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Pikmin 3 and 4


Tags: review

Pikmin 3 Deluxe

Pikmin 3 is a lot like the original Pikmin. It's ditched the addition of caves from Pikmin 2 and returned to the formula of crash landing on a planet and recruiting the Pikmin to help you escape. The plot is a bit more convoluted than the first two games. There are now three protagonists who are on a mission to feed their starving home planet.

Over the course of the relatively short campaign, you unlock all three captains which can each be controlled separately like in Pikmin 2. However, now you're able to use the map and automatically route your captains to walk to specific locations, allowing for a level of optimisation not possible in Pikmin 2, where the only squad that could move is the one that you controlled.

The balance here also felt a lot better than other games. The rock Pikmin were the main standout as being overpowered, however the way you approach combat with them is a bit different to the other Pikmin, because they are unable to stick to them. This means to fight more efficiently with them, you can throw them yourself over and over again, requiring more of your attention. The winged Pikmin are also specialised, being good for a few certain enemy types and for carrying objects over obstacles.

Pikmin 4

I spent a lot more time with Pikmin 4 than I have with any of the other Pikmin games and I even went for full completion. It has by far the most content, spanning 5 more open stages, and a command post where you can interact with the various npcs.

The opening to this game is slow. You're greeted with an hour or so of mostly dialogue between you, the silent protagonist and the rescue corps. The dialogue only really slows down once you finally get in the thick of exploring the stages, which are much larger than in any previous game. The camera is set lower, making this feel more like an action game than an RTS, an idea that's further reinforced by the lack of a second captain.

The second captain here is reduced to the most overpowered mechanic in any Pikmin game thus far. Oatchi, the two legged dog that hops around behind you or can go off with his own party of Pikmin. He can do a million things including

The only downside to Oatchi is that you can't pass through certain gates with him because he is too large, and you can really feel how much less powerful you are when he's missing.

The caves are also back, which I feel are much improved over Pikmin 2. They feel like the complete opposite of those caves because they feature no procedural generation and are at times a little too easy instead of too hard. The game did have much better assist features than the second game, letting you rewind back to the start of a sublevel to retry.

The good

The post-game is amazing. The dandori challenges really added another layer of organisational depth that you could only really find in some of the challenges from the third game.

They even retell Olimars crash landing in the lens of this alternate universe, recycling the familiar location from the base campaign and setting you out on another treasure hunt with a stricter time limit.

Nitpicks

The upgrade system feels superficial and like something they just HAD to do because it was a AAA game that needed a progression system rather than something that genuinely improves the gameplay. For an RTS like this, most of the upgrades that just boosted stats should have been left out in place of just the new abilities because by the end, I felt completely overpowered.

Conclusion

Overall I really liked Pikmin 3, it shakes up the original Pikmin formula just enough to stay interesting throughout its admittedly very short runtime. I also enjoyed Pikmin 4 for its larger scale and bigger worlds to explore, although I feel that with it's increased scope, it suffers from a certain amount of bloat that softened the challenge to cater for a larger target audience.

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