This review contains spoilers
Pikmin 4 is a fantastically well made game, it looks incredible, it's bursting with ideas and is a lot of fun to play, but it has a sort of weird relationship to its status as a sequel to the previous 3 pikmin games.
Pikmin 4 makes a pretty rough first impression. The tutorial is very long, limited in player agency, poorly paced, and egregiously, overbearingly talkative in that old way that you would have hoped nintendo would have learned not to do by now. It is also immediately apparent that some kind of weird retcon is happening with the previous games; Pikmin 4 acts as if none of them have happened, and also contains elements and characters from each of them. It sort of feels like they were afraid to move beyond including Olimar, since he's the Brand Mascot, but also couldnt come up with a justification for his inclusion other than "Olimar crashed AGAIN, time to go rescue him." Its a real Modern Nintendo move, the same nintendo that wont let you ever play as Zelda cause Link is the hero and thats just the way it has to be, the same nintendo that wont allow mario characters to have more than a smidgen of individuality in Paper Mario anymore cause it would somehow compromise the purity of the Brand Identity. Alongside this is a shift in tone that does away with most of the melancholy, mystery and menace that remained in the series from the first two games. Its replaced by an optimistic, hopeful whimsy, where it doesn't want you to think about the brutal struggle for survival in a hostile environment, or the unknown fate of the former human inhabitants of the planet that built all these gardens and houses you explore and used to own the objects you collect. There are some body-horror-ish things in the game that raise some truly wild questions about the nature of pikmin, but the game seemingly doesnt even realize this because it does almost nothing with them narratively. It feels like they didnt even notice or care about the implications of what they had come up with. It is the least the Pikmin series has ever been interested in its own inherent weirdness.
But, once you are through the tutorial and the game begins to open up, what you have ahead of you is a genuinely clever, incredibly well designed puzzle game, that is a complete joy to explore. The main areas of the game are huge, theres a lot of them, and there's an excellent variety of modes of play that all feel quite different despite sharing the same basic gameplay. And it is more of a puzzle game than previous entries in the series; those elements were always there, but in Pikmin 4, the struggle for survival and resource management of Pikmin 1-2 takes a complete backseat to exploration and puzzle solving. This is framed in the game by the concept of Dandori, which is the art of efficiently organizing and executing tasks to achieve better results in less time. Its a much more compelling take on strategic multitasking than Pikmin 3's incredibly half-baked 3-captain approach, even if it sacrifices a lot of the larger-scale tension of the older games to get there.
This brings us to Pikmin 4's biggest addition, Oatchi the Rescue Dog. Oatchi is a bug eyed little freak and I love him. Oatchi plays the role of secondary captain, combat and labor backup, and mobile weapons platform. He also has huge staring eyes that he will make unbroken eye contact to NPCs with every time you talk to them. You can command Oatchi to do various things, you can ride him around and throw pikmin from his back or charge into things, or you can assume direct control of him and split away from your primary captain. Oatchi simplifies and streamlines a lot of things that were troublesome in the previous games, without limiting the game design very much, and that's an impressive feat. The simplicity actually enables the design to focus in on what's best about the multitasking approach, the actualization of Dandori, which neither Pikmin 2 or 3 achieved with their attempts at the same ideas.
At the start of each in-game day, you wake up at a hub where all the people you've rescued are hanging out, and from there you can talk to them, upgrade yourself and Oatchi, buy items, and go on missions. The primary mode of play is exploration of large environments, just like in the previous games, and this feeds into all the other modes. There are more of these big levels here than in previous games, and the levels themselves are huge and detailed. It was a real joy to discover them and explore all the nooks and crannies of each in search of treasure, dungeons, and castaways. They look genuinely amazing as well, especially for a switch game. The lighting and shadows as the day passes, the detailed and believable material and texture work, and the immense sense of scale (or feeling of being very tiny) really sells the setting and makes it feel tangible. The monsters are lovingly animated and the sound design is fantastic. Its the closest the series has gotten to feeling like those great stop-motion pikmin shorts nintendo produced way back when. Its kind of wild to think this game looks this nice on the same system where a much less visually ambitious game like pokemon scarlet struggles to run at all.
