Pikmin 4 is fine.

It isn’t often that I get actively excited for video game releases, considering that my “backlog” of games is at the time of my writing this sitting at well over two thousand games I could try out at any time. I’m in no rush to play the newest stuff that comes out when I haven’t even finished Bloodborne, Mother 3, or even started Disco Elysium yet. I was actually excited for Pikmin 4 though. I preordered it and everything. I don’t even buy games usually, but this one I wanted to dedicate time to right away. Pikmin is one of my favorite game series ever. It’s a little rough around the edges, but I consider Pikmin 2 to be one of my favorite video games of all time. Pikmin 4 is fun. Good, even. But for me, it doesn’t touch Pikmin 2.

Pikmin 4 actually makes me feel the way that I’ve seen some diehard Pikmin 1 fans talk about Pikmin 2, with its lack of any sense of real pressure and focus on free exploration. On one hand, I agree that it takes away from the uniquely isolating, anxious, and unfamiliar mood carefully crafted for the first entry. On the other hand, Pikmin 2 was my first Pikmin game and I greatly valued the lack of pressure that allowed me to learn the ins and outs of it when I was an overly-cautious child. I’m pretty sure it took me 60 days or something the first time I finished it, and now that I’m an adult I can fairly consistently clear it in a couple of in-game weeks. I originally raised an eyebrow when first reading the question of “why bother with the day-night cycle at all if there’s no limit of days” regarding 2, but now I feel myself asking the exact same question with 4.

The actual answer is to create a stronger atmosphere and sense of environment, which Pikmin 4 nails (for the most part). The fact that you need to plan out your day and get work done during daylight, lest you face the wrath of wild night creatures, does wonders for building this sense of mystery and fear about the world you’re exploring. But this connects directly to what I feel to be the single biggest issue with the game: a profound failure of tension building or real danger. What we have here is an incredibly beautiful and vast landscape full of wonder and beauty set in front of us, begging to be explored after ten years of waiting for a new Pikmin game, full of treasures, caves, and enemies recognizable from the first three games.

And this dopey yellow shithead and his crew cheapen the entire experience.

Also the night missions are stupid and dumb contextually because they break the Pikmin story rule about nighttime being too dangerous to explore and ruin immersion by being actually pretty reasonable to handle. The game mode itself is fun enough though, Pikmin Tower Defense is a nice idea. I have nothing else to say about that.

Back to the dog.

With the introduction of the rescue pup Oatchi, levels are now designed with his abilities in-mind, like jumping, traveling through tunnels, and being able to carry Pikmin on his back while traversing through water, an obstacle previously reserved to blue Pikmin exclusively. He also doubles as a second captain who can command and lead Pikmin, just like the player character. You’re given the option (repeatedly encouraged) to give your pup various upgrades to make him stronger, whether it be to deal more damage, carry heavier objects, swim faster, etc., which obviously makes the game easier. However, riding on Oatchi’s back with your Pikmin entirely removes a key weakness of your ant-carrot army of the previous games:

Your hurtbox has now been concentrated to the back of a responsive and easily-maneuverable puppy dog.

I’m torn on this mechanically. On one hand, by the nature of all of your Pikmin being focused on a single spot, you now risk losing a greater number of Pikmin at once to single strikes. I know this because a boss creature stepped on me and Oatchi and I lost most of my troops. No, I don’t want to talk about it.

On the other hand, due to the way Oatchi’s tackle ability works, taking down most of the larger, higher-health enemies is now a linear experience. You hop on Oatchi’s back with your Pikmin, you charge your tackle, you land the tackle, your Pikmin hop off of Oatchi and onto the enemy, the enemy’s health depletes almost instantly.

A game doesn’t have to conform to the rules of any particular genre, but taking an engaging element of strategy out of a “Real-Time Strategy” game rubs me the wrong way.

I don’t actually hate the Oatchi-specific puzzles that come up on occasion. I like the little fella’s design. I think he’s goofy, especially when he makes the little whwhwhwhwhwhw noise with his whistle. But my problems with him get emphasized specifically in the context of the Engulfed Castle.

