Pikmin 4 is great. Let’s just get that out of the way. It’s probably the second-best Pikmin among the numbered titles released in the franchise’s 22 years. The very best Pikmin is the thing, though: it’s a shadow that, for all of Pikmin 4’s successes, cannot be escaped. At least for me, anyway—Pikmin 4 will surely become the best-selling Pikmin title ever, with Nintendo achieving their goal there, but that’s the issue at hand. What was done to make Pikmin 4 more appealing to more consumers is also what made it less than what it should have been.
Pikmin 4 is great, but Pikmin 3 was a masterpiece, one of Nintendo’s true greats. That just went widely unnoticed because, like so many other games, it arrived on the Wii U. And while its Switch re-release was well-regarded and sold better than any Pikmin that came before it, it did not receive the same kind of massive boost that some other core series saw in their arrival on the Switch: “sold better” is a relative thing here. Not every major Nintendo franchise can become a Mario Kart or an Animal Crossing, or what The Legend of Zelda has turned into, sales-wise, thanks to Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. Some of them are going to be more like Metroid or Fire Emblem: received well by critics, adored by the fans they have, but selling “just” a couple or a few million copies each time out instead of compelling many more millions to buy both hardware and software.
Pikmin has, historically, been in that latter camp, maybe through no fault of its own. Pikmin came out just a couple of weeks after the GameCube’s North American launch; like with Luigi’s Mansion, it was a non-Mario space that Shigeru Miyamoto spent his time in prior to the GameCube’s launch, and both games were analyzed by fans and critics with that fact in mind. Pikmin was impressive, challenging, centered around a strict time limit that could force you to have to restart the entire game if you didn’t take to the game’s systems and nuances quickly enough. It was praised, but it was also released early on for a system that never quite took off: you can only sell so many copies, regardless of greatness, on a platform with about 22 million customers on it. So, Pikmin, and its excellent sequel, Pikmin 2, sold around 2.72 million combined copies on the GameCube. And their New Play Control re-releases on the Wii managed just under one million combined copies, despite being budget titles available on a console that sold nearly five times as many units as the GameCube had. The Wii sold plenty of consoles with its “blue ocean” strategy, but software sales didn’t necessarily keep up, not even when Nintendo’s name was attached to it as with the two Pikmin re-releases.
There was no new Pikmin on the Wii, but instead, Pikmin 3 arrived within the first year of the Wii U’s short life. Like with the GameCube, there was basically no way to put out a massive commercial success on the Wii U thanks to the small user base, which topped out at 13.6 million, the lowest of any Nintendo console. Just 19 titles in the Wii U’s library even hit the one million sales mark, and while Pikmin 3 was one of them, it wasn’t by much: even Mario Kart 8 struggled under these constraints, limited to a console-leading 8.46 million sales compared to the over 55 million its Deluxe re-release has sold on the Switch.
There has never been a true opportunity for a Pikmin title to flourish sales-wise, and Nintendo was not about to miss their first such moment; unlike with the Wii, people actually purchase games for their Switch after buying the system itself, and unlike with the GameCube and Wii U, a ridiculous number of people have purchased a Switch. And this isn’t just guesswork or hypothesizing, either. This is from Miyamoto himself, in the Pikmin 4 Nintendo Asks: “There have been three games in the series until now, from Pikmin to Pikmin 3, and personally I’ve always wondered, ‘Why haven’t they exploded more in sales even though they’re so much fun to play? Why do people think they’re so difficult?’”
The conversation from there focused on the approach to development, and the balancing act of retaining the series’ signature difficulty and complexity, while also making everything within more approachable for those who might have been intimidated by those things in the past. Miyamoto continued, “We were talking about how we want as many people as possible to play Pikmin 4, but if it’s not Pikmin-like enough, we won’t meet the expectations of those who’ve enjoyed the series until now. The first game provided a deeper challenge, while the second game was broader in terms of content, and we went back to something closer to the first one in Pikmin 3. But after thinking about it, I realized that we could do both. We could retain the depth of gameplay that makes Pikmin so interesting, while providing the functional support to address the challenges around controls.”
