auto lock on makes me want to KILL MYSELF

i don't know if it's just bias talking since it's been 10 YEARS since the last full game, but i REALLY really could not get super into this game like i could with the previous three. the dog (and ice pikmin) completely annihilate every challenge the game could possibly try and set up for you. the previous games offered a challenge of higher squad = higher risk of death due to having to manage a million babies, but higher power. in pikmin 4, you can just make them all board the designated tiny hitbox and then hold x at a boss until it dies.

i think the characters in this game are the weakest. i was already turned away by the custom character creation, since one of the main appeals of pikmin is how you were playing as people with actual lives and actual personalities. i don't WANT to play as myself, i WANT TO PLAY AS A 40 YEAR OLD MAN WITH A WIFE AND CHILDREN

ok minor complaints time. the music is MEDIOCRE! the fact that the story is [REDACTED] is MEDIOCRE! the rewind feature makes it feel like there's no real sense of FAILURE! and really? they really did that to MY alph? MY brittany? MY charlie? i will KILL YOU

also somehow they managed to make pikmin with gyro control bad.

Potential semi-spoilers below btw

So Pikmin 4. Another decade waiting for the newest Pikmin sequel on the block. Was it worth the wait? In many ways, absolutely! However, it unfortunately comes with some jarring gameplay choices that really hinder the experience... depending on the type of player you are.

I will preface this with the fact that I am a HUGE Pikmin 1 and 3 fan. 2 was pretty good, but I didn't like the changes they made to the game (too many caves, random difficulty spikes, absurdly overpowered purple stuff). When 3 was the newest sequel, I felt that was the direction they would take for the future of the series. Pikmin 4 completely flips that expectation.

Pikmin 4 is a wonderful sequel to Pikmin 2. It comes with packed with enemies, caves, themes, mechanics, and more that fill you with that nostalgic Pikmin 2 that hooked you. The caves are fun, atmospheric, and sometimes pretty satisfying to do! The enemy variants that came with 2 were also a great welcome back to the series since they came with a more.. spicy difficulty. When Pikmin 4 clicks, it goes hard. It has a very satisfying gameplay loop that will keep you from putting the controller down, with surprises lurking around every corner to keep you motivated. The fun treasures, the new collectables (onions, flarlics, etc), and returning enemies will have you shocked for a moment before you return to the game, thinking 'they brought that back?!' It's pretty cool... but that's how I mostly can think of Pikmin 4 in it's current state. It's pretty cool, but comes with many flaws.

The story
Holy SHIT dog it is so lackluster. The NPC dialogue is a chore to read through, with Nintendo tainting another franchise with it's quirky, friendly humor. I get that I'm not the target demographic now... but I was when Pikmin 1 and 2 came out! Even 3! The dialogue of those games were so different; charming, atmospheric, moody, and a few funny moments here and there. I can go back to the old games writing so easily, and so can many others of the series that are just hopping into it through the Switch versions of Pikmin 1 and 2. At least the Piklopedia/Treasure entries are solid... as long as you read the ones from the returning captains. Anyways, the story is yet another rehash of Pikmin 1's ship crash (I get it), and the reason to collect after you land... is so basic. Collect stuff to expand your range to go to other places and yada yada yada. Pikmin 1 started it all so that gets a pass (and passes with flying colors). Pikmin 2 revisits the land to pay off a debt (funny, and honestly very unique). Pikmin 3 crashes and has to collect fruit to stay alive, while finding the captains that scattered from the crash. Pikmin 4... just crashes and has you get stuff to fix your ship/rescue castaways. No debt to fix up, no day limit ala fruits or Pikmin 1, just crash, land, collect, leave. Super bland and lazy, but sure, it's a Nintendo game, it doesn't have to try.

The ATMOSPHERE
It's okay. They nailed the grassy/sandy/fall areas, and the caves are all what you would expect. So they nailed... the very basics. Their biggest success was the house environment, which was my favorite to explore! But that was the only treat to me. Feels like they got the New Super Mario Bros team on this game's atmosphere. Incredibly normal and predictable environments, with one to shake it up a little cause they're Nintendo! They're so quirky!!!! no man bring back my snowy areas and beaches, and try something else out like a swamp! They tried with mud, but all it looked like was a forest with some mud scattered around here and there. A swamp would fit soooo well! Maybe some rocky mountains??? They just... played it so safe. Also, the music took a huge dip in quality, and followed the more atmospheric approach the other Switch first party titles followed (Zelda, Mario, Pokemon). It got a bit better with Olimar's side story, but still felt goofy rather than charming and memorable compared to Pikmin 1/2/3. Title theme is god-like though.

