Pikmin is one of the really interesting Nintendo series that, even though it doesn’t get THAT much love, it still gets some. It’s not like StarTropics, you know. Nintendo clearly still cares about Pikmin. And, after years of having told us Pikmin 4 was coming soon, it came out. It looked really interesting in the trailers.

So let’s see if it’s good! I think I’ll keep this simple.

What I like

The core Pikmin gameplay is always fun and fairly unique to the franchise, still. You control one person who commands an army of Pikmin, which he can throw at things to tell the pikmin to attack or grab (either to transport, move in some way or dig), or just tell all pikmin of one type to run at a target. Most objects will require several Pikmin to carry… up to 1000 (which is actually just 100 purples since they can carry more… or 90 purples and one fully-powered dog), but usually in the 5 to 10 range. Timing when you’re throwing pikmin at a target and when you’re whistling to call them back to you to avoid attacks is the core of combat here, as the enemies tend to have big attacks with long windup.

And of course there’s plenty of types of Pikmin. Red pikmin are strong and resist fire, yellow can be thrown way higher and dig faster and resist lightning, and blue pikmin can survive water. There’s a few special types as well, rock pikmin deal damage when thrown instead of having to grab on (and also they break crystal walls), purple pikmin do a ground pound shockwave when thrown and carry for 10 pikmins’ worth, white pikmin deal with poison and deal poison damage, flying pikmin… fly (they’re pretty useless, except for being able to go over swamps which is relevant a whole one time in the game). One new type is ice pikmin… they can freeze water, swamps, and enemies. Pretty useful. And there’s glow pikmin, which I may just mention later because they’re hardly relevant.

A new addition is Oatchi, the 2-legged dog-like creature. Oatchi has a lot of functions. At his core he can attack things and carry things like a Pikmin, but he soon gains the ability to not just swim, but carry pikmin on his back (so you can easily get non-blue pikmin across water), jump up small ledges, charge into enemies/obstacles for decent damage, resist elements, and you can directly control him, where he has the same abilities you do as a human (so you can whistle to take control of pikmin and throw them on things). So there’s a few spots where you can split up Oatchi and your character and do different things in different places (similar to how Pikmin 3 did it, but not exactly). Also Oatchi can be powered up, may it be being able to carry more weight, deal more damage, stun with his dash and a couple other things. You gain points to power him up by saving people and curing leaflings.

Dandori is, in my mind, the best part of the main game. Where the main game is lacking in strategically planning when and where to grab shit and multitasking (which you CAN do but don’t have to), and while a lot of the caves are fairly normal “explore and find all the stuff in them at your leisure” stuff, there’s 2 types of special Dandori caves. Dandori is the art of strategic planning of carrying stuff with pikmin, pretty much. Dandori Challenge caves are an area where you’re given a time limit and have to get as much of the stuff in it within that time limit. Those are generally pretty challenging and require careful pikmin use. To win you just have to get a bronze rating, though there’s sidequests asking to do better and try to get everything in the level. Some of these are pretty hard. The other Dandori is Dandori Battles, where there’s an arena filled with things to grab and enemies to fight, but there’s another opponent also doing this and you have to get more points to win. You can find items to cause issues for the other player, throw more pikmin at a thing your opponent is transporting to either slow down the transportation or switch the transportation so it goes towards your base instead. It’s pretty fun, though my one issue is that it cuts your split screen in half vertically (so you have the opponent’s viewpoint on the other side) and that’s really distracting. I believe the Dandori Battle option on the main menu is for online play, I haven’t looked at it much since I don’t subscribe to NSO.

What I don’t like

The very start of the game is fucking annoying. There’s a point where literally I’d take 2 steps, get a tutorial, take 2 more steps, get another tutorial, around 10 times in a row. It keeps interrupting you with tutorials a bunch for a lot of the first map (and a bit of the second one), it’s really annoying.

I really liked Pikmin and Pikmin 3. I actually didn’t play Pikmin 2. What I liked about those two is that there was a sense of urgency. The first game had a very strict time limit, while 3 had the juice system where you used juice each day and had to find more fruit all the time to keep your juice stocks up (not too difficult, but still a fun system). Pikmin 4 has nothing. You just take all the time you want, it doesn’t matter. The daily timer just feels like a way to force you back into the base camp. If you leave anything behind, it just stays there when you come back so whatever. All the daily timer really actually does is introduce long loading screens. Kinda lame.

While it’s cool that there’s night expeditions… they’re kinda lame. Instead of being exploring a different version of the world or fighting stronger monsters or monsters with different strategies or something, with hordes of them… it’s a tower defense. A really easy, kinda boring, tower defense. I like some of the ideas here, the way you build up your crew of Glow Pikmin is fun (glow pikmin are basically fully elementally-immune pikmin that teleport back to you if they idle), them having a super attack is pretty cool (basically a pikmin Spirit Bomb), but in the end it’s just activating sub-towers to lure enemies, then use your super to pretty much insta-kill them if they’re big, or randomly throw to insta-kill the smaller ones (and leave Oatchi to defend one of the main towers just in case). The one good thing about night expeditions is that they give you glow seeds, which you can use in caves to generate glow pikmin for free (which wasn’t really relevant for me except after I fucked up majorly against the final boss and lost almost all my pikmin, so I used glow seeds to refill).

I find the lack of really cool bosses pretty disappointing. There’s really just one, and a few big enemies here and there. Some of the big enemies are actually kinda pathetic, there’s this big really tall crab dude that you can just throw a few flying pikmin at and he’ll eventually die because he can’t actually kill pikmin. There’s this big slug-like thing that rolls around and is absolutely awful to fight (especially the second one since it’s in a small room and sometimes the air geyser you need to use decides not to work and you just die). And there’s a few miniboss-style enemies that are very easy to deal with. The bosses in Pikmin 3 I feel did more interesting things in the environment

What the fuck?

Well here’s the thing. That game I was hoping for, that has a time limit and more interesting exploration and basically no fluff? It’s IN this game. It exists. At some point Olimar joins the crew and you can talk to him and get his perspective of the story from before the start of the game. In this flashback you have 15 days to get all your ship’s parts, and even exploration is more interesting because you can’t actually 100% everything, at least in the first map, before getting into the second one. And it’s hard too, since it puts you in different spots than the main story and has some of the mechanics and enemies that you find later on in the main game but in the early levels. And the stuff you need to find is stuck behind stuff that’s a bit harder to deal with than in the main game which makes a lot of things easier than normal (like bomb walls… in the main game, just buy more bombs, they’re a non-issue… can’t do that in this mode, you need to actually find bombs).

There are minor issues, namely the fact that you’re exploring the same maps as you did in the main game so it feels like retreading old ground, but it’s still really cool that this is here and I kinda wish this was the main game. The spirit of Dandori is more alive in this side-mode than in the main game (outside of the Dandori caves).

Overall

The core gameplay of Pikmin remains fun and interesting. It has some great ideas and it still does cool things with them in this new entry. I was a bit disappointed in many little things here. The lack of urgency which is something that was interesting about the Pikmins I played, the fact that there’s no interesting bosses in this one (Pikmin 3 had really awesome bosses), how formulaic each map is, and how meh night expeditions are after hyping them up since the first game.

Overall I like the game a lot, I kinda hate that what I see as the core Pikmin experience is post-game content re-using the content you already played, and despite what looks like a negative tone  I do absolutely recommend this game. I love Pikmin and, even if this isn’t the best in the series as far as its main game, it’s still very good.