The most important games for me are ones that seem to pop in to my world at the exact time that I needed them, and Pikmin is a strong example of one of those cases. The moment I was living under my own roof, during the summer before I started college, I felt like a completely different person. I never knew what life was like without the every minor decision or daily bit of minutia being judged with a harsh eye, and subsequent fear, and my first apartment changed all of that. Living alone started as a party, I spent money and time in ways I previously never could, but as the high of freedom wore off, something took it's place, legitimate independence. Local transportation would allow me to effectively perform walkabout's in every area that interested me growing up, and despite growing up in a single parent household, as an only child, this solitude was something different, a vast world that began to teach me thing's. And it was about a year in to this unique solitude that I found Pikmin.
This silly gamecube launch title has valuable lessons about finding peace with death, discovering the logic behind a seemingly harsh world, and most importantly to me, how to deal with being left alone with your own thoughts. I remember sitting in my car in a massive parking structure, before a big event I was involved with, trying to squeeze in a few extra minutes with Captain Olimar and the Pikmin, knowing how important his journey's would feel parallel to mine.
At the end of the day, this is a neat tech demo about a tiny guy fighting monsters, but for someone attempting to finding their own voice; critically, profesionally, and personally, there could be no better companion than Olimar, and no better game than Pikmin.

for some reasons ive never played pikmin in the entirety of my life and i know that would sound weird and it probably is weird because this game was right up to my alley its charming it has an addicting gameplay loop and theres some super cute babies just roaming around the map i love them pikmins are adorable

pikmin is some real time strategy game and I'm really weirded out by the fact that I enjoyed it since I'm stupid as a rock and strategy is not really something I vibe with maybe use the word impulsiveness so yeah

olimar got to this planet and crashed his ship and finds a new lifeforms and the 2 things he thinks is "damn they look like some carrot brand on my planet . delicious" and "I shall throw them" which is pretty funny if you ask me

pikmin are super cute and they follow olimar to be used to do lots of things like killing enemies and getting stuff using they cooperative strength you will see 0/30 on objects so you will know how many you need them and also they come in different kinds for different situations theres red pikmins which are the standard ones but also are strong against fire yellow pikmins can be thrown l higher and can take bombs and blue pikmins which can go underwater so you got a wide array of strategise to do with these babies

main goal is taking back olimars 30 ship components lost throughout the planet and specifically in 4 + 1 levels using pikmins in a 30 days deadline

the levels are super sweet and memorable and have some great somber ambient music to boot so there's something too and actually have a lot of stuff going on so you have to properly distribute pikmins throughout the levels for time management

you got some idk 30 mins ? of daytime and then you gotta get back to the ship because the night is scary or whatever

and thats it people that's the gameplay loop incredible I know but if I tell you that they laced this with drugs I'm sorry it was quite addictive if you ask me I was always like "one more day……. just one more" and controlling pikmins really is a frenzy yknow they got some wacky AI and using them isn't even that fun you get to divide them in groups if you want to select a SPECIFIC pikmin to throw yellow pikmins with bomb explode at random because they're stupid sometimes while following you they'll get stuck or just drawn or just follow an enemy and try to battle with them until they get swallowed you get a lot of pikmins to begin with because every enemy carcass can be turned into pikmin seeds that may become pikmin flowers if you leave them growing and there's a lot of I have no idea how they're called but I call them pikmin money l the ones with the colored numbers like 5 10 20 and so on ok so like this chaotic nature of pikmins is kinda fun if you ask me they really feel like living things they get distracted and sometimes want to play and sometimes they make mistake because they're stupid and cute thats the truth and I like this aspect of the game if you ask me

umh I mean the end there's not much more about it apart from the gameplay loop I told you about the final boss the one you get to fight after getting all the 30 parts is kinda shit mainly because the battle system is already shit so if you put a whole ass guy that swallows pikmin whole of course you're gonna have a bad time but apart from that

great game

i also enjoy olimars diary entries at the end of the day where he talks about some things that he discovers which are actually gameplay tips like "oh I discovered that the beetles who run if you throw pikmins on top of them they spew nectar" which are always a good things to know and also his personal thoughts about pikmins that absolutely fucking kill me like "were pikmins aggressive because I came here . they seem to be trying to get on top of the natural order with my help. am I the one being used" that's fucking funny olimar youre funny

oh also I played with the 4k textures really looked gorgeous

I was reading about how this game was born out of a tech demo to show off the Gamecube’s capabilities, it got me missing the days when the jump to next gen meant developers doing wild and imaginative things mechanically that couldn’t have been done before, not just prettier graphics. Simple and direct, it delivers a quick burst of it’s unique gameplay loop and doesn’t overstay it’s welcome. It does suffer from a bit of jank though, the Pikmin AI can frankly be completely braindead at times with them getting stuck on walls and corners at the best of times, and diving into lakes to their deaths en mass at the worst. I definitely spoiled myself a bit by playing Pikmin 3 first with all it’s quality of life. Still, this series’ uniquely serene yet hectic gameplay loop is one of a kind, and holds up even in it’s most basic form.

The Libra and Sagittarius are souvenirs given to Olimar by his two children and are considered mandatory ship parts, yet they seem to be nothing more than two identical jewels on the sides of his ship. By not collecting these parts, you could essentially create a playthrough where Olimar's failure to leave the planet would not be from a lack of a functioning ship, but instead from not being able to live with leaving behind the gifts his children gave him. There's a lot I could say about this game, but this is the thought that sticks out to me the most.

