I’ve always loved the setting of the Pikmin series, and the hints that these little creatures are hiding somewhere in our world, unnoticed but only unseen. I like the idea that even though Pikmin live all around us, in our homes and gardens, between muddy pots and heavy dandelions, it requires people to take a slightly different – alien, actually People’s perspectives to discover them, spend time with them, and realize their true worth.
I think this feeling reflects the overall attitude towards the oft-ignored Pikmin series, despite several major incarnations, re-releases, spinoffs, and promotion by the legendary Shigeru Miyamoto himself. In terms of sales, it never bothered games like Splatoon or Luigi’s Mansion, let alone Mario or Zelda. It’s an odd concept, with a lovely strategy wrapper that clearly hides the more core needs of resource and time management. While its characters look good as stuffed animals, I wonder how many stuffed animal owners are actually 100% sticking with Pikmin 3. Maybe it’s bad luck? Unfortunately, so far, Nintendo has been planning new Pikmin entries for its underperforming hardware generation. Or, despite Nintendo’s repeated closeness, it never quite cracked a formula for a broad audience. Well, after experiencing the vast wealth that Pikmin 4 has to offer, I’m not sure what else Nintendo could try.
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Pikmin 4 is a stellar achievement, serving as both the perfect entry point into this world and the tried-and-tested follow-up for longtime fans who have waited a decade for Nintendo to turn a new chapter. A good example of this is the game’s new canine protagonist, Ozzie, who I felt very conflicted about at first. As anyone who has played the Pikmin 4 demo knows, the game starts off in the gentlest way possible and builds up to the series’ usual demands of playing around with different Pikmin types and different humans (and now space dogs) Allocate time and resources among leaders. The division of labor is a key component of the series, evolving over time, and it elevates Pikmin 2 from its single-protagonist predecessors. But in Pikmin 3, things go too far, with the three protagonists controlled via the Wii U’s GamePad tablet, veering awkwardly into RTS territory.
Back to Orchi. Let’s be real: This dog looks great on a game box. For the uninitiated, he’s an enthusiastic face, and his role as a virtual character riding a mount is quickly understood. For those of you who have ever set foot on the planet PNF-404, he’s obviously your second leader, and you’ll soon gain the ability to divide and control your Pikmin forces between your avatar and him. So, for those of you who want to play Pikmin 4 like Pikmin 2, constantly switching characters for maximum strategic advantage, here’s what you can do. For those of you who want to play something like Pikmin 3 and have markers on the game map to pave the way for the leader while you’re busy elsewhere, you can do that too. For those of you who wanted to play Pikmin 1, or even just use your avatar as a solo protagonist, I can count on one hand the number of times Pikmin 4 forces you to play as Oatchi solo.
As time passes and the game unfolds, Pikmin 4 will reward your patience with layer after layer of more abilities, upgrades, and fresh game types, each one dovetailing with the other. For example, progression through the game’s timed challenges and fun nighttime quests will unlock Oatchi’s ability upgrades, pushing you to a different approach to play and welcoming easy upgrades to explore further and take on tougher challenges. The ability to recall stray Pikmin with the push of a button once you’ve purchased specific upgrades is a welcome late-game add-on – though I can see some Pikmin purists choosing not to use it. Character upgrades are also back in Pikmin 2 – giving you a reason to hunt for resources like crystals as well as traditional human items for treasure. Finally, the triumphant return of Pikmin 2’s caves, and their increasing difficulty, allows you to spend more and more of your time formulating encounters in often claustrophobic locations, unconstrained by the game’s usual time on Earth’s surface .
The in-game introduction of Pikmin itself keeps the same return cadence, and the typical genre- by-genre introduction to Pikmin is naturally stretched out here, as Pikmin 4 makes sure to include all the major genres in the series so far ( Pikmin 3 relegated purple to Pikmin 4). and white to side mode continues to sting). There’s even a gradual progression to how your squad grows in size–I didn’t reach the usual 100 Pikmin total until after the game’s first ending. In short, this means you’ll have plenty of time to learn about the basic red and yellow types of the series before you move on to explore the underwater areas of each area with the blue pikmin, the former now featuring fire-carrying extra ability.
