Why did I wait so many months to play and review Pikmin 3? Ironically it’s because I got tired of waiting for it to come out.
You’ll recall that Pikmin 3 was slated to launch with the Wii U. It was a key part of the E3 conference that year, and while I wasn’t convinced a huge Pikmin presence made a lot of sense from a business perspective - if the original Pikmin couldn’t sell the Gamecube, why should we expect Pikmin 3 to sell the Wii U? - after getting some time with a demo at a local Wii U event, I was pretty excited to get to play it. The buttery IR controls instantly resolved my beef with the original games.
Then Pikmin 3 got pushed back. And not just a little push - Nintendo pushed it back 9 months. That’s not just out of the launch window, that’s past the window for reentry. You could have conceived and had a baby in the extra time we had to wait for Pikmin 3. (And extra points if you named him Olimar.)
(And triple points if you named her Olimar.)Eventually, I couldn’t wait to play Pikmin with that control scheme any longer. I went out and bought the New Play Control version of Pikmin 2, which was already on the shelves, and played through that with IR controls. Ladies and Gents, this is how Pikmin is meant to be played - not dragging around a circle with an analog stick like a dope, but with a simple, intuitive, mouse-like point-and-click. Lovely. The NPC Pikmin 2 is a pure joy in its own right.
But it also sated my thirst for Pikmin. When Pikmin 3 finally dropped a few months later, I felt I could wait on it. I’d just played a bunch of hours of Pikmin!
Well, I’m here to tell you, I shouldn’t have waited because Pikmin 3 is a masterpiece. Perhaps you already know that, but I’m here to repeat the truth. It’s the greatest entry in the Pikmin series and you should play it.
Say, have you ever played Pikmin before? If so, have you played it with IR Wiimote controls? If the answer to either of those questions was “No” then it’s time for you to play Pikmin 3. Because Pikmin’s time is now.
And for this lucky monster, Pikmin Breakfast Time is now.In this Miyamoto-produced game you control a team of 3 intrepid explorers from the planet Koppai - characters wryly named Alph, Britney and Charlie. Right away anyone familiar with the series will notice the absence of Captain Olimar, the venerable scientist-hero of the previous two games and representative of the series in Super Smash Bros. He’s nowhere to be found, here. At first this seems disappointing, as Olimar’s a likable presence in the first 2 games, but as the story unfolded I grew to sympathize with these three new characters and their desperate mission, which is nothing less than to harvest enough fruit seeds to feed the dying population of their war-torn planet. Sure, that means you’re mostly collecting fruit rather than artifacts of human civilization, but it also means the stakes are higher than before. It’s a different storytelling angle and one that suits a new cast. It’s also heavy stuff for a game that co-stars cute little guys with flowers growing out of the tops of their heads.
Pikmin come in several different varieties at this point. You’ve got your Reds, which are invulnerable to fire. Your Blues, which can swim. Your Yellows, which can dig fast and hold an electric charge. Pikmin 3 introduces Rock Pikmin, which can be used to bash glass or the hard exoskeletons of some enemies, and flying Pikmin, who can get to and from your ship by the most direct route possible, damn near breaking the game at some points. But who cares? They’re all fun to collect and utilize!
A witty script propels the story along. Our team of explorers crash land on a far distant future Earth, which they dub PNF-404 (a reference to the common internet Page Not Found error?). Humans are long gone, though the team encounters remnants of their presence on the planet in the form of pottery, neon tubes and miraculously still-active cell phones. (Battery life in the near-future must grow by leaps and bounds, because I’ve got a Nokia from 2002 that won’t power on, and yet these phones have made it millions of years while exposed to the elements.)
Anyway, as post-apocalyptic games go it’s all pretty cheerful. In fact, that’s one of the miraculous features of this game - it manages so many different tones and yet never feels like a mish-mash. Pikmin 3 delights in contradiction. It appears on the surface to be one of the cutest games in the Nintendo catalog, with its hoards of cutesy Pikmin growing little flowers out of the tops of their heads. And, yet, there’s a dark undercurrent of survival-of-the-fittest throughout the game, as you watch dozens of your beloved little Pikmin get devoured at once.
“Hi, boys and girls. My name’s Piki the Pikmin. I’m here to teach you that life is cheap.”With such a nice blend of different tones, you’d think Pikmin 3 would have universal appeal, and yet it seems to languish as a cult series for the Nintendo faithful. I wonder why. Many of Nintendo’s properties appeal across gamer demographics. Everyone likes Mario. Most everyone likes Zelda, Metroid, Tetris and, to a lesser degree, Barker Bill’s Trick Shooting. But universality is something that seems to have eluded the Pikmin series, so far.
