Throughout the entire series, Pikmin has always defied its initial appearance as a kids’ game focused on exploration. The first game was hardcore. You had to direct your Pikmin to complete collecting missions before Olimar, your space explorer, spent his 30 days of oxygen on a foreign planet. As new games were released, the formula remained the same, except for the less tense and less time pressed iterations. You are no longer Olimar in Pikmin 4. You are now a recruit to the space program sent out to rescue him. As you discover new levels, you collect sparklium, a substance that fuels your spaceship, from treasures left lying around. You unlock more areas as you collect treasure, and you meet castaways and members of research teams. Also tourists like Olimar, who came hoping to make a new discovery to shake up their lives.
The new version of Pikmin 4 ditches the first game’s time limit in favor of a less harsh daily timer. And it adds improved tracking features. You can rewind Google Maps-es you to your destination. Your dog companion, Oatchi, sniffs out treasures in your area with a skill. You can also use apps to review the story and see what side missions you have yet to complete. It makes easier to collect stuff, which has always been Pikmin’s main appeal. Almost every mission and side quest has a percentage counter that tells you how much you need to find. While you don’t need to collect everything in an area, seeing the percentages rise (and reading funny, sometimes emotional treasure descriptions) is rewarding.
Pikmin 4 plays out like a real-time strategy game, where your goal is to collect as many things and people (castaways) as possible within a given timeframe. It’s easy to automate supply lines in Factorio when you have enough Pikmin on your team. Just like how you can automate supply lines with them. This concept is introduced in universe as the concept of dandori, which prioritizes mission efficiency. When I traveled back and forth across the map on my fourth day, I was handling multiple jobs simultaneously. The pursuit of more efficient ways to grab treasure never distracted me from the beauty of the world, rendered lovingly and with particular attention to texture, such as the surface of water or the petals of a flower.
It was the combat, in which I participated in scattered encounters throughout the map that distracted me. Often, combat just comes down to overwhelming your enemies with Pikmin, and it gets repetitive when the solution to many puzzles in later stages involves winning a battle. I ran my Pikmin expeditions mercilessly, meaning I had to hear the cries of my dying soldiers and the disgust of my co-workers in-game. The new night expedition levels are more engaging than the RTS-ish scenarios, but have the same underlying problem. The best strategy is not to know the area and use a particular Pikmin type, but to err on the side of overwhelming numbers.
There is also a major (but good) challenge in Dandori Trials, in which you need to collect treasures within a set time limit in a specialty level. As opposed to combat encounters, these trials are fresh and intense. And they were one of the highlights of the game for me. I felt like I had won the Pikmin Olympics when I won the bronze medal on my first attempt in a Dandori Trial. After my first run, I gained a better understanding of the arena. The second one was my real attempt to collect everything in the level. You’ll probably need more than two tries. These are tough! There is a great deal of time pressure offered in Dandori Trials that is missing from the main game.
There were some tense minigames that were a welcome relief from the frustrating micromanagement of other areas of the game. Some of these features will be helpful for younger players, such as the action guides that pop up as you repeat actions. It was less appreciated that the rescue team gave away some puzzle solutions after you failed them once, rather than letting you figure them out. On the other hand, some things are never explained directly. This leaves you to comb through an expedition log. Or just wait for the research team to explain it to you by coincidence. Occasionally, Pikmin’s colors are not explained until you’ve already discovered them by trial and error. In general, it’s easy to find information, but the placement is inconsistent. Tutorials either appear after they’ve overstayed their welcome, or in unexpected places.
With so much cuteness and style in Pikmin 4, I couldn’t be unhappy for long. Every bark from Oatchi as he ran up to see me, every time a Pikmin babbled happily as it drank nectar from an egg, never failed to make me smile. Pikmin 4 has a positive outlook on life on Earth, both in terms of gameplay premise and little touches that make it even more enticing. What if advanced alien explorers found joy and usefulness in what we have here — not in our greatest technologies, but in the bits and bobs we forget about in a daily routine? Besides filling out my checklists, I was drawn to collect all of Pikmin 4’s treasures, a catalog full of jokes and deep appreciations. The real world seems more wondrous in Pikmin 4, perhaps because it accomplishes the best thing one can with media.