The new Ice Pikmin for Pikmin 4 also came out early, which is a smart addition. The ability to freeze water sources provides an interesting alternative for certain combat situations, though they’re most useful for temporarily freezing enemies solid during an attack, which greatly aids your ability to sap an enemy’s health in relative safety. It’s an alternative to Pikmin 2’s Super Bitter Spray, and now there’s a tradeoff: frozen enemies shatter on failure, stripping you of valuable resources. Ultimately, I found myself only freezing enemies when necessary, or trying to nimbly retreat when an enemy’s health was low so it could unfreeze and then defeat (and harvest) through non-freezing means.
The game’s other new species, the Luminous Pikmin, is only encountered during the night missions, and is the only type of Pikmin used in these separate sections. Pikmin 4’s Night Sojourn has been kept a secret by Nintendo, but it’s actually the equivalent of a quick tower defense jam, where you have to quickly build up a Pikmin army and then defend a series of hives until dawn. The spooky glowing Pikmin grows and works much faster than usual, and returns to you once the activity is complete. They can also combine to form a giant sphere for powerful electrified attacks. Like all of the game’s secondary gameplay parts, its night quests and glowing Pikmins also crucially feed back into the game’s main campaign: here, giving you glowing Pikmin seeds to use in the underground environment. These seeds will allow you to summon the glowing Pikmin you created earlier as temporary underground support – handy if you lose your Pikmin in the cave in the middle of your squad. Again, there’s a tradeoff here: similar to the much-missed Bulmin from Pikmin 2, you’ll leave them behind when you exit the dungeon.
While the night missions are brief, they’re one of several palate cleansers you can access at any time from Pikmin 4’s new hub, where you can start each day in the game. Here, you can spend resources on upgrades before embarking on your next expedition, or choose to replay challenge levels for a better score, or just gossip with some of the many other faces you’ll meet on your travels. Pikmin 4’s story is as simple as any of Miyamoto’s games, though it does have depth to its background, and there are some delightful connections between past Pikmin games for fans to discover . Your growing camp will also allow you to inspect your treasure and stay updated on a series of side quests that will push you back to previous areas.
The game’s original story – where you and a rescue team of NPCs search for the original Pikmin protagonist, Captain Olimar – culminates in a series of compelling areas inside human houses for the first time – commanding Pikmin’s seas is exciting As you crawl across the rug, dash under the couch, and climb up the kitchen cabinets and through the roaring flames of the kitchen stove. In such a large area, I appreciate the new ability to move the landing zone and Pikmin onions to different places, reducing the need to backtrack.
Pikmin purists might be surprised at first by the game’s new restriction of having three Pikmin types in your squad at the same time (although you can work around this in caves), but over time, I again Got the point of the game and found that this is actually helping the area to be more focused while still allowing you to use any of the main daytime Pikmin varieties in the game at any time. A brilliant and beautiful mid-game beach area is a great example of this focus, and as you’d expect, the aquatic blue Pikmin gets a real chance to shine. But even here, things change—at halfway through each day in the game, the tide recedes, revealing more land.
In the later game areas, you’ll encounter the huge purple, angular rocks, and air-flying Pikmin varieties from past games – and it took me a little longer to spot the series’ white varieties (although once found, they There may be more to come) Pikmin 4 than ever). Nintendo hopes that the Pikmin 4 review doesn’t spoil what the game has to offer after your initial mission has concluded (and the game’s lead credits roll). Suffice it to say, this is a very, very generous game that fans of Olimar and Pikmin 1 in particular will be delighted with, and that my playtime has more than doubled since then.
I could go on and on about how the pieces of Pikmin 4 slowly come together, how your hub is filled with extra things to do, the whole “Dandori” challenge mode where you can fight the AI, or The limited race against time to gather resources, the return of Piklopedia correctness, and small tweaks to established gameplay have made this game a step up in many small ways (however enjoyable it is to lock onto targets). Then there’s the game’s rewind feature, which quickly became a necessity for me trying to limit the pain of Pikmin, but I also believe that it also allows the game to keep offering more surprises and tougher battles, because you know when things happen You have a get out card. Go wrong instead of making you agonize over finding more Pikmin to replace missing numbers.
Pikmin 4 fills yourself and your time with a wealth of things to do, things to find, goals to chase and places to explore. It might be slow at first, but when it all comes together, it really sings. It keeps the series’ weirdness–doubling them in some ways–but opens up the series in ways that Pikmin hasn’t attempted before. It’s a good reward for a decade of patience from fans, and a lot of thought from Nintendo’s top brass about how best to continue beyond Pikmin 3. It’s a clever evolution of a long-overlooked series. Is this Pikmin’s real breakthrough moment? who knows. But there’s no question that this is one of Nintendo’s best games in years.
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