I have been in love with the Pikmin series since day one, being absolutely glued to the screen trying to help Olimar find all his ship pieces, which turned into finding treasure pieces for the Boss, and eventually into various fruits for a dying Koppai planet. I was pretty satisfied with the Pikmin series ending at 3, but I know the online community was especially loud about wanting a 4th one, and to be honest, I was a little curious where they would go with the series after 3, so hey, why not check it out?

I went in fully knowing that this era of Nintendo is no longer what I loved growing up with, but I still wanted to go in with an open mind, and hopefully be happy to find it keeping to its core. But after finishing the game, I couldn’t help but feel unsatisfied and just very… odd about the whole experience. Pikmin 4 isn’t bad, especially compared to other games on the Switch, Pikmin 4 is actually quite good in comparison! But after thinking about it for a little bit, I think I can sum up why I wasn’t quite as happy with Pikmin 4 as I was in the past Pikmin games.

Assistance

Pikmin 4 is too kind to you, so kind in fact, that it takes away the original enjoyment I had with the game. Pikmin 1 & 2, and Pikmin 3 on the Wii U all are games that create an environment with a mission that you need to complete, sounds easy enough, right? Well, no. The whole point of Pikmin is to complete your goal with literally EVERYTHING in the world out against you. It’s you, this tiny little man not even the height of a GameCube disc, and your funny little fellas, out against literally EVERYTHING. Pikmin started as a series called Adam & Eve where you had to control an eventual 100-person tribe of people with their own freewill and get them to complete tasks for you. You were essentially supposed to play God, with your little people as your followers.

I see SO many people complain about how it seems like the pikmin in Pikmin 1 are completely braindead or go against your wishes in order to jump into the water, fall off bridges/ledges, or run right into fire walls, and I can not stress this enough; That. Is. The. Goddamn. POINT. The Pikmin are supposed to be annoying, they’re supposed to go against your wishes, because to put it bluntly, Olimar is finding these creatures and making them into his blooming slaves. They follow Olimar because of the light on his helmet, but in the end, they still have their own wants and desires, and THAT is what makes Pikmin an incredibly amazing and insanely unique game never before seen. It’s a game where you have to fight against nature WITH nature in order to complete your goal.

What Pikmin 4 does that ended up taking the enjoyment away from me was that instead of making it a game of nature fighting AGAINST you, it’s now a game of puzzles that helps GIVE you that push towards completing your goal. Gone is that challenge. Gone is that struggle. Instead, you can rest easy in knowing the game will help you in any way it possibly can. The base is too far, making carrying items back difficult from environmental aspects (water, walls, unbuilt bridges, etc) or there being too many enemies no longer an issue, you can just move the base now. The fear of losing your Pikmin and being low on a certain type is gone, as Oatchi, as undeniably cute as he is, can be trained to withstand any elemental obstacle (minus poison), and can be trained to be as strong as 100 Pikmin to boot! He is a built-in, mandatory handicap to the entire game’s mechanic.

There are other things to critique and there are lots of things to admire, but this review is already long enough, and it’s really not that important. Overall, I would say Pikmin 4 is a good game in the sense that it does what it set out to do, and also seems to have fixed certain aspects that made the game more playable for a wider ranged audience, which I can’t have any serious vendetta against. It’s no longer the game series that I originally fell in love with, but that doesn’t mean I’m upset at people who could never get into the old games and find joy in Pikmin 4, in fact, I feel the exact opposite. I’m very happy to see so many people so passionate and happy about it in a way I felt about the original game, and ultimately, that’s what is most important to me.

P.S. If I was Olimar, I would just kill Louie at this point.

this is very much a me problem, but i've found myself falling out of love with or retroactively disliking the direction taken by many nintendo franchises for years, with big disappointments like paper mario sticker star, luigi's mansion dark moon, animal crossing new horizons, and now pikmin 4. as someone who's love of games stems from being raised on the unconventional and often times unapproachable late n64 and early to mid gamecube eras, i'm ultimately not surprised that in a post-wii world that nintendo is trying to make their games appeal to as many people who own a switch as possible, but it's still pretty disappointing.

in terms of pikmin 4 itself, it's ultimately fine but i have plenty of issues with it. i feel as though pikmin 1's tone and atmosphere of a surviving on an oppressive, lonely, and seemingly abandoned alien world juxtaposed with cute silly creatures while fighting for your life is one of that game's biggest strengths, and absolutely none of that is in pikmin 4 other than the cute silly creatures. everything is so pristine and clean and preserved to give the illusion that these cute little critters could be having silly fun adventures in your backyard to the point where the game being "pretty" means absolutely nothing to me, and the already desecrated tone definitely isn't helped by having a decent amount of characters involved who have nothing that interesting to say. it's like the captains from 3 but more and worse, and all of this combined leaves pikmin 4 to feel shallow in a lot of the aspects that matter most to me. we're no longer fighting for survival completely isolated in a world we aren't familiar with as a race against the clock and anything that was originally tied to that feeling is now completely disconnected from it.

gameplay wise, however, pikmin 4 is not that bad. pikmin's gameplay has kind of become secondary to me in that i find it too accommodating to the player as the series goes on and i can only really get too engaged while playing 1 or 2 because of this, but 4 is still fun at times. i think the forced lock on, throwing stopping when you use the right number of pikmin, and lack of respawning enemies are all insanely stupid and poorly thought out choices that do nothing to improve the experience and i'm still not 100% sold on the 3-type limit, but they're all ultimately minor issues. caves are back and at this point i don't really care about them either way in 2 or 4, they aren't remotely what i've ever liked about the series gameplay but i don't find them as awful and offensive as i used to and i'm sure there's plenty of people who are happy that they returned. oatchi kinda ruins the actual moment to moment gameplay for me though, i feel like he's too centralizing and overpowered and it's weird that character's will say "Where's Oatchi?" when he isn't currently on screen and i really do not care for his design or "look at the new dog character!" additions in general, but if you don't upgrade him too much you can still have a decent amount of fun.

ultimately pikmin 4 is a fine game that does its job, but one made for a completely different audience than me. being alienated by a series aiming for mass appeal isn't a new feeling for me, but in our world a company is going to do what it can to make the most amount of money possible and i'm glad people are making the most out of that and enjoying what comes of that even if i can't.

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.

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.

Immensely sweet and charming game with a lot to love :) My favorite thing is how committed the the game is to the storybook aspect, not just in it's interesting aesthetic but in the flow of the game itself. Every playthrough feel like it's own unique story. Also, Yoshi is so cute in this game that it makes my heart melt, there is so much love and care put into all of his little mannerisms and quirks that it makes you feel extra horrible when you inevitably mess up and get one of them whisked away to Baby Bowser's castle. Everyone should experience their own Yoshi's story ❤️