Pikmin 4 Is Practically Everything I Want Out Of A Pikmin Game

“Wistfully Wild”

I love Pikmin. Like, a lot. I really, really love Pikmin. I don’t have an excuse to talk about it here nearly as much as I would like to, but Pikmin is one of my favorite video game franchises of all time. I’ve been toying with the idea of doing a couple of different Pikmin-themed blogs for a while, but I’ve never gotten around to it. Until now. Finally, finally, with the July 21st release of Pikmin 4, it’s here. It’s the “min” portion of that lesser-acknowledged “Barminheimer” media composite, as opposed to just “Barbenheimer” (making July 21st, 2023 a truly triple-threat release date to go down in history, not just a dynamic duo of Barbie and Oppenheimer). This is a game that I’ve been waiting for release for over a decade, and that’s a good enough excuse to write about Pikmin.

And what do you know, even better yet, the game is good. So, so damn good. This is the proper sequel to Pikmin 2 that I wanted back when Pikmin had an emotional and mental hold over me unlike any other media since. Pikmin 3 was great an all, but Pikmin 4? Oh, this is how dreams come true. I have not been more excited about a game release since, well, only about a year ago with Elden Ring, but before that! Nothing else comes close! Pikmin 4 is a masterpiece, it’s a miracle, it’s Nintendo finally giving Pikmin the treatment it deserves, it’s one of my new favorite games and I haven’t even finished it yet, and I’m so happy that I get to say this without genuinely having a “but…” moment to come after. Pikmin 4 is just really, really good. It is good enough to distract me from the complete and utter implosion of my big Europe trip and the connected shadowy, obsessive mental health crisis lurking just behind my eyes. More on that next week. In the meantime, I need a pick-me (pik-min?) up. I am so happy with this game.

Reviewing video games like this, for free and with no direct benefit of my own, always feels weird. It’s kind of like I’m just shilling out for a company that does not know I exist and will happily put me in jail if I so much as blow my nose on their console wrong. I’m just an overexcited fanboy. But I only write reviews for things that matter to me on an emotional level. Obviously, the game is very good and I want people to play it and enjoy it because I think this game will make you happy, and there should be more of that in the world. The emotions and experiences it conjures up are a worthy way to spend some portion of your finite existence. If you are going to spend your time on video games, this is one of the best ways to spend it. I also want everyone to play and love Pikmin 4 because, selfishly, if the game sells well and Nintendo’s happy with the reception of it, then the chances are better that we’ll get a Pikmin 5, 6, 7, etc. so on and so forth. I want more Pikmin. I always want more Pikmin. I will never truly be satisfied with the level of Pikmin in the world. But I also want everyone to play and love Pikmin 4 because, also selfishly, it has been so long since I’ve talked to another person, any person, in real life who also loves Pikmin. Hell, it’s been maybe an actual decade since I’ve talked about Pikmin to someone in person who’s even played the games.

But this also isn’t a real review; this is, like I said, just an excuse to talk about my love for Pikmin. This game is an emotional experience to me. Pikmin is one of those things that triggers something powerful deep inside my brain, one of those happy memory things that hasn’t entirely been rooted out by depression and the stresses of modern life. In the same way a certain song might bring you back to another time in your life, Pikmin does that for me. Let’s get the review part out of the way first, and we’ll see where I end up with talking about everything else.

So. Let’s start at the beginning. Pikmin 4 is the fourth main game in a series of puzzle-strategy games that began with the release of Pikmin for the GameCube in 2001. In Pikmin 4, like in the rest of the series, you control a tiny spaceman trying to survive in a hostile alien world with the help of your wits and a friendly species of plant/animal hybrids called Pikmin. By throwing, whistling, and directing the Pikmin to complete various tasks, you can defeat enemies, gather treasure, build bridges, explore caves, and more to help your survival in this strange ecosystem. Each in-game day is a set length of time that you have to explore the planet before sundown and complete as much as possible in that time-frame. It’s almost like having an army of ants at your disposal, except the ants are humanoid and feel pain. If you’re bad at the game, they will feel a lot of pain.

