Full disclosure: I had to fail a whole 30 day playthrough of Pikmin to finally understand Pikmin. I just couldn't wrap my head around the controls for some reason, and each new day became strangely stressful and frustrating despite my seeming ability to perform all the necessary tasks on paper. When I saw Olimar's ship explode in fireworks and watched in horror as his corpse was fed to the pikmin machine, I wasn't sure the game was really for me.

Then I started my second playthrough and found God. It was like a lightswitch flicked on in my brain - this was so intuitive, so fun, so carefree. I was shocked at my own incompetence after having nearly written off the whole experience as a failed test run of a weird game idea. The learning curve finally made sense, and the world I'd found so hard to embrace on first pass became this beautiful space I couldn't wait to get back to. To call it a transformative playthrough would be a dishonor to the spiritual enlightenment I felt upon beating the Emperor and seeing the Captain escape home to his family with every single piece of the ship reclaimed.

I've now seen the truth, my faith has been restored, all things are right in the world. Miyamoto was right - Pikmin is the new Mario.