The Engulfed Castle is, in short, an excellent reference to the Submerged Castle from Pikmin 2, what I feel to be the most memorable and interesting cave in that game. It’s the only cave with a distinct restriction on the type of Pikmin you’re allowed to bring with you, as it is completely surrounded by water. A rule of Pikmin 2 is that you’re only able to enter a cave with the Pikmin directly in your squad, which means you can only bring blue Pikmin into this cave. The Engulfed Castle of Pikmin 4 is surrounded by water as well, but Pikmin 4 does not have this restriction on caves, so Nintendo decided to circumvent this by simply not allowing you to bring any other Pikmin type into the cave when selecting which Pikmin to join you. This cave functions just like any other, with long dark passages for you to explore and collect treasure, except your squad doesn’t have resistance to hazardous elements like fire, poison, and electricity. This means that you need to tread carefully in navigating obstacles to defeat enemies and get to the treasure. However, after about 5 minutes have passed on a sublevel, this steamroller-lookin’-guy shows up and starts meandering around the place, squishing everything in its way. Your blue Pikmin cannot hurt it.

The danger of the Waterwraith comes from the task of needing to carefully bring treasure back to your base coupled with how large, slow, and vulnerable your army is when spread out.

Oatchi lets your squad avoid the Waterwraith completely by carrying you and your Pikmin on its back.

You can just walk right past it. What’s it going to do? Turn slightly to the right? I’m already at the exit with all the treasure collected, you Flubber-lookin’ freak.

In Oatchi’s defense, it’s not entirely his fault. Nintendo also made Pikmin faster, so there’s not really any risk of them being left behind if you call them with your whistle (which is also the best it’s ever been) and try to make a break for it.

I will give Nintendo credit though, because they replicated the layout of the original sublevel floors from Pikmin 2. That was a very cool thing to realize while I was comfortably walking away from the steamroller.

Additionally, Pikmin 4 is so extraordinarily liberal in the sheer number of resources it gives you that I actively stopped giving a shit about Pikmin deaths. This is coming from someone who would hit restart on my GameCube every time a Pikmin died on my first playthrough of Pikmin 2. I’m sitting here with unused bombs, electricity, mines, and 56 Ultra-Spicy Sprays that I don’t even remember getting, and the game has the audacity to remind me that I can always rewind the clock if I feel bad about losing a single Pikmin. Relax, game. I have 400 other ice Pikmin sitting in reserve. It’s gonna be fine.

Granted, Pikmin 3 offered this via day-selection, but it wasn’t in-your-face about it the way in which 4 does it.

I don’t think a game being easier is necessarily a bad thing, but it feels a little wack to me when it’s a Pikmin game specifically, especially the way it was done with this one. I don’t need a bunch of items to figure out how to clear a level. My amorphous controllable blob of little guys can handle this.

Now, I need to address the Rescue Corp. itself. I don’t mind a world of characters that talk and have personalities. Hell, EarthBound is my favorite video game ever because of exactly this. However, what I do mind is a world that doesn’t know how to shut the fuck up.

These characters do not allow for any sense of mystery or wonder while it happens to you, the player, directly. “It sure is good we have the Pikmin with us!” No shit, we’re like three inches tall. You don’t need to have a message pop up that says “wow golly gosh gee you sure just lost 30 Pikmin to a rock-spider death explosion, it sure would be great to rewind time right about now” because you’re fucking experiencing it right there right in front of you. You’re having fun and making video game memories, and Collin or Shepherd has the audacity to say “this thing is happening and you need to do this right now immediately” like I didn’t learn to blow the whistle when my Pikmin were on fire FIFTEEN YEARS AGO.

Why is the game backseat-gaming? Give me the fucking wheel and let me experience the consequences of my actions. For fuck’s sake.

It can be helpful on extremely rare occasions to have some kind of popup notification about something happening off-screen, given the nature of an RTS game, especially for new players. But as someone who figured out fairly quickly to actively pay attention to and notice the only numbers on your screen available at all times worth monitoring (Pikmin population), being told that my squad I sent on a faraway mission is under attack actively spoils the surprise. With Nintendo offering no option to reduce the frequency or turn it off completely, they might as well just said “fuck you” to me personally instead.

