Pikmin is yet another series I’ve heard of over the years, but never got around to playing until now. From what I can tell it has a bit of a following, but it’s not nearly as popular as some of Nintendo’s other franchises. Going in I wasn’t sure what to expect, but after completing it I’m prepared to say that I liked it, and it still holds up even without nostalgia, seeing as I have none for this game.
In Pikmin you play as Olimar, an astronaut who is traveling through space when his spaceship is hit by a meteorite. He crash lands on a nearby alien planet, the pieces of his spaceship scattering all over the same region of the planet. Things look bleak, as he only has 30 days worth of life support, and if he can’t find all of the missing parts of his ship and repair it within those 30 days he’ll be doomed.
Fortunately he comes across some primitive plant-like lifeforms he dubs Pikmin who seem friendly and begin to follow his orders seemingly because they see him as their leader/paternal figure. With the Pikmin’s help he now stands a chance at repairing his spaceship and returning home.
The core gameplay loop consists of spending each day looking for the missing spaceship parts, which requires you to grow enough Pikmin to carry the parts, and to clear out the obstacles that stand in the way of the parts, namely natural barriers and hostile wildlife. There are three types of Pikmin, red Pikmin, which are the best at attacking enemies, yellow Pikmin, which can be thrown further and can carry bomb rocks, and blue Pikmin, which unlike the other Pikmin can survive in water. At the end of each day Olimar climbs into his spaceship and the Pikmin climb aboard their plant-like flying vehicles/incubators, and they spend the night flying up in the atmosphere to avoid the nocturnal predators that prowl on the ground at night. The days pass by relentlessly regardless of how much progress you’ve made, and all you can do is keep going and hope that you make it before the 30 days are up.
This game has a lot of similarities to RTS games, a genre that I don’t really care for, but Pikmin really clicked for me. In a typical RTS game you basically play as a God or a distant commander that has no direct connection or investment in what is happening, which creates a bit of a detachment between the player and the game. In Pikmin though you play as the astronaut, and you’re there on the ground, directly confronting the problem and directly affected by any setbacks or dangers. Another problem with RTS games is that often you’ll be dealing with conflicts on multiple fronts, so you’ll have to constantly swap back and forth between different sections of the map to keep an eye on things, and if you get too focused on one area it’s possible for you to not notice a problem in another area until after it’s already been overrun. But in Pikmin you typically are only required to focus on one problem at a time, and while you can multitask to a certain extent, how much you try to do at once is up to you, and you’re never overwhelmed with too much going on at once.
I think the game also finds a nice balance between being cute and being cruel. The Pikmin, wildlife, and environments are visually pleasing and even beautiful at times, but they’re also brutal. You often have to use the Pikmin to attack and kill other creatures, and then take their corpses back to the Pikmin incubators so that their remains can be used to create more Pikmin seeds, much like how ants take the bodies of dead animals back to their colonies to store as food. The contrast between how cutesy everything is but also how vicious things can be might sound jarring, but I think it works, because it perfectly captures the duality of nature. Nature can be very fascinating, beautiful, even awe inspiring, but at the same time it’s full of various life forms constantly competing for survival, and it’s a harsh but grim truth about how the world and the circle of life works.
I also think this contrast works when it comes to the Pikmin. The Pikmin are cute enough to be endearing, but they’re simultaneously very stupid, so while you feel a little bad when they die, it’s hard to feel that guilty when more often then not it’s their own fault. They’ll frequently fall off ledges, the red and yellow Pikmin will get too close to the water and drown almost instantly, and when they’re carrying things they’ll often walk directly into a predator or a fire and then be surprised when they’re being killed.
I think the best way to play this game is to fully accept that the first time around you won’t be able to retrieve all 30 spaceship parts before the 30 days are up. Part of it is that you just need to get a general lay of the land, learn how the game works, and what strategies are the best, and part of it is that the game is sometimes bad at explaining certain things. But looking up the answers in a guide kind of spoils things, and I think it’s best to treat the game as an experience, a simulation of what it’s like to organically explore and make your way through a hostile but lush alien world, rather than just something to win. After you’ve completed the first 30 day cycle, then yeah feel free to look up tips and tricks in guides, since there are some things the game doesn’t explain very well. And I won’t spoil what happens in the ending where you don’t get enough of the parts to leave the planet, but let’s just say that it’s equal parts wholesome and horrifying.
I appreciate the way the game keeps the core gameplay design as simple and elegant as possible, and it makes most of the problems and their solutions fairly intuitive. It’s a game that’s simple enough that children can play it, but it’s challenging enough that even adults will find it engaging.
I was also surprised by how articulate and thoughtful Olimar was as a character. After each day he writes in his journal, and will alternate between making philosophical remarks about the alien world he’s found himself on, missing his home and family, and giving some often very appreciated gameplay hints to the player. My main exposure to Olimar before this was his appearance in Super Smash Bros Brawl, and there he just looked like a silly dweeb, so I wasn’t expecting much here, but I ended up liking him. If he wasn’t already married I’d tell him to find out if Samus likes smart short guys.
While I liked this game, it does have some flaws. Wrangling the Pikmin can get a bit annoying, though I think that was at least somewhat intentional. Even so, deliberately annoying is still annoying, and it would have been nice if the Pikmin could fend for themselves more, and had more self preservation instincts than a dead squirrel. Admittedly I don’t think I would change much about this game even if I could, since overall I think it works, but I would make a few tweaks.
One would be to not make large predators respawn. It’s incredibly aggravating to go to all of the trouble of clearing out an area of all hostile wildlife, only for all of it to come right back a few days later. If there wasn’t a thirty day time limit I wouldn’t care as much, but there is, so it’s just a bad and frustrating addition. I’d also get rid of all of the fire geysers, because while there are ways of dealing with them without losing a bunch of Pikmin to the flames, they're still an incredibly obnoxious obstacle to navigate around, and the game would have been a bit more enjoyable without them. And one final change I’d make would be to alter one puzzle in the final area. You have to move a box, and in order to move it you have to manipulate the Pikmin in a way that is completely unintuitive, and that until that point in the game I’d never had to do. It was odd, and was one of the few points where I had to look up the answer, because otherwise I genuinely would have had no clue how to solve it.
But apart from a few minor annoyances, overall I really liked this game. The gameplay is engrossing, the core design is very elegant, and the attention to detail is quite impressive. Even if you normally don’t like strategy games, I’d say this one is worth checking out. There will be some annoying or even frustrating moments when the Pikmin do something dumb, or where something goes wrong because of some variable you forgot to take into account, but the good stuff more than makes up for it. I’m now really looking forward to Pikmin 2, because if it’s anything like this I’m sure it will be an excellent game.
Final arbitrary score: 9/10 (Outstanding)
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