I love the title screen of Pikmin 4 and I would dare to say that it´s the best one I have seen this year, I am fascinated by how with so little manages to express so much. The title screen is quite simple, it only shows some environments of the game, accompanied by a piano that is completely away from the warm and friendly tunes that usually represent the Pikmin games, this time, the piano gives a certain feeling of melancholy, it managed to develop an incredible sense of peace and sadness within me, I want you to remember the word peace, because Pikmin 4 is a game whose intention is none other than to give you peace, to make you feel in a special place.
Of course, it sounds nice until you realize you have to go through a tutorial of like 40 minutes where the game just treats you like a 4 year old kid who can't reason on its own, taking you by the hand every time, not gonna lie, this tutorial sucks, I couldn´t help feeling frustrated and wanting to end my life, but fortunately, once you complete that shitty tutorial and the game gives you freedom, you find nothing but a pretty nice experience.
The reason why the tutorial for this game stresses me out so much is because Pikmin has never been like this and it's quite noticeable that they've casualized it, if I look back at Pikmin 1, it´s true there is like a tutorial zone, but even so, the game doesn´t explain too much either, it´s up to you to get things right. I totally understand that this was done with the intention of reaching more people with the franchise but I can't help but think that it could have been done in a better way.
Pikmin 4 follows the story of Olimar, a person who has committed war crimes on his home planet, so Olimar decides to travel to another planet to commit crimes of dubious morality to the local fauna. Jokes aside, bruh moment that Olimar, the hero of Pikmin 1 got stuck on the Pikmin planet (again) but oh well, since Olimar got trapped on said planet, a ship with several crew members is sent to save him but due to fate, the ship crashes, so we see a pattern and start to think that maybe these people are not very professional.
A newbie is sent to see what happened and that's us, we'll be the newbie for the whole game basically, the fun of all this is that we can customize our character, I have to say it's the best avatar designer I've ever seen in my life, it's so good that it let me changes the size of my character's penis, thank you very much Miyamoto, very cool. Jokes aside, I have to admit that the avatar designer is ??????????????, I don't get why even exists in the first place, I mean, it´s too limited, but hey, thanks for trying I guess.
Pikmin has some playable bases that are easy to understand and in the case of Pikmin 4, not only it maintains these bases, but also improves them, to the point that it could be said that it´s the game with the best feeling in the franchise, I mean, it´s so good to move yourself through the planet and controlling your Pikmin.
In the game, we follow in Olimar's footsteps, so we proceed to use the Pikmins as slaves whose purpose is to destroy the local fauna of the planet, we will start with a small army which we can expand later, I was surprised by this fact, in previous games, you just took as many as you could, but this time, the number of Pikmin you can take out is very limited, until, like I said, you expand it later.
Pikmin 4 has many objectives, both main and secondary, one of these objectives is to find treasures for the crashed ship of the crew. The truth is quite simple, the treasures or objects or anything in the game will have an estimated weight, so you have to use the number of Pikmins that the game tells you to pick up the object and take it to the ship, the planet where we are set, it´s a world which humans once existed, so the treasures that you will find are objects used by the inhabitants of the planet, for example, earlier in the game, you can find a Gameboy Advance. The more treasure you find, the more the ship's radar will expand, allowing us to explore other areas of the planet that are blocked.
We will start with a single kind of Pikmin, which will be red, the red Pikmin are resistant to fire, well, more than resistant, it´s better to say that they are immune, in addition to the red Pikmin, there are the yellow ones, which are immune to electricity, they are able to reach higher areas easily, you can also find blue Pikmin, which are not affected by water at all. What I want you to get at is that each Pikmin is different, so it depends on the player to know how to use them in the different situations in which the game puts you, of course, I have to emphasize that you can only carry three different kind of Pikmin.
One of the new things from this game is the dog called Oatchi, which turns out to be incredibly useful, we can go on his back with the Pikmin, he can be used in combat too, he can pick things up from the environment such as monsters or treasures, just as a Pikmin would do, Oatchi is probably one of the best things about this game, besides what I mentioned, we can jump with it, this adds a verticality that wasn´t there in other games, which greatly increases the possibilities. Oatchi has something like a skill tree which we can expand, our character has also its own skill tree which we can expand.
