The latest entry in Nintendo's cult hit series is a highlight for Switch-owners
I sometimes think about how people who know about Pikmin, but haven’t played it for themselves, must view Pikmin fans. We must seem unhinged. I mean, what’s the big deal? You throw a bunch of little flower guys at bad guys and collect stuff? In concept and in design, Pikmin does not seem to demand or inspire the level of devotion fans like me have for the series.
Sure, for some of us, there’s a heavy element of nostalgia at play. I discovered Pikmin during my deepest Nintendo obsession when I was twelve years old, with the re-release of both Pikmin and Pikmin 2 on the Nintendo Wii. Nintendo practically defined my life at the time, and I threw myself into these games with a passion.
I remember bracing myself for the fact that Pikmin was considered by some to be too short, only to wind up laughing at what a silly caveat that felt like. The game, to me, was perfect, and Pikmin 2 provided an even more substantial experience. So, yes, I’ve been in love with Pikmin for 16 years now.
Does that influence my perception of the game? Absolutely. But I’m going to try and put all that aside for this review. Listen, if you’ve played any Pikmin game, you know. You know what a vibrant, living world those games inhabit. You know the thrills of fighting creatures ten times your size and racing to pick up one last item before the day ends and the beasts of the night emerge to eat up your flowered friends.
If you like Pikmin games, then you know that Pikmin 4 is going to be worth your time. This review then is aimed at all you fence sitters, and even some of you on the other side of that fence who don’t know a thing about Pikmin.
You deserve to be over here, in the land of Pikmin. You deserve to experience the unbridled joy that the rest of us feel when a new Pikmin game is announced. You deserve to play one of the best gaming experiences you can have on a Nintendo Switch.
You deserve Pikmin. Let me tell you why.
Crash Landing
Pikmin games all follow the same formula: you play as a Little Guy or Gal who crash-lands on an Earth eerily devoid of humans. Your reason for coming to Earth varies—food, treasure, or happenstance. In the case of Pikmin 4, you’re a member of the intergalactic Rescue Corp, hunting for Captain Olimar—a shipwrecked explorer who managed to send a distress signal before disappearing.
After a crash landing, you discover the existence of the animal/plant-hybrid creatures called Pikmin, who are drawn to you. Pikmin are key to your mission. You’ll use them to fight vicious beasts, collect valuable items, and overcome environmental obstacles. They’re helpless without your direction though, so careful management of your Pikmin army is vital to survival.
You might’ve noticed that I mentioned you playing as a ‘Little’ guy or gal. Well, that’s because you and the Pikmin are only a few centimetres tall. Being tiny in this abandoned world of humans is one of the games most appealing design elements. It is endlessly fun exploring this world from an ant’s perspective. Nintendo consistently designs levels that make the most out of your shrunken perspective—more on that later.
So, there you have it. You battle in real time against hungry monsters in order to traverse hazardous environments in your search for Captain Olimar. In true Nintendo fashion though, this simple concept belies a depth and breadth of gameplay that is simply a joy to experience.
The Horrors
There’s one more element I hinted at earlier that forms the basic structure of Pikmin 4 and that is the ‘Day System’. The game is played in increments, with a standard day lasting fifteen minutes. In-world, this is because most of the Pikmin-devouring creatures are nocturnal, making night explorations a risk, but gameplay-wise, this breaks the game into delightfully addictive chunks.
The ticking clock adds an element of tension, but also an element of motivation. Anybody who plays Pikmin 4 will at some point wonder just how much progress it’s possible to make in just one day, prompting them to work as efficiently as possible. Indeed, challenging yourself to beat the game in as few days as possible is where you’ll have some of the best fun in Pikmin 4 if you ever decide to replay it (as many do).
But what does progress in Pikmin 4 look like? While previous Pikmin games had incredibly satisfying progression systems, Pikmin 4 perfects it. You start with a hard limit of twenty Pikmin on the field at any one time. This isn’t nearly enough to tackle some of the nastier creatures guarding some the glitzier treasures, so you’ll have so source ‘flarlic’ to expand your roster.