An admirable goal, but whether it worked is debatable. Again, Pikmin 4 is great: it’s engaging, it’s designed in a way to keep you playing, and playing, and playing some more, but the difficulty and complexity and level of strategy needed to both create and enjoy something like Pikmin 3 simply isn’t there in this entry. Despite more Pikmin types than ever before, despite roughly 40 hours of gameplay without even counting the hours you could drop into achieving top ranks on the various timed and battle missions, there are fewer solutions to problems that need solving. Too much of the game can be solved by ramming directly into a problem with a very large number of Pikmin, and there are few consequences for this kind of behavior.
The ice Pikmin are overpowered: they do create some new strategies, like the ability to freeze bodies of water in order to transport treasures and defeated creatures and the like with Pikmin besides the water-traversing blues, but they effectively replaced the red Pikmin as the type you want in a fight, since they eventually freeze foes while attacking them. And since you can ram directly into an enemy at full speed and stun it using your space dog, Oatchi, and then all the Pikmin you have on Oatchi’s back leap forward and attack said foe, even a bunch of the game’s boss fights are over in mere seconds. The fear of losing Pikmin just isn’t there like it used to be, because you have to be trying to lose Pikmin for it to ever happen in large quantities that would be both damaging to your missions and also your psyche. (Hey, just because I’ve been hearing the cries of dying Pikmin for over 20 years now doesn’t make it any easier to hear.) Pikmin 4 solved that problem by making it a lot harder for Pikmin to ever get to that point.
There are few opportunities where you have to consider sacrificing a white Pikmin—a poison one, that when ingested will cause significant damage even to boss creatures—because things simply don’t get that bad. You no longer need to carry around dangerous bombs with yellow Pikmin and possibly blow up yourself and other Pikmin in the process: you can have bombs pre-made with scrap materials you find, so you can just keep a stock to be used for opening up certain paths, or making even quicker work of certain bosses—all without putting any Pikmin at all in danger in the process. These materials can also be used to create building blocks for bridges, rather than having to find said materials out in the wild to be used for specific purposes. It’s kind of a perfect case of the streamlining of the series being harmful to the strategy, as you’ll build up a huge supply of these materials from side missions and just general play, and so can avoid whatever dangerous creatures might be guarding more of it later in the game if you want to. In previous Pikmin titles, finding and retrieving any building materials you needed might cost you in blood. (Wait, do Pikmin bleed? My heart bleeds for them, at least.)
And if something terrible does happen to you in Pikmin 4 despite the game trying its hardest to keep that from happening—such as in a cave—you can rewind a few minutes back, or to the start of that sublevel, or you could use some of the glow seeds you received from the night missions to summon glow Pikmin, which can do anything. They’re not harmed by water, fire, ice, or poison, and they have a charge attack that incapacitates all enemies within range, then kills them. They teleport back to you when their job is done, so you don’t even need to keep track of them like other Pikmin. Their own overpowered nature is part of what makes the night missions you use them in—the ones that earn you the glow seeds—so tedious. There’s just not much to those levels, no real strategy necessary outside of sending a large group of Pikmin you can’t shake even if you wanted to against enemies who proceed in a pretty orderly and polite fashion toward your base, but they’re a vital part of the gameplay experience if you want to be able to rescue all of the castaways stranded on this alien planet we know as Earth. And being able to summon these glow Pikmin whenever during the day, even in caves where the inability to call in more Pikmin to help was a load-bearing impediment to success, further reduces the need for strategy or real tension.
I’m not against something like the rewind feature, neither in general nor in the way it’s implemented in Pikmin 4. It’s optional, and not everyone wants to tense up like wild and strategize their way out of losing as few Pikmin as possible. It fundamentally changes the game, like how Fire Emblem introduced a mode without permadeath, but you’re not being forced to use either, so even if you are against such a feature, simply do not utilize it, and let those who want to do so. The rest of the streamlining that Miyamoto and team discussed in the Nintendo Asks, though, and implemented in-game, was an overcorrection to a problem that didn’t actually exist, created out of a desire to sell more copies than prior Pikmin titles, and cannot be avoided since it’s all central to the very structure and design of the game. The ice and glow types are simply too powerful, and upset the balance that Pikmin had utilized in prior games. You’re limited to walking around with just three Pikmin types again, which was previously only the case when just three Pikmin types existed: in the previous two mainline entries, you could use five types at once, and you’d have to, because you were trying to balance the lack of time in a given day with the lack of time you had for your entire playthrough to be a success. There wasn’t necessarily time to be walking back to your base to retrieve more Pikmin, not if you wanted to be able to collect all the ship parts, or collect all the treasures, or find the fruits you needed to make food for your crew so that you didn’t all starve to death. It was truly a real-time strategy offering, more so than its predecessors.
