I’m not sure if it’s nostalgia bias but I miss the sense of isolation and time-pressure to get tasks done. Granted a lot of this changed with 2 and 3, but 2 at least had brutal caves and 3’s characters were far less in number and way less chatty. The opening hours of 4 were off putting with how many tutorials there were and how little freedom Nintendo wants to give the player. Weird decisions like limiting how many types of Pikmin you can have at one time or how I hit the first credits roll and still wasn’t able to bring 100 Pikmin soured me.

There’s still plenty to like here though. The core gameplay of Pikmin is great and the addition of Oatchi and the tower defence-like night missions were fun. The new camera system also showed off how nice this game looks, easily one of the best looking Switch games. Good sound design as well, the environmental ambience was fantastic. I mentioned earlier that the caves in 2 were brutal as a positive but I actually prefer their implementation here. They feel like little dungeons that are fun to navigate and provide a decent challenge.

Good game that I’m sure newcomers will enjoy and I’m not upset with what we got, but it is another modern Nintendo entry in a franchise I love that I’m not convinced is heading in the right direction for my tastes.

Thanks Nintendo for implementing two separate auto lock features that you can't disable. Very smart and educated
addition to your already boring game that abandoned all charm in favor of shameless marketability and toy creation.

I understand that Pikmin is a quirky game with unique characters, but half of the game is useless tutorial / reminders and the other half is constant banter between the new, unforgettable cast that isn’t even entertaining in the slightest. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the Koppaites from Pikmin 3 for this exact reason, but atleast they knew when to shut the fuck up and let the game do the talking. Beyond that, I had such high hopes for the night levels. I love tower defense games! Granted I haven’t played a lot of them, but from the ones I have played, I loved the concept! This is the most barebones, mundane shit fest that anyone could have asked for. I dreaded doing these expeditions because they were so lacking in difficulty and depth. Thankfully, the challenge caves or whatever they were called, the things akin to the mission mode in Pikmin 3, those were fun and probably the only good part of this laughable game. I loved micro managing and stressing myself out to the point of my veins bursting while making sure every single Pikmin was doing what it was supposed to be doing without wasting a second. The bingo battle look-alike Dandori was also fun to play, though my mom pointed out how the lock on system was archaic and strange. After a few rounds, she asked if we could go back to playing Pikmin 3’s bingo battle instead. Usually she doesn’t discriminate against game complexity or design, I just found this to be telling. It also doesn’t help that you can only choose 3 types of Pikmin to be out with you at any given time, and while it arguably makes the game less “grindy”, it’s because the game is designed around this mundane decision making each level require 3 different types of Pikmin at any given time (not including caves). Speaking of the Pikmin themselves, I don’t know how I feel about progressively gaining the ability to access a bigger number of Pikmin.

On the topic of charm, or rather the lack thereof, the almost corporate UI that they added to this entry has lost any and all resemblance of the unique bubble-like aesthetic that the previous games were known to have. I know it sounds like an extreme nitpick that losers would have, and it is, but from someone who has loved Pikmin for years and has awaited the 4th entry for a long time, it’s very sad to see them go down the route of uninspired graphic design. Beyond that, the levels levels are uninspired for the most part. I get that it’s a flawed argument because Pikmin has always tried to have a realistic art style, but since the first two games were on the GameCube they weren’t able to reach that sense of reality and unintentionally developed a unique graphic style that feels very lonely and… i hate using this word… liminal.. and thanks to that a lot of the assets and places in those first two games feel much more enigmatic and inspired rather than the realistic jargon they finally achieved, but that beach is just a fucking beach. That forest is just a forest. I can’t even remember the names of these locations. Another big factor is that Pikmin, for me atleast, is supposed to be set on a post nuclear war, apocalyptic earth where you never know what you’re going to see next. Of course I highly doubt that’s ever been the intention, but it’s been my interpretation and without that facade the game loses a lot of what made the series special to me.

Something I’ve noticed while journaling my thoughts about this game is that this is Nintendo’s attempt at making Pikmin much more widely accessible, even though it already was with Pikmin 3. Writing this also made me remember why I hate modern gaming. We’re achieving accessibility, but at what cost? Make some of this shit optional. Now that I’ve deconstructed my thoughts regarding my favorite children’s game, I’m going to play some real shit such as Call of Duty or Fortnite.