Why is that, I wonder?
Well, in trying to review it, I’ve found that it IS a hard series to describe in a way that’s universally appealing. Here, I’ll give it a go:
At its core, Pikmin is about the twin joys of exploration (hooray!) and building supply chains (what?). You take the role as a leader of a team of dozens of various Pikmin, assigning them orders: Carry this apple back to our ship. Fight this killer monster. Open this gate. Stop drowning yourself, you idiot. It sounds complicated. It may even sound like the workload of a bored corporate middle manager. But it’s actually quite fun in practice.
I’ve seen it categorized as a Real Time Strategy game, and while that’s not completely off the mark, it’s also not a bullseye. Yes, much of the game is concerned with resource management and yes it all happens in real time. But I have to confess to not liking most RTS games and yet I adore Pikmin 3. So what is it if not an RTS? Puzzle elements abound, but it’s not super cerebral, with tasks built largely around having the right pikmin for the right job. So it’s not really accurate to call it a puzzle game. Is it simply an action game? Nah. Control is too indirect for that. How about adventure? Well… that’s a very stretchable genre, but Pikmin 3 seems to lack the prerequisite swords and fairies and wizards.
I’m beginning to think it’s simply a genre unto itself - a version of RTS that breaks the mold as much has Zelda breaks from your standard RPG or Smash Bros breaks from other fighters. That’s probably the best way I could hype it.
To extend the core game, there’s a pretty incredible set of Mission Modes accessible from the main menu. There are three types of challenges for the custom maps, here - to collect as much fruit as you can in a time limit, to kill as many enemies in a time limit, and to defeat as many bosses as you can. In truth, I had as much fun with the fruit collection Mission Mode as in the main game, partly because it introduces co-op control. My wife and I became quite addicted to collecting fruit in this mode and I can say, with my hand on my heart, that it’s the most fun I’ve had playing coop on the Wii U. That’s high praise for a console that has Super Mario 3D World, Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze and NintendoLand. Seriously, if you have the game and haven’t tried this mode in co-op, dig it back out. It’s a pure delight.
They have different toppings on pizza in Japan.What complaints can I dig up? Well, they’re mostly the usual Nintendo things. Why no online, Nintendo? Why is co-op its own mode when it would work so wonderfully in the main game? Why no voice acting? Those sorts of things you can fault most Nintendo games for not including. But those complaints are simply asking for more from a well-designed game. They don’t describe deficiencies in the game itself. Pikmin 3 doesn’t require those features to be excellent, so it seems a little trifling to hammer the game because it doesn’t check all the possible boxes. However, if I were looking toward a Pikmin 4, I would throw those ideas in.
I do have a small complaint about the final level, but it’s spoileriffic. So I’ll now cover up my thoughts in giant bricks of black:
Initially, it wasn’t clear to me that the final level is designed to take several days to complete. So I was furious at the tightness of that level. How the heck was I expected to do so many tasks at once? Well, I’m not. It may seem impossible, but that’s only because it basically is. There may be some miraculous players who can rescue Olimar in a single day, but I think it’s clear, on your first playthrough at least, you’re supposed to fail the rescue on the first day. What you’re expected to do is set the rescue up for success on the next day. So, in retrospect, my anger at the game wasn’t really justified - the level isn’t impossible, it just requires the gamer to stick with it and celebrate making progress over the actual achievement of the goal. I’m cool with that now, but I was hopping mad at the game for a few hours when I thought it looked impossible. I’m not sure if the script should have telegraphed this better for me, because it would give away something that I’m glad I had to learn by doing. But in the moment of learning it, I was legitimately furious. Maybe that’s to the game’s ultimate credit, too.I’ve had a hard time finding sales numbers for Pikmin 3, but I did come across a quote from Iwata that suggests it underperformed. That could be because there were some hopes it could turn around the Wii U’s sales problems at the time. To me, that was always a longshot. But let’s take for granted for a second that Pikmin 3 underperformed its goals. That’s a shame.
Personally, I think Pikmin 4 is unlikely. Nintendo has other unexploited properties that have a greater opportunity to sell the Wii U. I’m on record as being a bit grumpy about the direction Nintendo went this generation, but from my perspective, if there’s any game out there that single-handedly justifies the Wii U, it’s Pikmin 3. If you have the console, you really ought to try this game.
Because this game is a masterpiece, as far as I’m concerned.
Pikmin's time is now. Don't miss it.
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