You don’t need to prioritize time like that at all in Pikmin 4, as there’s no time limit to the completion of your mission. Do as little as you’d like on a given day, and it’s fine: you’ll try again the next day. Pikmin had a hard limit of 30 days to find all 30 ship parts, and while you could fudge it a little by leaving some nonessential parts behind, you didn’t always know if they were nonessential until you had acquired them. Pikmin 3 made it so you needed to find fruits to make juice in order to survive, and also took that juice away from you eventually at a time when the game was significantly more difficult and demanding, meaning you had to be on your game in order to survive that twist. Not only does it remove any of these kinds of time limits, but Pikmin 4 all but eliminates the multitasking of both Pikmin 2 and Pikmin 3. Yes, Oatchi eventually can order some Pikmin around and carry them and get them to do things for you, but there is little call in the actual design of the levels and structure of your missions for that to happen, which makes some level of sense given that you only acquire those abilities through purchased upgrades.
In practice, Oatchi is essentially a very large Pikmin you can order about to help with the dandori method that is spoken of so often in Pikmin 4. It’s fun and has its uses, but it’s a far cry from what peak Pikmin 3 was, when you had three different groups of Pikmin roaming maps at once, each controlled by a different leader, and you had to organize them to be swift and efficient and deadly lest these smaller groups fail to achieve their missions before the sun went down, or were obliterated in battle by virtue of not being able to just slam 100 of them against the soft spot of any enemy they encountered. You can get through any challenge in any amount of time in Pikmin 4 simply by strapping 100 Pikmin to a dog and literally barreling into any obstacle you find until it stops fighting back.
The final cave of Pikmin 3 is one of the single greatest setpieces Nintendo has ever designed. It’s so complex, so deep, and requires so much strategy and expertise, that it could have been its own mini-Pikmin game on its own, like some kind of challenging expansion for experts who understand every single thing that can be done with each type of Pikmin, and in the most effective and efficient ways. This one stage has its own day/night cycle, and yet also keeps you from summoning new Pikmin until the next day, meaning it’s combined the surface and cave elements of the series together into something new, different, and devious. There is nothing in Pikmin 4 that comes anywhere close to approaching the complexity and depth of this final stage—the final cave is 20 floors deep, yes, but they’re all fairly isolated and, by this point in the game, such simple challenges to overcome—because the design choices that simplified so much of the gameplay can’t support such a thing in the first place. What remains is still highly enjoyable—again, Pikmin 4 is likely better than every Pikmin title besides its direct predecessor—but the gap between Pikmin 3 and the rest was already so significant, and all Pikmin 4 has achieved, from that angle, is to fill it in somewhat rather than actually close it.
This all sounds harsh, but the criticisms are more about what Pikmin 4 is not instead of what it is. What it is is deeply charming, and the kind of game you can very quickly lose yourself in over a few days until you realize that you’ve played a lot more of it in a short span than you meant to. Nintendo might have tried to simplify and streamline to boost sales, and in some ways that’s to Pikmin 4’s detriment, but we’re not talking about a disaster of Metroid: Other M proportions or anything of the sort. Pikmin 4’s greatest sin is in not building on the greatness of Pikmin 3, which is even more of a shame because it’s not like the lack of the Wii U’s GamePad is what caused the shift: Pikmin 3 Deluxe already proved you could more than make do without it. And this is what the lament is for: that Nintendo zigged when they could have stayed on the path they were on, the path that led them to the complexity, the depth, the challenge of Pikmin 3. And they did it to appease and attract hypothetical Pikmin players more than existing ones—understandable, but regrettable.
Maybe, when Pikmin 5 inevitably releases as an early title on the Switch 3 in 2033, Nintendo will have course corrected once more, figuring out how to make the streamlining of Pikmin 4 live alongside the difficulty and challenge and depth of Pikmin 3, much like the the former was meant to be a best of both worlds idea born from the first two games in the series. It would be lovely if so, as the idea behind Pikmin 4’s direction is solid, and the result great. It just could have been even better, and we know that’s true, because Pikmin 3 already exists.
Marc Normandin covers retro videogames at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Twitter at @Marc_Normandin.