The only surprise to be found here is in my own consistent expectations of Nintendo.

Speaking of lacking any sense of mystery and wonder, a mechanic I was surprisingly very excited for in this entry was actually a limitation; you are only allowed to have three types of Pikmin out on the field or in a cave at any given time. This had the potential to be cool in-concept, because it could have meant you’d need to pick and choose different Pikmin types for different needs throughout various obstacles you encounter throughout your time spent in different huge locations.

Nope. The game YET AGAIN removes any player responsibility for decision-making. Just press the X button. The game will give you recommended types. You’ll be fine. No thoughts required. Go grab yourself a snack.

Can’t quite hit that one creature? Lock-on button. Charge. With Oatchi. It’s probably dead now.

Great.

The lock-on feature is awful and I hate it. I’ll take the free-form movement of an entire army controlled by the right stick and the ability to aim freely over an auto-snapping lock-on and charge button any day.

Biggs_hoson comments in their review that Pikmin 4 feels like “just playing more Pikmin™”, and when it boils down to it, I think that’s ultimately my biggest problem with the game. It’s still “Pikmin™”, but in a lot of ways it’s been homogenized to taste a little more like your average video game and less like the Weirdo Shit™ I’d fallen in love with through the first two games; games I find myself gravitating more and more towards as I play more video games.

Nintendo took the formula from their previous games, created an interesting world to explore and appreciate, and then slapped all of the tools they possibly could together to make it conducive to blazing through said world as fast as you possibly can.

My body is a machine that turns unexplored natural habitats into Platinum-Medal Cleared Dandori Challenges™.

I’m conflicted, because the first two Pikmin games are pretty niche and I understand completely why Nintendo would make the choices they did with 4. Pikmin 1 was ambitious and weird, and I respect it tremendously, significantly more than I actually enjoy playing it, which could be argued is the entire point of it. Pikmin 2 is my perfect jank-sandwich full of bullshit and weird eccentricities, and one of the few games I’ve given genuine thought about speedrunning. Pikmin 3 simplified the controls and toned down the difficulty in order to make it more approachable, shifting focus to a Pikmin 1-esque gameplay style of “do things as efficiently and quickly as possible,” all at the expense of making it an overall more shallow experience, and Pikmin 4 went further by tuning up the “dandori” focus and then adding a thousand safety nets. There are challenges in the later part of the game to be sure, but the ones requiring actual honest-to-goodness creative thinking are few and far-between. I’ve been seeing a lot of people saying it “takes elements from all of the other ones to make it the best one” and I just don’t see it. It’s the most sterilized and homogenized in the series for sure.

It’s still a good game overall though. After how short Pikmin 3 felt back on the WiiU, I welcome the clever design tricks Nintendo used to pad out the Story Mode and make it longer, e.g. Pikmin 3’s Mission Mode now existing in the form of mini-caves where you rescue leaflings by completing a Dandori Challenge. I feel it to be way too hand-holdy for my tastes, but I want to stress more than anything that I still like this game and I feel it to be an overall strong entry in the series. The time I’ve been putting aside to play Pikmin 4 has been enjoyable, and I’m incredibly happy for the reception it’s getting, as Pikmin is a series that absolutely deserves it. The levels are great, the controls are great, the caves are great, and the overall design of the game itself is fun and works well. But it’s too sleepy for what I was hoping for.

You’re not gonna get unexpectedly carpet-bombed or jumpscared by a Bulbear just for carrying a rubber ducky out of a cave. In my eyes, for some reason, this is a negative.

In the end, I guess I just wish Nintendo would say “fuck you” to me through its level design instead of its endless tutorials.

Just give me a “silent Collin” mode and let me explore the wilderness in peace.

I bet I’d feel differently about all this if this was my first Pikmin game.

It’s not.

It's an improvement over Breath of the Wild in a few of places, but the bland writing/localization, underdeveloped plot, middling voice acting, technical bottlenecks and shallow game design choices are really holding this back from being really exceptional.