The graphics
I expected a bit more. I look at Pikmin 3 in comparison, and I kinda prefer how 3 looked. It had a more realistic, glossy finish to the game. Pikmin 4 still looks great, but if you put the fruits of Pikmin 3 next to the fruits of Pikmin 4, there is a clear difference. The environments look good, but I just expected a bigger leap for the series. Pikmin 3 is 10 years younger than Pikmin 4.

The gameplay
Here we go. I'm a sweaty Pikmin player. I love 3's mission mode, and 1's time limit. I hate how easy 2 was due to the Purple Pikmin and spray, and how you just have to run around caves to avoid the dumb, artificial difficulty added by random bombs and enemies dropping from the sky. 1's gameplay is peak, but is dated by now. So if they just re-did 3, I'd be okay with that.
They took a wild approach and introduced auto lock-on. An assist to gameplay that you CANNOT turn off. You walk next to anything, it will AUTOMATICALLY lock-on to it, and make it hell to choose to fight anything because the game decided to lock-on to. But that doesn't really matter in fights because the enemies are all braindead easy anyways. Everything gets 1-shot by Oatchi's charge, the captain's charge, just freezing them or spamming items. Traditional Pikmin gameplay (think 1 and 3) is so difficult to find in the game because it keeps feeding you new options, while nudging you there every waking moment (due to auto-lock). Even so, why risk any Pikmin loss with normal Pikmin gameplay, when you can just ram with Oatchi? I feel like I'm just not playing Pikmin. I'm walking and dodging enemies and just mashing A. I'm not aiming at them, it does that automatically, locks-on, and I'm just mashing A and the occasional charge. They chose a different style of play for the game, and it certainly worked, but it didn't for me. I'm sure plenty of others will not bat an eye, especially new players, but it really hampers my experience with the game. I want to feel like I'm aiming at them - that's Pikmin to me!
I played Pikmin 1 and 3 right after 100%ing 4 (Platinum ranking everything as well, finishing all quests, getting all items, etc) and it felt so much better. Natural gameplay, with some skill in aiming and movement at the same time, and not having auto-win buttons like Oatchi's charge, or bombs in my bag. THAT'S Pikmin gameplay. I tried my best to enjoy 4's, but I just do not. Still enjoyed the game enough to 100% it though. Huge Pikmin fan lol

Other Random Stuff
I liked Pikmin 4. It had some great ideas. Ice Pikmin are very fun to use, and the freezing gimmick is honestly incredible. Just wish it was used more.
The night gameplay was pretty lackluster. It was just a glorified tower defense... but all the enemies just lose to the same combat loop of charging and auto lock-on. It's just a constant combat loop, but the enemies are all the same but with a different model and MAYBE a gimmick coupled to them. That's how I view all the enemies in the game though lol
SPEAKING OF ENEMIES - great returns from Pikmin 2, and some cool new ones, but they all just die too easily. Bosses shouldn't be able to die in less than a second lmao. The final boss is pretty okay, a little too much waiting for me personally, but I wish they had a few more BIG bosses like Pikmin 3. The Pikmin 2 bias is just way too strong here.
Jumping and platforming in a Pikmin game is god-like. We needed more of that.
Oatchi should not be able to hold all the Pikmin on him either... takes away an aspect of Pikmin where you feel like a leader and are protecting/leading your pack. There is no reason to play as the captain aside from his climb gimmick & charge, which isn't common.
The dandori missions (not the combat ones) were pretty great. Thank you Pikmin 3 mission mode.

In the end, mods can save this game from a 3 star to a 4 star to me. Remove Auto Lock-on, nerf Oatchi, and change up how the item inventory works. A rework of the game's story/writing and music can move the game from a 4 star to a 5 star for me. As it stands, I think it's a solid 3 stars.

I don't like RTS games at all. I don't enjoy their seriousness and/or base/loadout building mechanics that they commonly have, so when I got into Pikmin I was very cautious about it. I wanted to experience a genre that was new for me, I wanted to try and have fun with one of my friend's most favorite videogames and have something in common with them and I really wasn't ready for the beautyness of this game.

