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.

Paradise Killer is such an interesting game, gripping me originally as kind of a vaporwave noir detective style experience that I found slowly transform into a compelling moral quandary. Lady Love Dies is a character that becomes nearly omniscient at the end of the experience, her collecting and piecing together of the facts are exact and inevitable. The game very quickly becomes less a question of “who done it” and more “who deserves justice.” Which I think genuinely is a much more compelling game experience, especially considering that the actual incarnation of Truth and Justice is a very malleable thing, there is no right answer to the trial of Paradise Killer compared to Danganronpa for instance.

There are I think four categories of characters in Paradise Killer.

Genuinely Didn’t Do Anything
Aided and Abetted
Directly Criminal
Masterminds

The only characters really completely innocent are Crimson Acid and (not)surprisingly Henry Division, and I think that the set up for Crimson Acid in particular is really well put together.

The aided and abetted camp are occupied by Sam and Lydia Daybreak, and Doom Jazz. A cast of characters that wind up being the nicest, more upfront, and least corrupt of the cast. I think the heart of the game is found in these characters and whether or not you the player (or you Lady Love Dies) think they deserve justice for their actions.

The Directly Criminal characters are Akiko 14, Yuri Night, and Dainonigate. Outside of Dianonigate, I think these are the least interesting of the bunch because they are essentially tools. For what I am going to get into earlier these characters are almost always “guilty”, they are selfishly motivated, unsympathetic, and unessential in the grand scheme of the world of paradise killer. That doesn’t make them bad characters, I think their role is incredibly important.

And that leaves us with the two Masterminds, Architect Carmelina Silence and Witness to the End, and these characters are of similar importance to the heart of the game. I think that they wind up being the question because ultimately Paradise Killer isn’t a question of “who” it is a question of what is justice, or what is guilty.

At the end of this game a player is going to have two uncomfortable questions that they need to answer. Was what the Daybreaks and Doom Jazz did really worthy of execution (is that justice)? Or some variation of “Even though Carmelina did this, is she too important to kill” or “Is the Witness right.” Which leads the player to an incredibly interesting scenario, because unlike other similar style detective games more information doesn’t lead the player to the correct answer, but instead control of the narrative, it allows you to define what justice is and what guilt is.

Which leads to some really interesting kinds of trials you can have. There are two that I think most players will choose, a variation of killing Yuri Night, Akiko 14, Carmelina, and Witness as they are the most directly guilty, and the daybreaks/doom jazz don’t deserve punishment. Or the heart wrenching decision to kill the daybreaks and doom jazz as well, pretty much executing the entire cast besides Crimson Acid and Henry. I personally picked the first outcome on my first play through but on ruminating on the events of the game there are four distinct other outcomes of this trial that lay outside the bounds of the traditional sense of justice and guilt. Do you protect Carmelina but cull those will ruin the next paradise? Do you believe the Witness was correct and time spent wasted on making the perfect island instead of reviving the gods is blasphemous, and kill Carmelina and her abetters? Do you protect the current syndicate and execute Henry? Or do you believe this Syndicate is equally unworthy/too problematic for perfect 25?

I think the game gives you enough breadcrumbs for each and every choice to be one worthy of consideration, and I think it positions the game uniquely in the VN space. I think it also makes LD a really interesting and complex character.

The only thing stopping me from giving this a five star is that I think it kind of paces itself too quickly during the trial. We don’t get enough closure with the cast, I wish there was a way to talk to characters before the die and/or some real closure with the characters you let live. I think there was a lot of missed opportunity to end such an incredibly well structured and well put together game.

“When love dies, all that remains are the facts”