Pikmin 4 does dungeons better than Pikmin 2 did. They're all hand-designed this time instead of the janky half-procgen setup in that game, and feel like miniature puzzle challenges a bit like the shrines in BotW/TotK, but without being disconnected from the game setting like in BotW/TotK. They split the difference between puzzle and exploration really well, and dive into the mechanics tied to different pikmin types in more detail than the other modes.
Alongside the dungeons are the Dandori challenges and battles, where you are tasked with collecting objects, or collecting more objects than your opponents, as efficiently as possible in given a time limit. These are self-contained tests of skill where you don't bring in your own pikmin and instead have to use the ones given to you, so you in the more difficult ones you have to get pretty good at working effectively within limitations to get a good score, and thats a lot of fun to figure out.
The last mode of play is the Nighttime Expeditions, which are all about defending a base from a stream of hungry monsters. You have to use glow pikmin for these, which are sort of an all purpose super ghost pikmin. The harder ones can get pretty frantic as you try to head off multiple streams of beasts or defend two bases at once, and they're pretty fun as a result.
All of these modes relate to the overall goal of rescuing all the castaways, and due to them being interconnected in key ways it very smoothly incentives you to change up which ones you're engaging with as you play. Despite being fairly open-ended and not enforcing a particular order of doing things besides new areas unlocking at certain treasure score thresholds, it feels very well paced. Its a brilliantly put together framework for progression.
As a game it's also fucking huge in a way i was not expecting. There is a lot going on in this game and it keeps going on, and going on, long after you expect it to end. But it maintains such a high quality that it never feels like it's overstayed its welcome. It is bursting with gameplay ideas and is very enthusiastic about sharing them with you. I haven't even touched the mode that appears to be a miniature remake of Pikmin 1, timer and all, yet! its wild that something like that is even in there!! Its really a feast of a game.
So once you get past the weird tonal and narrative choices and the generally softer-edged feel of it all, Pikmin 4 might genuinely be the best in the series from a game design standpoint. Its a bit too easy until the endgame finally ramps up, its a bit less strange and compelling tonally, and the characters talk way too much, but its such a joy to play that it overcomes those flaws and then some.
Pikmin 4 makes a pretty rough first impression. The tutorial is very long, limited in player agency, poorly paced, and egregiously, overbearingly talkative in that old way that you would have hoped nintendo would have learned not to do by now. It is also immediately apparent that some kind of weird retcon is happening with the previous games; Pikmin 4 acts as if none of them have happened, and also contains elements and characters from each of them. It sort of feels like they were afraid to move beyond including Olimar, since he's the Brand Mascot, but also couldnt come up with a justification for his inclusion other than "Olimar crashed AGAIN, time to go rescue him." Its a real Modern Nintendo move, the same nintendo that wont let you ever play as Zelda cause Link is the hero and thats just the way it has to be, the same nintendo that wont allow mario characters to have more than a smidgen of individuality in Paper Mario anymore cause it would somehow compromise the purity of the Brand Identity. Alongside this is a shift in tone that does away with most of the melancholy, mystery and menace that remained in the series from the first two games. Its replaced by an optimistic, hopeful whimsy, where it doesn't want you to think about the brutal struggle for survival in a hostile environment, or the unknown fate of the former human inhabitants of the planet that built all these gardens and houses you explore and used to own the objects you collect. There are some body-horror-ish things in the game that raise some truly wild questions about the nature of pikmin, but the game seemingly doesnt even realize this because it does almost nothing with them narratively. It feels like they didnt even notice or care about the implications of what they had come up with. It is the least the Pikmin series has ever been interested in its own inherent weirdness.
But, once you are through the tutorial and the game begins to open up, what you have ahead of you is a genuinely clever, incredibly well designed puzzle game, that is a complete joy to explore. The main areas of the game are huge, theres a lot of them, and there's an excellent variety of modes of play that all feel quite different despite sharing the same basic gameplay. And it is more of a puzzle game than previous entries in the series; those elements were always there, but in Pikmin 4, the struggle for survival and resource management of Pikmin 1-2 takes a complete backseat to exploration and puzzle solving. This is framed in the game by the concept of Dandori, which is the art of efficiently organizing and executing tasks to achieve better results in less time. Its a much more compelling take on strategic multitasking than Pikmin 3's incredibly half-baked 3-captain approach, even if it sacrifices a lot of the larger-scale tension of the older games to get there.