Throughout all the Pikmin games, you control your character, called a “captain” most of the time, and not the Pikmin directly. This is where some of the appeal of the game comes from; your captain is weak, tiny, and ineffectual. They can’t possibly survive on their own. But when you have a horde of 100 ravenous space bunnies Pikmin at your back, nothing is insurmountable anymore. Wall in your way? The Pikmin will take quick work of that, and build a bridge for you, too. Enemies blocking your path? Send in the troops. Something too heavy to carry on your own? Tsk, tsk, tsk, that sounds like a Dandori issue if I ever heard one. Let the Pikmin do it and hit the gym, Jack. As in real life, you can solve most problems by chucking your offspring at them until they stop moving.

Unlike the earlier games, you now also have Oatchi, that yellow dog-looking thing up there, who serves dual-purpose as a second captain for you to control, so you can do several things at once, and also as a mount for you and your Pikmin to ride around on. This is great because it saves space and makes navigating narrow areas with your army much easier. You’d think it would be hard to fit a hundred Pikmin on this dog since it would be something like fitting a hundred people on the side of a minivan, but apparently, Oatchi does not care for the complaints of space, time, or the traffic advisory. He can crash into enemies at high speeds, catapulting all the Pikmin off his back just like the watermelons unstrapped in the back seat of my car crashed through my neighbor’s windshield, and he can even drag items around, too. He’s easily the biggest new addition to the game, but I like him. His presence might make things just a touch too easy, and it’s hard to justify using Pikmin for something when I can just make Oatchi do it instead, but this is the tradeoff for the fact that I no longer have to worry about my Pikmin throwing themselves off of narrow ledges because the bridge got too crowded.

Other new additions to the Pikmin formula I liked that I was surprised by: the Dandori battles and challenges. These are maybe the game’s biggest new feature. They’re a new gamemode that takes the gameplay from the regular game (i.e. controlling Pikmin and Oatchi to gather treasures and defeated enemies), but then putting that into a timed contest or directly pitting you against an AI-controlled enemy player. I really got a kick out of this, and although I haven’t beaten the game yet (I did roll the first credits, opening up the game’s voluminous post-credits content), I’ve already got a surprising amount of mileage out of these Dandori battles. I’ve never been a time-trial person in games. As soon as a game told me “great job! Now you can try again to get a higher score and a gold medal!” I lost interest. Even in previous Pikmin games I bounced off of this; Pikmin 3 had a fairly extensive timed mission mode, where you could compete against yourself for the fastest time/highest score. But I think the fact that these challenges are woven directly into the story campaign makes a difference for me. They directly feed into my character progression, and that makes me want to try harder. Plus, they’re just more fun than I thought they would be. It’s more Pikmin. More stuff to do. It’s great.

The character progression is another big new feature that I really enjoy. I’m always a fan of feeling like your character gets stronger as your play throughout a game. Getting new armor and weapons, leveling up, that kind of a thing, anything that you can look at and say, “Oh, yeah, I’m playing with more power than I was at the start.” Older Pikmin games kind of had this? You could unlock new areas, and sometimes new power-ups, but they were mostly just “immune to fire,” or “bigger whistle.” There’s a lot of that same kind of bonuses in Pikmin 4, but everything’s been overhauled in a way where it really feels like everything you do and collect can be used to make you and Oatchi stronger. Oatchi especially gets some pretty excellent boosts throughout the time spent with the game. Hell, I even like the fact that you start out with less than 100 Pikmin, and have to find upgrades to improve your onion; yes, it makes it easier for new players, but it also adds something to do. Oooh, is that new area full of treasure? Or does it have this even more valuable rare upgrade? Better find out. It’s great and makes me value how much of a change even ten Pikmin can make. Design by subtraction and all that.