Pikmin is incredibly well crafted. It's not a hard game at all but it can be very punishing if you commit a mistake. Not because getting resources or penalty for dying is harsh, but because your troops are small little aliens that sing and jump and do cute thingies so seeing them die is incredibly painful and sad in an emotional level. If you don't care about this, then it really isn't painful unless you have multiple colored pikmins and you need specific ones but it doesn't matter much in this game.

The 30 day limit can be incredibly stressful for some people (it was to me too!) but there's this rule of thumb that "If you get one piece per day, you'll be good" and at first I was very anxious about this until I realized I get two or three per day on average, so I was more than good. Pikmin also offers a "restart day" button, allowing you to just go back to the start of the day if things really went that bad.
This time limit is not there just because. Pikmin is built upon this timer and most of the skill comes from being able to do stuff quickly and multitask. This will make it so you will naturally try to speedrun through the game and speedrunning while blind is an amazing experience. It can be highly overwhelming to a lot of people, but knowing that you can follow the rule of "1 piece per day" and that getting more than one piece per day is not uncommon, that fear, stress and anxiety will quickly go away.

I also love how this game has FOUR variants/layers of level song. You have the normal song, near-hazard/combat, sunset, and sunset near hazard. It really helps set the mood and note the importance of the daytime.

This is the first game of a series and while incredibly charming and fun, it has some very frustrating elements that thankfully were improved in later entries. These frustrating elements being the Pikmin pathfinding capabilities and lack of a good sorting system. Despite its flaws, Pikmin 1 will forever be incredibly important to me and something worth of your time and effort.

I really love Pikmin and I wish I could say it louder. I'm glad that with the release and success of Pikmin 4 the game got more attention because the series were criminally underrated.

This game is quite a departure from the earlier games. It has a lot of new stuff that didn't really need to be there. That isolating feeling the first two games had is all but gone here. The crewmates will chime in constantly, never letting you go without stating the obvious (Pikmin 3 had this problem, but it's even worse here). There's way more dialogue than the first 3 games, so much so that I started skipping it because I didn't care for the story. Just let me play the game damn it! Thank god for the plus button.

The game also feels quite easy (I've lost even less pikmin than I did in 3). Oatchi's rush ability and ice pikmin spam make most fights a cakewalk.

That said, this is no doubt a great place to start for newcomers. It's easily the most accessible pikmin game with plenty of quality-of-life features absent from the older entries. There's a lot to love for new fans.

Nintendo took the route of mass appeal. It's no doubt going to be the best selling pikmin game by far, but at the cost of alienating some longtime fans.

Overall I don't really like the direction it took, but it's undeniably polished.

There's a lot to take in with this game, and to be frank I don't think I like all of it.

Surely, the best place to start is what I hated most about the game, and I think the most egregious thing in this game is how things are upgraded. In previous installments, upgrades for your crew were unlocked by obtaining specific treasures hidden in the world, and offered buffs that were rarely that game breaking or overpowered (barring a certain five-man napsack). In Pikmin 4, the upgrading system is streamlined to a fault, letting you choose your upgrades by using naturally obtained currencies that you rarely have to go out of the way for. The upgrades are also pretty overpowered, ranging from simple health or walking speed upgrades, to making your dog a force of absolute destruction, one that puts Purple Pikmin in Pikmin 2 to shame. Everything about the upgrades in this game just make it feel like "a modern gaming take on a Pikmin game" and I don't like that.

How many Pikmin you're allowed to have in your current platoon is also tied to its own upgrade system in the form of obtaining Flarlic. I get capping the number of Pikmin you're allowed to have is supposed to be a means to prevent the game from being way too easy early on, but frankly the game is too easy across the board. If you want a game with a challenge on par with 1 or 3 (without reaching levels of bullshit like 2), you'd have to avoid upgrading your dog and deliberately limit your Pikmin capacity. I wouldn't mind them having just done away with the Flarlic system in exchange for making the game acutally difficult.

Speaking of making the game actually difficult, letting you rewind time by minutes at a time seems way too generous, but I guess that's just a matter of accessibility; if you want to have an actual challenge with the game, don't use the rewind feature so much, but if you want to experience a Pikmin game for the first time, go ahead. Besides that, the game just doesn't have a whole lot of stakes when you can just use your dog to destroy anything. It's pretty clear they wanted to do Pikmin 2 but more fair, with the dungeons returning and the lack of a day limit, but they overcorrected for that game's flaws. Instead of being bullshit with random traps and obnoxious fights in randomized dungeons, this game has pretty avoidable traps and not-very-thought-provoking fights. Dungeons having actual level design is a HUGE plus, though.

