Pikmin 4 does so much masterfully but has multiple Achilles heels that felt so avoidable. Pikmin is the ultimate "checklist game" franchise. The series understands just how satisfying it feels to be presented with a bunch of pretty clear objectives and progressively completing them. What really upset me while playing Pikmin 4 was how much fluff gets in the way of that core conceit.
Let's start with my #1 glaring issue I ran into: the overabundance of boring dialogue. The opening 2 hours of the game is an agonizingly slow-paced tutorial that introduces you to the world of Pikmin as if you were just born yesterday. This is something Nintendo loves to do for their non-Zelda and non-Mario games for some reason and I'll continue being annoyed by this until they give us an option to skip it. The characters that do most of the talking, your ship's crewmates, are some of the worst characters I've ever had the displeasure to talk to. And they just refuse to stop talking. After every in-game day, you return home to your base and, of course, that comes with about 8-12 text boxes of the most boring shit you've ever heard. It's like if I asked Alexa to have a conversation with Siri. And this wouldn't be a problem if talking with these freaks wasn't forced upon you. But everywhere you turn, from the upgrade shops to the side quests to the main path, you are assaulted by a bunch of little cute guys telling you for the 8th time "wow this situation we're in sure is crazy". Pikmin 4 also continually takes you out of the action with its "cutscenes" if you can even call them that. You'll be trotting along when you get to one of the dozen or so dandori challenges in the game. Once you get close enough to the entrance, the camera slowly pulls away from you as you lose control and you must witness the game telling you "hey this is one of those caves. you can go inside and battle a little guy in a dandori challenge. okay now you can go back to having fun". It's incredibly annoying. The game will never pass up a chance to take away control in a manner such as what I described above. Pikmin 4 does that for every main quest objective and every time you rescue one of the FIFTY crew members.
This is starting to feel like a rant so let's move onto what I really dug about Pikmin 4. The environment art in this game is absolutely gorgeous. Sure there are time where textures don't look quite right but that comes with the territory of a Switch game at the end of it's life. The atmosphere and vibe of being in this tranquil but dangerous nature setting just hits every time. The Pikmin themselves are cute as always and it's pretty impressive seeing up to 100 of them fighting and carrying things independently. The treasures that you're searching for are always delightful. Since Pikmin is a "small guy in a big world" settings, all the items you find are giant versions of everyday items. You'll find things like fruit, rubber ducks, and even items from Nintendo history (Gamecube Controller, Joycons, and GBA Cartridges were some of my favorites). All the treasures are lovingly modeled and textured; they're so realistic they almost look out of place in the rest of the world.
The core loop of Pikmin 4 is razor sharp. It all starts at your home base where you progress side quests and unlock upgrades. Next you choose an area to explore and land there with all your Pikmin. This is the meat of the game. You have a daylight timer that ticks down your 10-15 minute day as you scramble to grow your Pikmin population, clear out enemies, assemble bridges, break down walls, and most importantly collect treasures. All while you're doing these things, you are thinking about the next thing you wanna do with the Pikmin who are almost done with the current thing. While it may sound basic, the art of trying to tackle everything in the fastest order is a whole lot of fun and gets your brain thinking in unusual ways. When the day is all said and done, you must gather all your Pikmin so nobody is left behind or else you risk seeing the most heartbreaking cutscene in all of modern video games. Afterwards, you can a nice breakdown of all the shit you collected and any progress on your side quest. Then you do it all over again! It's got this "one-more-turn" feel to the loop but it never feels predatory. Real-life time melts away as the in-game days fly by. The biggest friction point is the dialogue in between the days but we already know how I feel about that subject.
Let's talk Oatchi because this guy deserves his own paragraph. This is the best boy. Oatchi acts as sort of a commander-type unit that lifts heavy things with ease, deals massive damage, and has actual smart AI. Oatchi can feel like a crutch at times but mostly I was just happy to always have this 2-legged, dopey-looking canine at my side. Oatchi best boy, Oatchi for Smash, Oatchi for president.
Lastly, I want to touch on some frustrating content near the back half of the game that I really left a bad taste in my mouth. Spoiler warning for the rest of this paragraph for the last 10ish hours of Pikmin 4! Around 20 hours into the game you have your Pikmin population maxed out at 100 and then you get the feeling the encounter designers weren't really sure what to do to challenge the player at that point. The bosses after this point have incredibly high health totals and are usually placed in scenarios that completely shut down your attempts unless you can a specific population of Pikmin with you. Particularly, the game LOVES to throw poison at you and only 1 of the 7 colors, white Pikmin, can survive poison and that just so happens to be the color the game gives you the least amount of. This very binary approach to encounter difficulty feels really awful when you're low on the color of Pikmin you need. In my very thorough playthrough (I was 100%ing all the areas), I never found the white Pikmin onion which is the thing you need for that color to repopulate. That meant I had basically a fixed population of white Pikmin so it felt awful to lose them and often times I found myself ill-equipped to deal with poison bosses. All of these deep-rooted issues came to an awful conclusion in the final dungeon in the game. This giant boss-rush cave is 20 floors deep which is about quadruple the length of even the deepest caves I had found up to that point. It was a serious slog. It was a death march to finally see credits and I absolutely was not having any fun the entire time. This boss-rush cave featured NONE of the item acquisition loop that the series is so renowned for. It was ALL combat against the toughest bosses placed in the most annoying areas possible. I was just really not a fan of this conclusion. It didn't feel like a celebratory end when I finished off the final boss, instead I felt a sigh of frustrated relief like I was finally off the phone with my ISP after 3 hours.