The only real hiccup in the new features is the night expeditions. I was really looking forward to these because the idea of nighttime being a more dangerous time on the planet has been baked into Pikmin since the very beginning. I always wondered what night on the planet would be like; what kinds of new creatures came out, how the ecosystem changed at night, the tension of sneaking around with my Pikmin to try and pick up stray treasures or collect new resources at night. I would have loved a kind of risk/reward system where you can stay out past the day’s single, timed sunset, and try and get more done by playing at night and dealing with more monsters, but the reality of what we get in the night expeditions is… a bit underwhelming. Don’t get me wrong, I think they’re a lot of fun; night expeditions are effectively just a regular Pikmin day on crack, where everything moves much, much faster. You get Glow Pikmin, too, which are crazy powerful, and they grow faster, you get more of them faster, they do damage faster, etc., etc. At night, the enemies come to you, too; it becomes almost like a tower defense game. But everything happens so quickly, I barely have time to register what I’m doing before the night is over.

It’s kind of a trend that I’ve noticed with the game as a whole. Everything moves faster. Like, for example, the game really pushes this whole “Dandori” thing, which is some kind of abstract concept about planning your tasks strategically to maximize efficiency and get things done as quickly as possible. Practice Dandori in your daily life! the game says. It’s almost like a self-help mantra; you can do better, as long as you get better at Dandori. At organizing and planning. And so the game encourages you to play not just strategically but quickly as well; days, as always, are a set length of time that you can’t exceed, so the more you can get done in a day, the more efficient your dandori is, or whatever. Though thankfully time is not limited in the caves (extra levels inside of regular levels), so you can take as much time as you need there. But I found myself never really slowing down as I played; I was always rushing to the next task, to get as much done as I could. Which was fun; that’s probably how the game is meant to be played, anyway. As efficiently as possible. But, frankly, that’s not what I love about Pikmin. The strategic gameplay has never been what’s drawn me to Pikmin. So as much as I love Pikmin 4, as incredible as the visuals and sound design and levels and everything is, there’s still a little bit of a weird disconnect for me there.

Pikmin 4 is truly an amazing game. It’s got so much to do, more than any Pikmin game, including probably Pikmin 2, which was easily the biggest game in the series prior to this. The visuals are top-notch; it’s one of the prettiest games on the Switch without a doubt. It looks so much better than Tears of the Kingdom, which also just came out. I can’t put the game down; I just want to keep going back to it and play more. I want to see every creature, every treasure that this game has to offer. It is Pikmin, refined to a streamlined, approachable vision. And while some Pikmin purists may grumble about things like Oatchi taking away from what makes it Pikmin (i.e. the Pikmin themselves), I don’t think that’s much of an issue for me. With new content, features, and character progression, built-in level remixes and challenges as part of the main story, and everything polished to Nintendo’s typical spitshine perfection, Pikmin 4 is everything I could have asked for from a proper Pikmin sequel. It is easily one of the best games of the year.

But there’s still something more to it. There’s still something I want to talk about. There’s still something… missing. (Come on, you knew there was going to be a “but….”, right?)

Look, explaining this game is difficult. Story’s easy; you’re trapped on this alien planet, the local species is helping you to survive. Collect treasure and make it home. Straightforward enough. Explaining what it’s like to play? Not so much. Trying to get the concept of the moment-to-moment gameplay of Pikmin across to people who have never played a video game before is an arcane and opaque task. You have your captain and you have Oatchi to control up to 100 Pikmin to throw at enemies and take their bodies back to the Onion to make more Pikmin, and each pikmin has a different special power you can use and you can split them up by types and control one captain at the same time as the dog is running around dragging treasure around but you also have to collect treasure and castaways and at night you have to go back to the ship but in caves time is stopped and it goes on and on and one. Pikmin 4 is the most approachable Pikmin game, and while I’m sure that most people could understand it pretty quickly once they see it in action, but explaining it is still layers upon layers of what the fuck is this if you don’t already know what’s going on. Imagine trying to explain electro-swing music to medieval farmers humming Gregorian chants without being able to play a song for them.