In general, the game comes off as baby's first Pikmin game, even more so than Pikmin 3. Nintendo wants Pikmin to succeed, and they probably wanted to start reeling new players in by being more accessible, but in a lot of places they went way overboard.

The dog itself also just kinda feels like a step down over similar systems in the previous games. Pikmin 2 gave you an extra captain that you could control in tandem with the other, and allowed you to split up your squadron pretty quickly. Pikmin 3 gave you a third captain and the ability to quickly pause time to direct what you want each captain to do. Pikmin 4 gives you a dog you have to dismount in order to split up from them, and then in order to send them off to do their own thing you have to go into a quick menu to split off from your Pikmin (you have to do this process twice if you want to have the dog take all of the Pikmin, because doing it once only splits the captain away from all but one Pikmin type), and then you have to change to the dog in order to command them where you want their AI to go. Really, the dog just kinda makes this game worse in a lot of ways. The fact that you have two captains that aren't made equal could be good on paper, allowing you to play to each one's strengths or weaknesses to have them do specific things, but in reality what you get is a character with like 15 different powers and then your actual captain who does the generic stuff.

The vibes of this game are pretty immaculate, it stands out against every other game in the series in that regard, for better and for worse. It's a very pretty game, the environments look great, and the game very deliberately makes a point of showing how small you really are in the grand scheme of things, seeing as how the game takes place in someone's backyard. On the other hand, everything feels a little bit too cutesy for its own good. The original Pikmin has a very gloomy, eerie feeling throughout, every environment in that game feels truly desolate and intimidating, a very deliberately alien setting. This game doesn't feel "alien" all that much, it just feels like you're an ant coming to raid someone's picnic. Not really a negative thing, just depends on what kind of atmosphere you're in the market for.

The enemy design on this game is still on point, typical of a Pikmin game, but as for your crew...it's very obvious they were put through the same character creator as you, with a few bonus features. No one feels like a very stand out design in the slightest. Then you have a self insert player character, which really does not suit this series well. In the first 3 games, all the captains had pretty interesting personality quirks demonstrated through their log notes, and in 2's case the emails you'd get from characters related to Olimar and Louie. In this game, you get a self insert who doesn't say anything, and a crew whose personalities and dialogues are even less interesting than those of any of 3's captains. It's like being stuck with 6 different variations of Alph who never shut up. But I like my little skrunkly I made, so it's okay.

Of course, being a Pikmin title, this game's shining qualities come from how satisfying it feels to pull off multitasking quickly and efficiently. Whatever the story mode has you doing is satisfying enough, but the real meat of the game comes in when you do the dandori challenges, where there's an actual sense of difficulty, and thus actual sense of achievement when you manage to get a high score. Really, that's probably how you can most enjoy this game, imposing challenges on yourself. Avoiding certain upgrades, going for completion under a certain number of days, there's a lot you can probably do, but playing the game as what feels like intended just doesn't let you express a lot of skill.

Also uhhh night stages? Yeah they're fun I guess I'd probably have more fun with them if I avoided upgrading Oatchi, but I do like the feel of what's basically Pikmin tower defense.

I probably sound like I tore the shit out of this game but I really did enjoy it, it was a very satisfying time that I didn't want to pull out from, had a handful of QoL improvements over previous installments, and despite the things I personally didn't like about it constantly sitting on my mind, I think the good I got out of this game far outweighs it. It still has those iconic Pikmin moments where you're taking in the world around you, getting treasures, when you're suddenly jumped by a group of giant enemies out of nowwhere. I don't think I can call this game a disappointment, even though it was a game that took 10 years to come out despite feeling like it was only in development for 3. I will probably truly appreciate it upon trying to challenge myself on another playthrough. I'll probably end up updating this review if I bother playing it in a more difficult fashion or when I finish the postgame.

At the current moment I think Pikmin 3 is the best game in the series in terms of gameplay, and Pikmin 1 is the best for atmosphere and worldbuilding. I don't think I'll budge on the latter opinion, but this game does have potential to be my favorite in terms of gameplay.

tutorial sucks btw, very bad very long