This review contains spoilers
Pikmin 4 is a really introspective sequel. It genuinely feels like a lot of this game was built from looking back at which each individual game in the series did well and delivering an experience that hit on each of those notes. It feels nostalgic to play, it is also really well put together. Which is almost good and bad for Pikmin, the jank feels like a core part of the experience. Taking unfair losses always felt core to the content of the game, sometimes theres just nothing you can do.
On that, Pikmin 4 has a bit of a modular difficulty in the gadgets you can aquire and how you use Oatchi. Oatchi when fully upgraded is essentially worth 100 pikmin. His ability to solo incredibly hard to efficiently take down enemies (like the fiery bulblax or spotty bulbear) means you can ignore a lot of the "difficulty" of the organizational parts of the game depending on how much you use Oatchi. Except when you have a timer.
Pikmin as a series has been pulled at both ends between two core gameplay fantasies that were defined by Pikmin 1 & 2. Pikmin 1 is dandori as this game puts it, its efficiently laying out the tasks before you and achieving them as quick as possible with as little loss as possible. Pikmin 2 is a vibes game, you have unlimited time and a substantially larger scope of collectables. You are chipping away at a bigger whole with less stakes, but not necessarily a less difficult experience. You can mess up as many times as you want and take as much time as you need but the task or challenge at hand always needs to be completed, the water wraith dungeon exemplifies this concept. You can take as many losses or days to do it, but at the end of the day you need to get to the end with enough pikmin for the purple flowers to solve the puzzle.
Back to Oatchi, Oatchi is a swiss-army knife that can fit every part of a Pikmin 2 vibes puzzle. With enough time Oatchi does everything. However, as a Pikmin 1 style tool. When you only have a certain amount of time, Oatchi can do anything, but can't do everything. Making him one of the most fun aspects of playing around the dandori puzzles. I think The Purple Key dandori puzzle is a wonderful stress test of this concept. The way Oatchi is used in that puzzle to get a platinum time is really fun. Similarly Dig Deep has a very fun push and pull with Oatchi between using him to kill fodder while your white pikmin are digging and then using him to pick up large uncovered items so you can more efficiently dandori. Oatchi in challenging content was very fun to play around.
Oatchi in the main game is also fun, in another way. In a Pikmin 2 vibes based way. When you are just enjoying the collecting, amassing, and exploring aspects of Pikmin. This "vibe" and Olimars story were the two very nostalgic parts of this game for me. Having Oatchi make the non-challenging content less taxing let me enjoy parts of the Pikmin vibes that I think I only really felt in Pikmin 2, and have been hoping to reexperience in a Pikmin game since then. In a "I don't want to deal with the fiery bulbax under the sprinkler in Giant's Hearth so I am just going to send Oatchi to solo kill it while I watch my Pikmin dandori a bunch of items in a neat little line" kind of way. I understand why people don't like Oatchi for the above reason, he is definitely a first order optimal strategy for the casual content of the game. All I would say about that is that he can't be used in that way in the challenging content of the game, and you don't have to use Oatchi in that way at all. I see a lot of people playing that just use Oatchi to get around faster and that is a much more authentically difficult overworld experience similar to base Pikmin 2 just without the jank.
My favorite content in the game was Olimar's Shipwreck Tale, I think it was a very fun challenging piece of "dandori" content that played a great homage to the original game. The scope was perfectly sized to be consumed in a single play session. It felt so awesome to breeze through that content in a high-challenge high-speed kind of way (I completed it in 6 days with an average of 5 ship parts a day). On a lot of the days I was getting parts within seconds of the timer ending, just barely getting what I needed to clear out an area before moving on. I felt incredibly warmed up and prepared from the content that comes before this section, I just beat the base game, I've been going ham on the dandori challenges, I took Olimar's cryptic life lesson to heart and this section felt so rewarding for the skillset the game was passively trying to encourage and foster. I think that's where the Pikmin games are at their strongest. A push pull between a contemplative vibe based stroll through a large beautifully designed slightly forgotten world where you feel small and everything is familiar but not quite the same as things actually are, and a high pressure efficiency dandori speed challenge where you are desperately trying to squeeze every last drop of value from a day. Where all actions feel deliberate. Where you are managing a bunch of things at once and just barely getting by.