I know my audience here (hi, Mom), so let’s drop the pretense that this is a proper game “review.” Even though I, uh, already wrote a quite generous review of the game. For this back half, if you’re still here, I’d rather talk about something more interesting, anyway; why this game makes me feel so damn much.

I’ve talked about my disappointment with media a handful of times recently, how I’ve felt about growing up, and how I’ve been finding difficulty in recapturing those old emotions of childhood games. I’ve talked about that most extensively regarding Mario, of course, and a little about other franchises, too, I think? How Elden Ring didn’t hit quite the same highs of Bloodborne, how playing Resident Evil 4 for the first time in 2023 is as wonderful as it is confusing. I’ve been thinking about how you never really can play a game again the same way you used to, and how nostalgia and rose-tinted glasses will warp your perception of not just how the game is, but how it felt to play it back then, too. Maybe I haven’t talked about it here, but I’ve been searching for comfort in childhood games like, say, Wii Sports, or Mario Kart. Things that I associate with happier, easier times. So when I played Mario Galaxy, for example, and it didn’t make me feel the way that I did back when I first played it, I was disheartened. There was no longer any comfort to be found in this game that I had both idealized and idolized.

I was sad and confused when the Mario movie (or Mario Galaxy) didn’t quite reach the nostalgia factor the way I wanted it to; I assumed there was something wrong with me. And maybe there is, I can’t rule that out. Maybe I’ve just become focused on these topics, of how you can never play the game again, of nostalgia and memory (although I’ve always been obsessed with memory, but that’s a topic for another day), because my life has become increasingly unmoored from stability. That holding pattern I’ve been in since graduating college has started to change dramatically over the last year or so, especially in the last three months. These changes aren’t conscious, but I have noticed a difference in the way I think about my future and my past. This is caused by, admittedly, changes of my own doing, and I’m doing them for the right reasons. I’m progressing forward in my life, going to grad school and living abroad, and this unmooring is only temporary (well, two years temporary. But still.). But I’m still seeking some sort of comfort, something in my past to reach back into and feel a deeper connection to those memories, thoughts, experiences of myself from decades ago, when things felt simpler and more straightforward. To feel a stronger connection to who I was, back in the day, though my reasons for this aren’t quite entirely clear to me. For some people, this act of seeking nostalgia is in the form of songs, books, or movies from their youth. For me, it’s Pikmin 2.

So I was thrilled to play Pikmin 4 for the first time and realize that, yes, this was “Pikmin 2 2” and not “Pikmin 3 2” or “Pikmin 1 2” if that makes sense. Pikmin 4’s sensibilities and gameplay takes after Pikmin 2 in more ways than just caves, though that’s admittedly the biggest comparison. The campaign is longer, there’s treasures to collect, there’s a proper Piklopedia, we’ve returned to only two controllable captains, etc. Where Pikmin 3 refined on Pikmin 1’s short, replayable campaign and expanded upon the Real-Time Strategy gameplay style of having multiple leaders, Pikmin 4 is a proper expansion of the ungodly amount of content and caverns of Pikmin 2. This is what I wanted; this is what I had been hoping for. Hoping to play it and not feel… what, exactly? I’m not sure. Disappointment, maybe? Whatever that negative emotion is that I’ve been talking about so much recently, this disconnect between reality, expectations, and memory/nostalgia, I didn’t get it from Pikmin 4. That was the greatest part of the game.