It's good, I guess? The qualities of a great game are there but are brought down by things like ice pikmin that make sure the game is a boring cakewalk. Then, the dungeons aren't randomly generated this time around, yet most of them aren't memorable at all, making you wonder what the point was of all that effort.
Lastly, my biggest complaint is that the bosses are sadly the worst new additions to the franchise. Most aren't memorable or hard at all. This is especially dissapointing to me since the bosses are my favorite parts of pikmin.
On a more positive note, the graphics are stunning, Oatchi is awesome and if you do like what's there than there is a lot for you to do.

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.

Gets old very, very fast - once you've played it for a week or so, you've pretty much exhausted all there is to do and seen all of the unique content. The gameplay is pretty basic and mostly consists of you watching your Miis exist like an ominous god until they deem it time to give you a short, repetitive little minigame.

That said, it's a fun, basic little simulator game that's very random in a very wacky, dreamlike kind of way, and making your friends and family can create some genuinely hilarious scenarios you'll want to tell them about.

I have fun coming back to this once every couple of years, making everyone all over again, playing around with it for a few days, and then abandoning it again, but I can't imagine playing it more in-depth than that. I certainly wouldn't pay more than £10-15 for it.

Also, no gay relationships. That's dumb. If you want to make your gay friends, you have to either deal with the uncomfortable experience of them falling randomly into straight romances or you have to make them a gender they aren't and just pretend real hard.

It's fine. The more I think about it, the more issues I have with it, mainly pertaining to Oatchi and his ridiculous arsenal of abilities that make him into a bonafide powerhouse by mid to late game. Combat is more mindless than ever since you can just use Oatchi's Rush attack to instantly latch your squad of Pikmin onto an enemy. I hardly ever felt the same kind of satisfaction I'd get from besting a Wollyhop in the first two games, hell any enemy for that matter. It was all about the timing, knowing when to bait for an attack and then when to back off, how many Pikmin to throw before you gotta whistle them back. That's largely gone in 4, replaced with an utterly dull system with little to no strategy required. There's no real weight to losing Pikmin anymore either. It always hurt to lose Pikmin in 1&2 since every one of them counts, meanwhile in 4 I felt nothing when losing any of my little guys since I have a tank in the form of a dog.

Even the bosses left me feeling underwhelmed (especially considering a good chunk of them are recycled from 1&2). The Water Wraith was neat to see again, although not even half as threatening as it could be in 2. Would've been better if it was a different kind of "wraith" akin to the Plasm Wraith.

I also really hate how you can only have 3 types of Pikmin out on the surface, worse yet it TELLS you which Pikmin you'll need for the area. In prior games, I was always carefully considering which Pikmin types I'd need and how many of each, but in 4 you just have to push X. Would've made for an interesting challenge paired with the new Survey Drone, but oh well. So much for asking the player to think for themself.

I think the areas are okay, but they hardly hold a candle to anything in 1 or 3. It really does feel like a sequel to 2 in that way. The areas in both games largely serve as sandboxes. I honestly preferred the linear area design of 3, because what you got were carefully designed challenges that I felt took advantage of the abilities of the Pikmin in far more interesting ways than what 4 tries to do. By that I mean the areas look nice at first glance but they feel very... empty? It's partially an issue with the fact that there's no day limit, so you're under no stress to explore any faster. That's always been one of my favorite things about Pikmin, working to beat the clock by figuring out which challenges to tackle first. Micromanagement played a key role in 1&3. Yes, you can easily beat them with plenty of time to spare, but it's the fact that the game pushes you to do better with little things like the more triumphant music that plays at the day end cutscene if you've collected a large number of fruit. Stuff like this makes it immensely more satisfying to play my best, learning and adapting my strategies when necessary. It's a core value of 1 that is lost in 2 and lost again in 4. I had some fun exploring the areas in 4 but they're really nothing special.

At the very least the caves are a step in the right direction, they have some neat new gimmicks that make for some fun little puzzles to solve. Miles better than what 2 attempted with its randomly generated cave layouts. The caves in 4 are a bit too short though, most of them don't get enough floors for their gimmicks to be fully fleshed out.

Oh yeah there's also the night expeditions which were rather dull. They're far too easy, even the later ones end just as the difficulty starts ramping up. I've got nothing else to say about these, they're very unimaginative.

Pikmin 4 plays it way too safe for the sake of appealing to new players, to a point where it loses some of that edge the prior games had. Not to say the rest of the series is perfect, I have my issues with each of them. It just happens that 2 is my least favorite, and 4 takes after it in more ways than one.

If you've never played a Pikmin game before, I'm sure you'll love 4. I can't say I did, unfortunately.

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.