Pikmin 4 scratched both itches and then some for me. It was a really nice game that scratched an itch Pikmin 2 left on me when I was a kid that hasn't been scratched again til now. Maybe in the next sequel we will finally be able to put Louie down like the dog he is.
On that, Pikmin 4 has a bit of a modular difficulty in the gadgets you can aquire and how you use Oatchi. Oatchi when fully upgraded is essentially worth 100 pikmin. His ability to solo incredibly hard to efficiently take down enemies (like the fiery bulblax or spotty bulbear) means you can ignore a lot of the "difficulty" of the organizational parts of the game depending on how much you use Oatchi. Except when you have a timer.
Pikmin as a series has been pulled at both ends between two core gameplay fantasies that were defined by Pikmin 1 & 2. Pikmin 1 is dandori as this game puts it, its efficiently laying out the tasks before you and achieving them as quick as possible with as little loss as possible. Pikmin 2 is a vibes game, you have unlimited time and a substantially larger scope of collectables. You are chipping away at a bigger whole with less stakes, but not necessarily a less difficult experience. You can mess up as many times as you want and take as much time as you need but the task or challenge at hand always needs to be completed, the water wraith dungeon exemplifies this concept. You can take as many losses or days to do it, but at the end of the day you need to get to the end with enough pikmin for the purple flowers to solve the puzzle.
Back to Oatchi, Oatchi is a swiss-army knife that can fit every part of a Pikmin 2 vibes puzzle. With enough time Oatchi does everything. However, as a Pikmin 1 style tool. When you only have a certain amount of time, Oatchi can do anything, but can't do everything. Making him one of the most fun aspects of playing around the dandori puzzles. I think The Purple Key dandori puzzle is a wonderful stress test of this concept. The way Oatchi is used in that puzzle to get a platinum time is really fun. Similarly Dig Deep has a very fun push and pull with Oatchi between using him to kill fodder while your white pikmin are digging and then using him to pick up large uncovered items so you can more efficiently dandori. Oatchi in challenging content was very fun to play around.
Oatchi in the main game is also fun, in another way. In a Pikmin 2 vibes based way. When you are just enjoying the collecting, amassing, and exploring aspects of Pikmin. This "vibe" and Olimars story were the two very nostalgic parts of this game for me. Having Oatchi make the non-challenging content less taxing let me enjoy parts of the Pikmin vibes that I think I only really felt in Pikmin 2, and have been hoping to reexperience in a Pikmin game since then. In a "I don't want to deal with the fiery bulbax under the sprinkler in Giant's Hearth so I am just going to send Oatchi to solo kill it while I watch my Pikmin dandori a bunch of items in a neat little line" kind of way. I understand why people don't like Oatchi for the above reason, he is definitely a first order optimal strategy for the casual content of the game. All I would say about that is that he can't be used in that way in the challenging content of the game, and you don't have to use Oatchi in that way at all. I see a lot of people playing that just use Oatchi to get around faster and that is a much more authentically difficult overworld experience similar to base Pikmin 2 just without the jank.
My favorite content in the game was Olimar's Shipwreck Tale, I think it was a very fun challenging piece of "dandori" content that played a great homage to the original game. The scope was perfectly sized to be consumed in a single play session. It felt so awesome to breeze through that content in a high-challenge high-speed kind of way (I completed it in 6 days with an average of 5 ship parts a day). On a lot of the days I was getting parts within seconds of the timer ending, just barely getting what I needed to clear out an area before moving on. I felt incredibly warmed up and prepared from the content that comes before this section, I just beat the base game, I've been going ham on the dandori challenges, I took Olimar's cryptic life lesson to heart and this section felt so rewarding for the skillset the game was passively trying to encourage and foster. I think that's where the Pikmin games are at their strongest. A push pull between a contemplative vibe based stroll through a large beautifully designed slightly forgotten world where you feel small and everything is familiar but not quite the same as things actually are, and a high pressure efficiency dandori speed challenge where you are desperately trying to squeeze every last drop of value from a day. Where all actions feel deliberate. Where you are managing a bunch of things at once and just barely getting by.
Pikmin 4 scratched both itches and then some for me. It was a really nice game that scratched an itch Pikmin 2 left on me when I was a kid that hasn't been scratched again til now. Maybe in the next sequel we will finally be able to put Louie down like the dog he is.