There was a time in my life, around middle school and early high school, when I lived and breathed Pikmin, and especially Pikmin 2. I’d work all week at school, taking tests and doing homework and going to band and Science Olympiad and Boy Scout meetings and whatnot, and I’d think about Pikmin. I’d dream about when I could get to the next level, or see what the new enemies were, when I’d have time to play it on Friday afternoon. I’d spend hours pouring over the in-game encyclopedia’s entries about the biology and ecology of these fictional species (my love for ecosystems was ingrained early, you see), thinking about the world beyond the game and what the rest of the planet of the Pikmin was like. I went to school, to summer camp, to camp-outs and thought about Pikmin. Hell, the last time I talked to a real, live person about Pikmin and they really got it was at Boy Scout summer camp. I played Pikmin 2 with my closest friend at the time, and forced him to play co-op with me just so I’d have someone to share it with. We stole the bulbmin and forced them to carry away their mother’s corpse. I played Pikmin 2 at my… was it 13th? 14th? birthday party, because I was stuck on an infamous boss and my friend, who was into the Pikmin YouTube community, wanted to play that level in person instead of just watching it. I know it wasn’t my 16th birthday because that was when we played PT, and we went to the pumpkin patches in Kentucky that weekend.

Do you see what I’m getting at, though? Much like Mario, Pikmin 2 itself, as a game, isn’t as important as the memories and the emotions it’s connected to in my head. Like I said, I’ve always been obsessed with memory, with nostalgia, something about growing up or days gone by has always had an unnatural hold over me. Even as a child, only three or four years old, I couldn’t listen to the song “The Circle Game,” simply about growing up, without bawling my eyes out. I intend to interrogate this further in a blog post coming soon, but I’ll get to that later. As much as I remember adoring the game, how obsessed I was over it, and how much I loved it, these days Pikmin 2 has become a convenient throughline to the past, to child me, a part of me that hasn’t existed for over a decade now.

I think, perhaps, what cemented Pikmin 2 in my mind, though, what set it in stone and put it above almost any other media in terms of nostalgia value, is the fact that the game itself operates in some level of nostalgia, both textually and metatextually. From a metatextual standpoint, my copy of the game was already trafficking in nostalgia for people who came of age in the time of the GameCube. The version of the game I played, the New Play Control version for the Wii, was already seven to ten years removed from the original release. To me, I was experiencing it for the first time. But to someone else, the time between me playing Pikmin 2 and when they first played it is the same length of time between me now and me in ninth grade. I don’t know if I consciously recognized that this was an old game that I was playing, old at least by a child’s standards. But it’s weird to think about now, especially as I find most comfort and nostalgia by immersing myself in that particular era of content.

But in the game itself, there was a nostalgic resonance that really connected with me back then, when I first played it, and continued to connect with me now. The final area of the game, Wistful Wilds, is an orange, autumn-themed stage that you only unlock after you’ve “beaten” the game, and had the credits roll once. Fall is already a fairly nostalgic season, since it’s a time for reflecting on the year gone by and the way things fade and die after the heat of the summer’s all gone. It’s got this eerie, somber flute music in the background, the player-character makes comments about how the leaves make him wish he were home to spend time with his family (remind me to write a post about how Olimar is the best video game protagonist Nintendo’s ever written), and the whole thing gives off this almost dream-like, unreal quality. The whole game had a bit of an unreal quality to it, thanks to the kind of janky early 2000’s animations and textures, but it was especially true here.

For me, someone who’s been more strongly affected by nostalgia and memory even when I was too young to be properly nostalgic for anything, and someone whose favorite season has always been, and likely always will be, autumn, this area hit me especially hard during these formative years. Although I’ve changed a lot since then, Pikmin 2 played a huge role in developing my artistic, creative, and personal tastes in media, and Wistful Wilds has an especially outsized role. It was the way that everything came together perfectly to create this particular emotion within me, that even back in the day I recognized as being particularly powerful. It hit me hard.

So maybe what I feel is missing from Pikmin 4, what I feel Pikmin 2 had in spades, are those qualities that I found to be so formative to my development. The things that made Pikmin 2 really stand out to me. For one, Pikmin 2 (and, of course, Pikmin 1) is a distinctly lonely game. Olimar and Louie are alone on this far-away planet, with Olimary regularly mentioning how he misses his family, and Louie being almost entirely mute. The planet is hostile, conveyed to the player by just how fucking difficult some of the encounters can be. The way that one or two enemies can just obliterate your entire team is breathtaking, compared to later entries. And the fact that you’re collecting human artifacts, leftovers from a people who never make a direct appearance throughout the entire time, adds a further touch of distance to the game. Olimar does not know that he’s looking at a child’s toy, not a weapon of war, but we know that. The game works to distance us from our own world.

