WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH I FUCKING LOVE PIKMIN, I LOVE BEING EMOTIONALLY ATTACHED TO SILLY LIL’ GUYS JUST TO BE DEVASTATED WHEN I LOSE ONE TO A FUCKING FROG, I LOVE DESTROYING AN ENTRIE ECOSYSTEM AS A SILLY CAPTAIN AND MAKING MY ADORABLE ALIEN CHILDREN CARRY HIGHLY DANGEROUS EXPLOSIVES, LET’S FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

It's been a long-ass time since a game has made me feel this irrationally happy, just a barrage of every positive emotion imaginable compressed into a collection of 3D models and funny sounds. There’s something about commanding and caring about an army of colored plant-aliens and exploring these forgotten forests and lakes that made me a happy motherfucker, it’s glee in its purest state.

It's a response I really can’t explain, ‘cause in reality, Pikmin is kinda the opposite of loud and bombastic; it’s a quiet, borderline meditative game, mixed with an overwhelming sense of stress and time constraint that present every single second that passes in PNF-404. 30 days to reclaim 30 spaceship parts, 25 if we ignore the extra ones, an objective which, on its own, rises stakes to the stars, and that thought will dictate every single action, and yet, it still finds room for joy.

Progression in Pikmin is entirely dictated by what you decided to do in those 30 days, which also means that it goes by pretty fast. Once you arrive at The Forest Navel, the second out of the three main areas (there’s also other 2, but one serves more as a tutorial and another as a final challenge after getting the 29 ship parts) you will have unlocked every single Pikmin type there is, and considering how you unlock that area pretty quickly and you need Blues to 100% percent The Forest of Hope, you’ll have them all basically throughout the entire game, and the purpose and use of each is clear: Reds are the strongest and can resist fire, Yellows can be thrown the highest and can carry Rock Bombs, and Blues are the only ones that can go through water without kicking the bucket. It’s with that knowledge and army of friends that you are left to your own devices, and it flows; the openness of these three main areas makes the daunting objective and the time limit feel much more manageable, especially when you get the radar, which can be pretty early on. You chose which parts to go to first, which routes to take, which roadblocks to take down and how to manage your squad and shortcuts.

You can go to get a propeller without a care and trying to ignore all hostile fauna and barricades, and you know what, that may work and you mar arrive at the part in one piece!... But things may not go as well when your Pikmin have to bring the stuff all the way back… I learned that the hard way…

Your messes and fuck ups feel humongous, and unless you decide to reset your current day, those mistakes are gonna be felt through the rest of the days… except, it’s actually pretty hard to mess things up beyond repair. Even if you feel as you could have done better or lost a ton of Pikmin to some random bird sprouting from the earth or a giant bouncy spider, you still probably got at least one part, opened up a pathway or two, made a source of bombs accessible, build a bridge that allows for non Blue Pikming to reach different items or that create faster routes; the little worlds of Pikmin may feel big, but they are still… well, small, even if you screw a day or two, you probably also made something that will help you greatly in the days that’ll follow. Pikmin is a game full of losing conditions: extinctions, giant enemies, blocked paths… and yet is also full of little victories, constant reminders that your strategizing, both fly and between days, pays off immensely.

Despair won’t do much here, and there are reasons to be hopeful, and Olimar himself does a pretty good job of reminding that.

The Captain is a damn good protagonist in a way I wasn’t expecting, yet in the way he needed to be. This isn’t a game about saving the planet or even he Pikmin, those are doing pretty good despite the post-apocalyptic, this is a game about saving Olimar. He got his ass stranded and now gotta fix the damn mess, and that in it on itself is a pretty compelling idea, but it’s made even better by how fleshed out he really is. I really expected him to be just som random silly guy, and instead what I got is a man with a life back home, and learning about his life, the gifts of his children, the advice of his wife that helps him when he first crash-landed, or just knowing his deeper thoughts at the end of the day, his findings about the wildlife and ship-par description (or just complaining about his boss and company and him talking about a massage machine which is funny as FUCK), it all amounts to a character which I really ended up caring about. I want Olimar to see his family again, and that makes me act faster and more carefully, it makes an already fun part collecting and time managing even more meaningful, another piece of the borader Pikmin puzzle that falls into place alongside everything else.

The Pikmin blindly following Olimar, reaching new horizons and discovering the secrets that this planet holds as well as how the Pikmin themselves work, or reading the night log after a whole day of hectic strategizing; Pikmin almost seems like a tale about the fun in adventuring in the direst of situations. The Captain names everything he encounter after things from back home or his own thoughts, the Pikmin just relax and lay down when left alone and celebrate after bringing a piece back to base, the fauna can be incredibly dangerous, but that only makes it even better when you swarm enemies properly. The only thing that matches beating a Cannon Beetle deathless or stopping a Fly Snatcher from stealing your little friends is getting multiple hard to get parts in a single day; there are so many different victories across a sea of hardships that is hard not to smile, 9is hard not to feel accomplished when managing Pikmin perfectly or successfully cleaning areas and encountering its wildlife, hell, the hardest, most deadly enemies in the game and completely optional, some not even awarding any parts, and it feels warranted! Not every single action is your final objective, but everything you do builds to it, and a game that should be riddled with stress and tension (and at times it still is) becomes kind of… zen, to put it bluntly.

Not everything is fine tuned as the world itself makes it out to be; some stuff like the flowers that change your Pikmin to other types or bugs that eat bridges thing feel vastly underused, with the former being only really useful in two puzzles for two parts and the latter barely plays a part into things since most bridges that are affected by that will probably be used only once. And that’s not even getting into probably the only thing that made me feel frustrated at the game, and something that isn’t even related to anything to the world or the way you control… and that is the brains of the Pikmin. Look, I love these fellas and I love how dumb they can be, but when I say the blindly follow Olimar, I MEAN IT. These guys will disregard any change on level or body of water and will just keep on going, and once that happens, good luck finding them again or getting them out before they die! Out of the 200 or so Pikmin that died in my run, I’d say about half of those did because of reasons that completely escaped my or my enemies’ control; things like tripping, getting distracted or one Pikmin hogging the nectar form themselves I can kinda get behind, because they give them much more personality and they are, to be honest, funny as all hell moments. But losing members my squad just because the game decided they are acting dumb or even to some random weird glitch, that not only feels horrible, is probably the only thing that feels out of place in this otherwise wonderful, rewarding experience.

I didn’t expect to get all 30 parts, let alone in less than 30 days, I didn’t expect to learn to manage my little soldiers so well and for it to be so fun, I could have never see coming in a million years feeling so attached to every single member of the cast of this game, even the enemies that made my life so difficult, I didn’t expect this to make me feel so… happy. Pikmin is a small game about some small guy in his small predicament, and the small aliens that helped him and the small victories they accomplished along the way. It’s a small game, and yet it feels grander than many world-saving adventures, everything about it does, even placing a pellet in the right place.

It’s a small game, and it makes me smile.

Basically, what I’m trying to say isWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO PIKMIN IS DA BEST BAYBEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE LET’S FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO-

Also, take a shot for every time I wrote ‘’Pikmin’’ in this review… way actually don’t you may perish wait waitWAIT.