Also in typical Pikmin fashion, you only start with one kind of Pikmin—the fire-immune Red Pikmin. You’ll have to source other kinds—Blue, Yellow, etcetera—to access different areas of the map and exploit enemy weaknesses. Discovering a new Pikmin species is always exciting, because it opens up so many new ways to play the game.
Your primary day-to-day goal is to acquire ‘Sparklium’—a resource acquired from treasures scattered around the playable areas—in order to expand your ship’s reach. Pikmin hoist the treasures back to base for you, but you’ll need to make sure their path is cleared of enemies first, otherwise they’ll get gobbled. And you do not want your Pikmin to get gobbled.
Pikmin Down
Pikmin are cute and I love to look at them, but their kid-friendly aesthetic—one that might put off more quote-unquote serious gamers—belies a truly unnerving aspect of the game; when Pikmin die, they do not go quietly into that good night. The shriek of a Pikmin being eaten alive is one of the most gut-wrenching sounds in all of gaming, and watching their little souls float off to Pikmin-Heaven in the aftermath is like kicking you when you’re down.
Pikmin die easily. Only careful strategy or overwhelming numbers will keep them alive. The fact that it is technically possible to beat the game without losing a single Pikmin—and that the game keeps track of how many you’ve lost—pushes you to play carefully. Of course, you can always replenish and boost your Pikmin supply with pellets and carcasses, so if you do lose a big chunk of Pikmin, you’ll likely be able to replace them easily enough.
Really, the only true downside to letting your Pikmin die is the psychic damage it does to your conscience—and I personally think this is one of the greatest aspects of the game.
One new feature Pikmin 4 adds to the series is rewinding time. You can skip back through the minutes of the day for whatever reason you choose—although most of the time you’ll find yourself only doing it when you lose Pikmin. I was unsure about the feature at first, but I quickly became attuned to its benefits.
Nintendo must’ve realised how many people were restarting their games when they lost Pikmin—I used to do it all the time—and decided that it would save a lot of gamers a lot of time by simply adding this ‘rewind time’ function to the game. It’s essentially a soft reset button, and although some hardcore Pikmin-heads no doubt scoffed at its inclusion, it adds an optional safety net to the game. Using it or not makes your playthrough of the game even more personalised.
Nightlife
While your typical Pikmin day primarily focuses on traversing the environment, clearing enemies, and collecting treasure, there are numerous ways that Pikmin 4 remixes and expands on this theme. The most frequent way it does this is with caves. Caves—a much-appreciated returning feature from Pikmin 2—act as mini-adventures within a day. Delving into a cave slows down time (game logic), so you never have to fear the day ending mid-action.
Most caves are practically mazes. They’re split into levels, and at the deepest part of the cave there’s usually a boss monster. Pikmin boss designs are wonderful; there’s so much fun to be had targeting a boss’s weak spot and taking it down with careful strategy—not to mention the thrill of fleeing in terror from their overwhelming size when you don’t have a clue how to safely dispatch them.
Most bosses are guarding trapped castaways—civilians of various professions who’ve also been stranded on the planet, subsisting solely on their space-suit’s life-support systems. Rescuing specific castaways is usually how you progress the game’s story, with different ones unlocking more game features. Want to unlock helpful gadgets? You have to find the engineer. Want to change how your customisable character looks? You have to find the beautician. Finding castaways really contributes to the game’s sense of progress.
New to Pikmin 4 are nighttime expeditions, which is Pikmin’s take on the ‘tower defence’ game genre. At night, you’re tasked with defending ‘Lumiknolls’ using a special type of spectral Pikmin from hordes of enemies. These are action-packed, fast-paced sections of gameplay that can be fiendishly difficult at times. There’re only a limited number of these levels—and once you beat a level once there’s not much reason to do it again—but there are quite a few of them, and they make for some of the game’s best moments.
Dandori
Night expeditions aren’t the only new way Pikmin 4 tasks the reader with playing the game in a different way. There are also ‘Dandori’ challenges. These are timed challenges taking place on a small battlefield either against a CPU character or simply against the clock. The goal is to rack up points by collecting items and defeating enemies as quickly as possible.