Talking a little bit about the level design in Pikmin 4, I have to say that it´s quite good, I have noticed that the areas are considerably larger now, they are not an open world (thank God) but you can feel a big difference, which is appreciated, and despite the fact that they are large, I didn´t feel that there was a drop in quality, they are still very good areas to lose yourself exploring, finding treasures or destroying the local fauna. Pikmin 4 is a video game that looks quite nice, it adopts a realistic style that despite the fact that the Switch is about 10 years out of date, I don't know, it looks pretty cute, I have no idea how, but Nintendo does black magic with the console, of course, I won't deny that it´d look better, still it looks quite cool.
In Pikmin 4, the underground areas return, which were already present in the second game, but have returned once again. When I saw them for the first time, I thought that maybe they would not be a good idea, I felt that maybe they could break the pacing, and to be honest, these underground areas are so ... fun to do, and exploring them is useful, as you can find new Pikmin to use.
The underground areas are not just places to just explore and that's it, they are like mini puzzles that you have to solve taking into account types of Pikmin as well as the design of the area, they are not particularly complicated, but they can become a good entertaining challenge. For example, in one of the many underground areas in the game, you can find an incorporeal monster, it has no form and the truth is, it´s impossible to kill unless you do something specific that I won´t mention, this little friend with just one touch literally speaking destroyed my squad of 50 blue Pikmin that I had at the time, the frustration I felt after that was horrible but funny, it reminded me of how old games were, sadly the only part of the game game that was difficult for me because I had no idea what to do.
In this game, you are finally allowed to play at night, this is amazing because it was impossible to do it before, but to be fair, it´s a bittersweet victory, I mean, yeah, you can play at night, but you are not allowed to collect anything, it´s weird, you can only use a kind of Pikmin which is called Glow Pikmin, they are immune to everything, in this case, we will have to protect our base from the different enemies that will want to demolish it, they will come from everywhere. It's basically League of Legends but within Pikmin, I can't believe Pikmin has become Lol, now I hate Pikmin. I´m joking, it´s fun and it can get hard if you don´t know what you are doing.
Remember when I said that Pikmin 4 has many objectives? Well, one of the objectives is to save all of the crew members of the ship, who are lost in many areas of the planet. Normally, you usually find them in the underground areas, there are some that are pretty curious, they have been transformed into beings similar to Pikmin and every time you find them, these characters challenge you to a Dandori confrontation.
Shigeru Miyamoto has pointed out on several occasions how frustrated he is with the lack of success of Pikmkin, he feels that this is because players see Pikmin as a difficult and challenging strategy game, he doesn´t look to Pikmin as a strategy game tho, but more like based on the Dandori philosophy. I'm not very knowledgeable on the subject, but Dandori is a philosophy of always optimizing everything you do to get a good result, no matter how many repetitions you have to do in the process, as long as you get the optimization that suits you, it´s something that suits Pikmin actually.
In these confrontations, you will fight against these individuals, the idea is to obtain points by obtaining treasures or monsters scattered around the environment, you are fighting against someone, so you must optimize your run well to defeat your opponent, it´s an interesting idea, but idk not my thing, I didn´t feel extremely happy when I played one of these Dandori confrontations, my reacion when I had to play once again a Dandori battle was something like XD._. There was a Dandori matchup that I enjoyed a lot and it was close to the end of the game.
Pikmin 4 is the peak of the franchise, it takes everything that Pikmin did well in its previous games and undoes everything that didn't work that good, but there is something that I didn´t like too much, in Pikmin 4 there is no day limit, you can take the time you want to solve everything, this contradicts the Dandori philosophy a lot to me, in my opinion, let's say that I lose 60 Pikmin due to a mistake I made, that´s actually not a problem lol, I can just come back next day and farm Pikmin, but whenever something like this happend in Pikmin 1 was something like ... wow, I mean, in the first game there were 30 pieces and 30 days, basically, if you fucked up doing something in the day, you´d regret it and you would do your best to optimize your run next time, something like this doesn´t happen in Pikmin 4 because the game is too easy and there is no day limit.
Is Pikmin 4 a bad game because of this? Absolutely not, it has been a pretty cool experience, I've had a pretty good time, it's not my favorite Pikmin game, but probably the roundest in the franchise, the one with the most content and definitely the longest one, I just finished it after 30 hours, that´s funny because there is actually a postgame, if I play said postgame, I would reach 50-60 hours. Again, I've had a great time playing Pikmin 4, it's a game that brought me a lot of peace and I think it's the best for getting into the franchise, it has everything.
All of the screenshots were taken by me