Pikmin 4 frustrated me to no end but mostly because of the missed potential. It feels like flawlessly completed school assignment with a gigantic coffee stain that covers most of the page. If you're looking for this type of game but executed so much better, may I direct your attention to the 2022 indie hit Tinykin.
Let's start with my #1 glaring issue I ran into: the overabundance of boring dialogue. The opening 2 hours of the game is an agonizingly slow-paced tutorial that introduces you to the world of Pikmin as if you were just born yesterday. This is something Nintendo loves to do for their non-Zelda and non-Mario games for some reason and I'll continue being annoyed by this until they give us an option to skip it. The characters that do most of the talking, your ship's crewmates, are some of the worst characters I've ever had the displeasure to talk to. And they just refuse to stop talking. After every in-game day, you return home to your base and, of course, that comes with about 8-12 text boxes of the most boring shit you've ever heard. It's like if I asked Alexa to have a conversation with Siri. And this wouldn't be a problem if talking with these freaks wasn't forced upon you. But everywhere you turn, from the upgrade shops to the side quests to the main path, you are assaulted by a bunch of little cute guys telling you for the 8th time "wow this situation we're in sure is crazy". Pikmin 4 also continually takes you out of the action with its "cutscenes" if you can even call them that. You'll be trotting along when you get to one of the dozen or so dandori challenges in the game. Once you get close enough to the entrance, the camera slowly pulls away from you as you lose control and you must witness the game telling you "hey this is one of those caves. you can go inside and battle a little guy in a dandori challenge. okay now you can go back to having fun". It's incredibly annoying. The game will never pass up a chance to take away control in a manner such as what I described above. Pikmin 4 does that for every main quest objective and every time you rescue one of the FIFTY crew members.
This is starting to feel like a rant so let's move onto what I really dug about Pikmin 4. The environment art in this game is absolutely gorgeous. Sure there are time where textures don't look quite right but that comes with the territory of a Switch game at the end of it's life. The atmosphere and vibe of being in this tranquil but dangerous nature setting just hits every time. The Pikmin themselves are cute as always and it's pretty impressive seeing up to 100 of them fighting and carrying things independently. The treasures that you're searching for are always delightful. Since Pikmin is a "small guy in a big world" settings, all the items you find are giant versions of everyday items. You'll find things like fruit, rubber ducks, and even items from Nintendo history (Gamecube Controller, Joycons, and GBA Cartridges were some of my favorites). All the treasures are lovingly modeled and textured; they're so realistic they almost look out of place in the rest of the world.
The core loop of Pikmin 4 is razor sharp. It all starts at your home base where you progress side quests and unlock upgrades. Next you choose an area to explore and land there with all your Pikmin. This is the meat of the game. You have a daylight timer that ticks down your 10-15 minute day as you scramble to grow your Pikmin population, clear out enemies, assemble bridges, break down walls, and most importantly collect treasures. All while you're doing these things, you are thinking about the next thing you wanna do with the Pikmin who are almost done with the current thing. While it may sound basic, the art of trying to tackle everything in the fastest order is a whole lot of fun and gets your brain thinking in unusual ways. When the day is all said and done, you must gather all your Pikmin so nobody is left behind or else you risk seeing the most heartbreaking cutscene in all of modern video games. Afterwards, you can a nice breakdown of all the shit you collected and any progress on your side quest. Then you do it all over again! It's got this "one-more-turn" feel to the loop but it never feels predatory. Real-life time melts away as the in-game days fly by. The biggest friction point is the dialogue in between the days but we already know how I feel about that subject.
Let's talk Oatchi because this guy deserves his own paragraph. This is the best boy. Oatchi acts as sort of a commander-type unit that lifts heavy things with ease, deals massive damage, and has actual smart AI. Oatchi can feel like a crutch at times but mostly I was just happy to always have this 2-legged, dopey-looking canine at my side. Oatchi best boy, Oatchi for Smash, Oatchi for president.
Lastly, I want to touch on some frustrating content near the back half of the game that I really left a bad taste in my mouth. Spoiler warning for the rest of this paragraph for the last 10ish hours of Pikmin 4! Around 20 hours into the game you have your Pikmin population maxed out at 100 and then you get the feeling the encounter designers weren't really sure what to do to challenge the player at that point. The bosses after this point have incredibly high health totals and are usually placed in scenarios that completely shut down your attempts unless you can a specific population of Pikmin with you. Particularly, the game LOVES to throw poison at you and only 1 of the 7 colors, white Pikmin, can survive poison and that just so happens to be the color the game gives you the least amount of. This very binary approach to encounter difficulty feels really awful when you're low on the color of Pikmin you need. In my very thorough playthrough (I was 100%ing all the areas), I never found the white Pikmin onion which is the thing you need for that color to repopulate. That meant I had basically a fixed population of white Pikmin so it felt awful to lose them and often times I found myself ill-equipped to deal with poison bosses. All of these deep-rooted issues came to an awful conclusion in the final dungeon in the game. This giant boss-rush cave is 20 floors deep which is about quadruple the length of even the deepest caves I had found up to that point. It was a serious slog. It was a death march to finally see credits and I absolutely was not having any fun the entire time. This boss-rush cave featured NONE of the item acquisition loop that the series is so renowned for. It was ALL combat against the toughest bosses placed in the most annoying areas possible. I was just really not a fan of this conclusion. It didn't feel like a celebratory end when I finished off the final boss, instead I felt a sigh of frustrated relief like I was finally off the phone with my ISP after 3 hours.
Pikmin 4 frustrated me to no end but mostly because of the missed potential. It feels like flawlessly completed school assignment with a gigantic coffee stain that covers most of the page. If you're looking for this type of game but executed so much better, may I direct your attention to the 2022 indie hit Tinykin.