‘Dandori’ apparently translates from Japanese as ‘planning’ or ‘preparation’, so naturally these levels challenge you to approach them as efficiently as possible in order to nab a high score. Again, there’re only a limited number of these, but they’re a lot of fun.
My only issue is with them is the lack of online leaderboards, which would’ve added a much-needed competitive edge. Still, planning out your route and battle strategy on the map screen and implementing your ideas in real time makes you feel like a master general. I had a lot of fun shaving seconds off my high-scores in order to get the platinum medal for the courses.
I’ve neglected to mention a very important element of the game—one that helps with strategy an immense amount—and that is Oatchi, the ‘Rescue Pup.’ The player character and all Pikmin can ride on Oatchi for more efficient travel, but Oatchi is also capable of being ordered around and even controlled by the player while your avatar is elsewhere on the map.
Oatchi can do everything the player character can do and more. He’s capable of charging enemies to stun and damage them, attack them by biting, and carry treasure back to your base. The best thing about Oatchi is his progression system. In the beginning, Oatchi isn’t all that useful, but as you train him using ‘Pup Drive’, he can become an unstoppable force.
Oatchi The Indestructible
Literally unstoppable. Oatchi is a fun addition to the game at times—but I also don’t think he’s all that well balanced. Once he’s strong enough, there’s almost no reason to manually throw Pikmin at regular enemies anymore because it’s so much quicker and easier to just charge them and OHKO them with Oatchi.
This isn’t an issue that rears it’s head for a while though, and even then it’s not like it breaks the game. I just could’ve used a few more sections of the game where strategy didn’t come second to brute force.
This leads me to the equipment you can unlock after you rescue the engineer. Much like Oatchi, you can ‘level up’ your gear so that you take less damage, run faster, become immune to elemental hazards, etcetera. This is another fun progression system, but the engineer also lets you purchase weapons from him. Pikmin fans will recognise the Bomb Rocks, but that’s only the beginning of the wide variety of missiles and god-like forces you’re capable of buying to aid in the destruction of your enemies.
And I never used any of them once.
Pikmin 4 isn’t too easy, but neither is it exceptionally challenging apart from some endgame sections. Maybe my perception of things is skewed by the fact that I’m a Pikmin veteran at this stage, but if I let myself use all of the weapons available to me, this game would’ve been considerably less fun.
The fact that they’re locked behind in-game currency that can be used for other purposes, like building bridges and climbable walls, means that choosing not to buy the weapons doesn’t feel I’m purposefully avoiding an element of gameplay—it’s more like an opportunity cost. Still, I would’ve liked to have an excuse to use some of these weapons—maybe on some extra-difficult enemies—just to see what they played like.
End of Day
The last element of the game I want to briefly touch on is the post-game. Don’t worry! No spoilers for either plot or game content! I just feel like it’s necessary to mention that when the credits roll, the game is not over. I’ll be entirely honest and say that when I reached the credits, my heart sank a little. Those last few story and gameplay beats before the credits felt like a total anticlimax, and I struggled to swallow my disappointment as I waited with bated breath for the credits to finish, hoping and praying for some post-game content.
My relief was immeasurable. There’s tons of content in the ‘post-game’, which mostly feels like a natural continuation of the story that came before and less like bonus content. I seriously question the placement of those credits.
Nevertheless, Pikmin 4 is a stellar game. The environments are gorgeous; filled with life and small details. The bosses are tough and the Pikmin are cute. Its controls are fluid and natural, and the game is lengthy if you’re looking to fully complete it. It also runs like a dream, with no lag or choppy textures.
Honestly, Pikmin 4 is a Pikmin fan's dream come true. I often find myself returning to Pikmin games just so I can languish in their wistful, dangerous, and fantastical atmosphere, and writing this review, I'm already excited for the day I give Pikmin 4 a second playthrough.
If you own a Switch, you should own Pikmin 4. The series doesn't get half the recognition it deserves, even from Nintendo fans like me. I genuinely can't imagine someone playing a Pikmin game and not enjoying it. My dream is that some day, Pikmin becomes popular enough that fans don't have to wait a decade between instalments.
Until then, all I can do is write reviews and tell you that if you haven't played Pikmin 4, you're missing out.
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