Addendum (5/30/23): Having now finished the game, and done a good bit of sidequesting, my feelings on this game are a little more sour. As I said earlier there's definitely some highlights and great moments of creativity, but it all comes back to this nagging feeling I had during the whole course of the game. That feeling being I was playing more of an expansion to Breath of the Wild than a full on sequel.

I can't say I'm a fan of the sage mechanics, the building system, or really a lot of the bosses outside one in particular. Overall feeling more disappointed with this game than anything, but I'm glad I at least gave it a shot and finished it at the very least so I could come to that conclusion.

There's some good fun to be had here, but I think there's more fun and creativity to be had in the first game. I'm honestly good on open world games for a while and I think this direction isn't it for Zelda, in my opinion at least. I miss the more linear structure that's a bit more laser focused than just throwing everything and the kitchen sink in.

Not for me. I like the idea behind all the color changing puzzles but ultimately the game just had a lot of stuff I didn't like.
The open world was super tedious with no map or good fast travel. The combat was terrible. The puzzles were occasionally fun and occasionally totally opaque. There were times when they would say "You have everything you need to solve this puzzle" for obvious puzzles and then there were puzzles which required leaps in logic of how various elements interacted with no such prompt.
For a mostly single developer labor of love, this is pretty incredible what was created. But for your time, I would spend it on other stuff.

>Gets remaster of Wii U game I love for Christmas
>expects to play it casually throughout the next couple months as there are other new games I need to get to
>fucking binges it in a week, getting all fruits in story mode and getting Platinum medals in all the new Olimar missions
>mfw only Mission mode remains
>Pikmin 4 cannot come sooner
>still Peakmin 3

Pikmin 3 is one of my favorite video games ever and I can't believe it took me this long to get to its definitive version. While I was initially skeptical about how much the new side content would really add to a game I already played for years, I found myself not only continuing to be hooked by Pikmin's addictive gameplay premise as well as appreciating aspects of the original game even more than I did initially.

Pikmin 3 always got some flak for being short and while I can't say it's unfounded criticism, I can understand the value of a much more condensed yet ultimately more polished and replayable adventure compared to its predecessor. The world design in this game is just as beautiful as it was back on the Wii U with stunning environmental details and plenty of interwoven paths and shortcuts to open up for more clean exploration as your knowledge of the map grows. The maps used for the new side missions are all ripped from the main game, which sounds like it could be repetitive on paper, but it turns out scrambling the hazards and obstacles on each of the maps and even changing where you start out can drastically change how you approach each level. It keeps the polish and cohesion found in the game's already stellar level design and delivers new and interesting twists on each one to really squeeze the potential out of these areas. It's honestly the best way I believe they could have approached making new content for the game without having to commit an absurd amount of resources to making brand new assets and locations for what ultimately amount to bite-sized missions in the same vein as the original game's mission mode.

Just like with the new content, I found the main experience to be just as fresh and interesting as I remembered it. The charge move feels even better than it did before thanks go tweaks made to the move and allows for some of the cleanest kills in the series. While some may argue this move is a bit too good and can really neuter the challenge in some enemy encounters, I personally believe dealing with a sometimes unreliable reticle shouldn't be the main focus of challenge in Pikmin's combat system; rather it should be how you allocate your resources when multitasking and making attack decisions on a larger scale. This game's (main) bosses all have their own gimmicks and methods for defeat but are all fun and incredibly inventive with which they use the combat system. The last two in particular are still pretty difficult if you aren't prepared and are the two best bosses in the series because of it. My new adaptability to the dodge roll move that was in the original game but I never mastered was very helpful against these bosses, but there were still plenty of moments where one unexpected attack can throw you off and snowball into losing dozens of Pikmin. Boss fights are incredibly strategic but still keep you on your toes in order to keep your Pikmin from scattering and running into danger. And it's this dance of balancing control and frenzied surprises that keeps the Pikmin experience so fresh after playing each game so many times.

I'd still say that Pikmin 2 is my personal favorite in the series due to its replayability, dungeon content, and general greater sense of nonlinear exploration, but damn if Pikmin 3 isn't the highest the series has reached from a pure technical gameplay perspective. Deluxe only adds on top of that, but it turns out adding to a masterpiece still gets you a masterpiece at the end of the day.