This brings us to Pikmin 4's biggest addition, Oatchi the Rescue Dog. Oatchi is a bug eyed little freak and I love him. Oatchi plays the role of secondary captain, combat and labor backup, and mobile weapons platform. He also has huge staring eyes that he will make unbroken eye contact to NPCs with every time you talk to them. You can command Oatchi to do various things, you can ride him around and throw pikmin from his back or charge into things, or you can assume direct control of him and split away from your primary captain. Oatchi simplifies and streamlines a lot of things that were troublesome in the previous games, without limiting the game design very much, and that's an impressive feat. The simplicity actually enables the design to focus in on what's best about the multitasking approach, the actualization of Dandori, which neither Pikmin 2 or 3 achieved with their attempts at the same ideas.
At the start of each in-game day, you wake up at a hub where all the people you've rescued are hanging out, and from there you can talk to them, upgrade yourself and Oatchi, buy items, and go on missions. The primary mode of play is exploration of large environments, just like in the previous games, and this feeds into all the other modes. There are more of these big levels here than in previous games, and the levels themselves are huge and detailed. It was a real joy to discover them and explore all the nooks and crannies of each in search of treasure, dungeons, and castaways. They look genuinely amazing as well, especially for a switch game. The lighting and shadows as the day passes, the detailed and believable material and texture work, and the immense sense of scale (or feeling of being very tiny) really sells the setting and makes it feel tangible. The monsters are lovingly animated and the sound design is fantastic. Its the closest the series has gotten to feeling like those great stop-motion pikmin shorts nintendo produced way back when. Its kind of wild to think this game looks this nice on the same system where a much less visually ambitious game like pokemon scarlet struggles to run at all.
Pikmin 4 does dungeons better than Pikmin 2 did. They're all hand-designed this time instead of the janky half-procgen setup in that game, and feel like miniature puzzle challenges a bit like the shrines in BotW/TotK, but without being disconnected from the game setting like in BotW/TotK. They split the difference between puzzle and exploration really well, and dive into the mechanics tied to different pikmin types in more detail than the other modes.
Alongside the dungeons are the Dandori challenges and battles, where you are tasked with collecting objects, or collecting more objects than your opponents, as efficiently as possible in given a time limit. These are self-contained tests of skill where you don't bring in your own pikmin and instead have to use the ones given to you, so you in the more difficult ones you have to get pretty good at working effectively within limitations to get a good score, and thats a lot of fun to figure out.
The last mode of play is the Nighttime Expeditions, which are all about defending a base from a stream of hungry monsters. You have to use glow pikmin for these, which are sort of an all purpose super ghost pikmin. The harder ones can get pretty frantic as you try to head off multiple streams of beasts or defend two bases at once, and they're pretty fun as a result.
All of these modes relate to the overall goal of rescuing all the castaways, and due to them being interconnected in key ways it very smoothly incentives you to change up which ones you're engaging with as you play. Despite being fairly open-ended and not enforcing a particular order of doing things besides new areas unlocking at certain treasure score thresholds, it feels very well paced. Its a brilliantly put together framework for progression.
As a game it's also fucking huge in a way i was not expecting. There is a lot going on in this game and it keeps going on, and going on, long after you expect it to end. But it maintains such a high quality that it never feels like it's overstayed its welcome. It is bursting with gameplay ideas and is very enthusiastic about sharing them with you. I haven't even touched the mode that appears to be a miniature remake of Pikmin 1, timer and all, yet! its wild that something like that is even in there!! Its really a feast of a game.
So once you get past the weird tonal and narrative choices and the generally softer-edged feel of it all, Pikmin 4 might genuinely be the best in the series from a game design standpoint. Its a bit too easy until the endgame finally ramps up, its a bit less strange and compelling tonally, and the characters talk way too much, but its such a joy to play that it overcomes those flaws and then some.