And yet, it’s a lively, vibrant place, too. As I said, I spent hours reading the in-game encyclopedia about the animals in this world, and that’s likely because I love nature. I’m a nature and ecology kind of person if my graduate school degree is anything to go by. But Olimar’s specific style of writing in the game is distinctly scientific, almost ecological in tone; he pays special attention to creature behaviors, and how they interact with themselves and the environment. I fell head over heels in love with this; I still am. Besides Subnautica, I have yet to play a game that is so committed to its fictional biology. And Subnautica disappointed me at the end because the game pulls away from its biology in favor of resource management, especially at the end. Pikmin, on the other hand, keeps it up the entire time.

Then, of course, there’s that layer of unreality the game has. It is janky; it is broken or uneven in places; there are things that feel rushed. It’s mysterious, it leaves questions unanswered, it offers room for speculation. This is a game that lacks the polish of modern titles, or even other Nintendo games for the time. This is more true of Pikmin 1 than Pikmin 2, but it feels anachronistic compared to everything else available for the Wii, for the GameCube. And while that unreality definitely works to make the game feel lonelier, too, it also works to make it feel more… special, somehow? This is a treasure, a dream, I have that very few others have, and what a joy it is to behold, even in all its flaws.

These things, these types of atmosphere, of topics, of kinds of focus or ways of presenting a media, are things that have continued to influence my consumption and creation of media today. Sure, Pikmin 2 is not the only influence on my creative aspirations, but it is a major touchstone in my personal development. I spent close to 90 hours on Pikmin 2, for no real reason other than the fact that I was bad at the game. It took me 88 in-game days to 100% it, and collect all the treasures. But I’m so glad I spent the time with it that I did. That is an unthinkable length of time for me now, and it’s an unthinkable length of time then. I played this game for years (I think; then again, I can’t be sure, and if I didn’t, does it really matter? I’ve since thought about it for years). There are maybe a dozen games I have put that much time into across my entire life, yet Pikmin 2 is up there.

And as incredible as Pikmin 4 is, it doesn’t quite have the same allure of Pikmin 2. Its polish works against it in this regard. There are too many characters, and they’re all too damn chatty in the way Nintendo characters are, with nothing of real substance to say but plenty of tips or filler to give you. Not like Olimar, who felt distinctly written. Olimar was a real character, a rarity in Nintendo games. Not so much here. And the game is very bright, and is set in too many human spaces; I don’t want to be exploring a house, damn it! Stick me back in the woods with a grown-over sandbox in the distance. And its graphics, too, ground it in a very real way. I still love the ecology, I love the monsters and enemies and animals and thinking about them interacting, and maybe the graphics heighten that aspect, but the dreamlike layer is gone.

But I know this might not be true of Pikmin 2, anyway. I don’t think I could replay it now. I’m scared to replay it now, in a twisted way. Same with those other games; I’d almost rather keep the memory of it intact than actually play it again and realize that it doesn’t have the same power it used to, or worse, that it’s not even that good of a game. It just happens to be the one that stuck with me the most.

Ah, well. It’s odd how these things happen. Maybe I’ll replay it again someday, when I’m stable enough (financially, physically, logistically, etc.) to be able to afford losing this kind of nostalgic callback. Or when I feel comfortable in accessing those memories in other ways; I have noticed that I think have a difficult time recalling events or actions from my past, but I have no difficulty remembering spaces or visuals. In the meantime, it’s enough for me to know that Pikmin 4 really does scratch that nostalgia itch, but more than that, it’s a fantastic game in its own right. I’m enjoying it, and I think you would, too. Give it a try. Even just so I have someone else to talk about Pikmin with.