sage leaf challenges where I was actually forced to play around oatchi, especially in the first few when I was still stubbornly refusing to upgrade oatchi past bare necessities. my positive takeaway is that they made this interesting asymmetric relationship with oatchi where he's the primary locus of your strategizing thanks to his wealth of abilities. on the other hand, in the context of the main campaign it ends up being more of a bulldozer that makes structured routing pointless in favor of just mindlessly throwing oatchi at everything.
combat in general has sorta been given up on. the biggest culprit is having not one but multiple types of pikmin that just turn off combat, with the infamous purples being supplemented by rocks and ice. ice in particular feels like a miss when it comes to explicitly establishing a trade-off: freezing an enemy and then shattering them is very safe but gives you nectar for leveling pikmin instead of a corpse you can trade for pikmin sprouts. would maybe work in a game that didn't freely give you extra and easy pikmin sprouts en masse, but here I was leaving corpses behind left and right out of laziness, so cheesing enemies with ice was almost always the best solution early game (even for bosses!). that plus the new lock-on (which has the dubious honor of both being brainless and annoyingly inaccurate and restrictive) plus oatchi plus charge... they just don't really know what to do with the combat system. which like, totally fine, but then you've gotta play up the routing, and I s2g 70% of this game just doesn't have that at all. at least the bosses are pretty quick?
I think what really killed it for me was the progression, where you're looking for your ship's pilot and you're just looking around the various areas trying to figure out where he is. felt like it was in-game weeks before I finally found him and could wrap up the main story. would've loved to skip a lot of the random-ass caves I did so I would've still felt fresh on the game for the endgame content, but unfortunately I kept getting stuck on optional shit. bet there was signposting I breezed past on accident so I'm not willing to completely blame that on the game. weirdly scattershot and unfocused. discussed more here.