Very much a blast of joy. I played a good chunk of this when I had to be off my feet for a weekend. Really great vibes for that. Soaking up these miniature worlds, their human touches and beauty. Gone are linear levels of pikmin yore, and now are a few large levels meant to be played many times over.
The music is outstanding here, all woody mallets and whimsical melodies which never cloy. Lots of excellent sound design that keeps your head scratching, "how did they make this?" synths aplenty, whirring and chiming, feels exploratory and bold. There's this cave in seaside shores that is aquarium themed that is a real fucking highlight. Water in this game looks fantastic and your character walks right on the seafloor enhancing that diaroma effect. The cave is tense and exploratory, and the fishbowl aspect miniaturizes you, all while a soft theme plinks around and your Pikmin crest the waves.
Unfortunately, the game is overall a little too frictionless. Lots going back and forth on whether this game is too easy or not and I think that's fundamentally the wrong question here. It's about that friction: is there enough making the stakes high, the exploring and collecting tense thus rewarding? Not really. Take oatchi who is an absolutely fun addition but minimizes so many processes. No longer throwing pikmin, but just able to charge and blast them all off onto your enemy, shrinking a health bar instantaneously. Collecting stuff can now be done at double the speed.
I must be inconvenienced more. I never needed to collect or worry about any amount of my pikmin a day after getting them. I didn't need more treasure halfway through the game because I collected enough to unlock everything through endgame. It's all smooth good vibes hurling yourself at weak enemies. Every pikmin death felt inevitable, not hard won.
This lack of friction really rears it's head in nighttime expeditions, which initially are fun power fantasies in which growing an army is easy and uneventful, but then there's nothing more to balance that out, and dandoris, which I think are a bit of a saving grace in that they distill the core game into a beautiful match and I like the friction there, even if, yes I do think they are too easy. I know harder ones are behind the olimar story.
The olimar story is the final example here. You think this might be the friction, but I think it's trial and error. I didn't beat it because I kept starting days and then wasn't able to advance in that map because I was missing an upgrade. I know I can rewind a day, but putting the puzzle together of what to get after what upgrade is simply memorization and trial and error. I could restart the olimar campaign and breeze through it on a second try because now I know the order of operations. But what would be the point - it's now rote.
Anyways, even though there is more negative than positive in this review I'll remind you of the first two paragraphs. I want to love this even more and when I was still playing through the home map, this was scoring higher in my mind, and I needed to work through my criticisms in the end.
The music is outstanding here, all woody mallets and whimsical melodies which never cloy. Lots of excellent sound design that keeps your head scratching, "how did they make this?" synths aplenty, whirring and chiming, feels exploratory and bold. There's this cave in seaside shores that is aquarium themed that is a real fucking highlight. Water in this game looks fantastic and your character walks right on the seafloor enhancing that diaroma effect. The cave is tense and exploratory, and the fishbowl aspect miniaturizes you, all while a soft theme plinks around and your Pikmin crest the waves.
Unfortunately, the game is overall a little too frictionless. Lots going back and forth on whether this game is too easy or not and I think that's fundamentally the wrong question here. It's about that friction: is there enough making the stakes high, the exploring and collecting tense thus rewarding? Not really. Take oatchi who is an absolutely fun addition but minimizes so many processes. No longer throwing pikmin, but just able to charge and blast them all off onto your enemy, shrinking a health bar instantaneously. Collecting stuff can now be done at double the speed.
I must be inconvenienced more. I never needed to collect or worry about any amount of my pikmin a day after getting them. I didn't need more treasure halfway through the game because I collected enough to unlock everything through endgame. It's all smooth good vibes hurling yourself at weak enemies. Every pikmin death felt inevitable, not hard won.
This lack of friction really rears it's head in nighttime expeditions, which initially are fun power fantasies in which growing an army is easy and uneventful, but then there's nothing more to balance that out, and dandoris, which I think are a bit of a saving grace in that they distill the core game into a beautiful match and I like the friction there, even if, yes I do think they are too easy. I know harder ones are behind the olimar story.
The olimar story is the final example here. You think this might be the friction, but I think it's trial and error. I didn't beat it because I kept starting days and then wasn't able to advance in that map because I was missing an upgrade. I know I can rewind a day, but putting the puzzle together of what to get after what upgrade is simply memorization and trial and error. I could restart the olimar campaign and breeze through it on a second try because now I know the order of operations. But what would be the point - it's now rote.
Anyways, even though there is more negative than positive in this review I'll remind you of the first two paragraphs. I want to love this even more and when I was still playing through the home map, this was scoring higher in my mind, and I needed to work through my criticisms in the end.