Pikmin to me is like the perfect kind of confert food gaming. As a time management strategy games I feel like a good chunk of the game is managing the Pikmins crappy AI rather then a real challenge but once you get used to it it's not that big of a deal. I feel like while Pikmin 3 really does do everything better this game does it's still something to come back to just for the undeniable nintendo charm that I personally feel is lacking from a lot of their more recent games. (god I hope Pikmin 4 is good) Pikmin 1 is just oozing with so much charm and just like other Nintendo games of that era it's also pretty replayable even with just the single campaign mode and a few challenge modes. Too me that's a mark of quality that even thought your game is lacking in overall context it dosn't matter because the core game is just so much fun you wanna replay it over and over again.

In other news I wish I had a pet Bulborb so fucking badly. I don't care if their the apex predator for out lovable group of plant based parasites I want one now. I could keep em in like a warm terrarium and like sprinkle pikmin into the tank like fish food. Come on Nintendo just give me one, I know you have the money to start a cross splicing gene farm for fictional characters; just give em to me now. where else are you putting all that Switch money because it's definitely not in the games or hardware!!!! (I didn't sleep all night so I'm very tired rn)

Foram 24 dias no total.
Minha experiência com pikmins amarelos e bombas não foi das melhores mas rendeu umas gargalhadas tipo um esquadrão suicida no meio de um monte de inimigo explodindo eles junto com uma parede, e eu obviamente estava planejando fazer isso e não queria só destruir a parede. Eu gastei tempo pra caramba tentando entender como elas funcionavam e também tentei usar bombas no chefe final e ele engoliu meu esquadrão inteiro de bombas e combatentes me deixando apenas com 5 pikmins, foi algo tão ferrado que eu simplesmente deixei eles de fora da luta e acabou que por causa disso eu tive pikmin suficiente pra pegar a ultima parte, então gracias senõr pikmin amarillo.
Quem quiser ver meus resultados clica aqui

I really enjoyed my time with this game although being the first game in the series it does have some issues that later games do not. The thing that annoyed me the most was the Pikmin's ai, they are really stupid in this game there were so many times when I was moving and I suddenly realise none of my guys are with me because they're either A: plucking grass, B: stuck in a corner or under a bridge, or C: they all killed themselves by either running right into enemies or water. I also wasn't a fan of the time limit, it didn't effect me as I beat the game on day 25 and I don't know anyone who ran out of time but I still would prefer if you could take as much time as you want. Overall despite my complaints it's still a great game.

Pretty curious to try Pikmin 2. I cleared Pikmin 3 years ago (which was my first Pikmin game), and remember liking it although it didn't leave a particularly deep impression.

My overall impression is this game feels a little underbaked - which makes sense because it was released one month after the GameCube launched, so it probably got rescoped at some point.

It's hard to know how much to criticize the Pikmin AI, the finicky controls. Part of that adds to its charm and I think when you see that kind of problem in a game, it's also evidence that the game is designing in a new space. Only uninteresting games have no 'problems', except for the problem of being uninteresting.

The main issue is that the combat felt a bit at odds with the enemy variety presented. Pikmin would die by the dozens, or the boss would lose half its health in 10 seconds, and I had no real sense of what I ought to be doing better.

I like the game length - nice and short, memorable levels you remember. More games should be like this! That being said, some of the level design felt like straightforward puzzles that just took time and planning to execute. Like converting blue pikmin to red to get an item through fire - idk, I think there's a more interesting puzzle direction than that. IIRC Pikmin 3 had some interesting puzzles but it's been a while.

If this game were released now I'd probably give it a 3 but it was Nintendo trying to 'casualize' RTS games, after the jump to 3D, and they really did propose some interesting solutions to making a casual RTS for controllers, so yeah it's hard to fault it too much.

This past week I made a trip to hang out with some friends an hour down the road, and something we do almost every time I come over is plug in the modded Wii and fuck around with whatever iso catches our eye. This two day event was no different: Monday night I banged out the last third of Resident Evil 4, and the next morning; huddled around the TV looking for something to pass the time with, I tried Pikmin on a whim. My memory card was full from last night’s adventure so I could only get a taste of the adventure at the risk of losing a massive amount of work, but even from the 3 day sample we tried, I could tell it was something special. Everything about it was attractive to me, from the Nintendo-spun RTS mechanics to the peculiar world they inhabited. I knew when I got home from that trip that I had to sit down and really sink my teeth into the game.

Funny enough, Pikmin has actually been a bit of a white whale for me personally. As a kid playing Luigi’s Mansion for the first time, unearthing the Pikmin trailer felt like peering into something beyond our world. It always looked like something I’d be into, but fate was not kind to my interests, and I never got my hands on a copy. Though maybe in retrospect I should have actually asked for the game once or twice… Regardless, I finally sat down to play it as an adult, and predictably it was absolutely wonderful. What I didn’t expect was that I’d go on to play through the game 3 times to completion within the week. Looking into it online it seems like the length of the game, and by extension the 30 day time limit, seem to be the biggest point of contention amongst most players. This is peculiar to me, as in my experience I found it to be the glue that prevented the game’s systems from completely collapsing in on themselves. That’s not a sleight against the mechanics though, and I do want to shine a light on the actual game part because I feel like it gets overlooked when looking at the game from the outside.

Every layer is razor sharp, and the few massive pieces of design interlock so well to allow for interesting strategy puzzles, that removing or adding just a single piece would likely send the whole thing crashing down. Across a single day there are only a few major things to keep track of: The Pikmin population, part locations, level layouts, and enemy spawns. It’s all disgustingly simple on paper, but contending with everything at once is where the magic really happens. Efficiency is the name of the game here, and because tasks have to be performed in real time by the Pikmin (with slight time saves coming from the number of Pikmin on a task and the status of their bud), a strong grasp of level navigation is all but essential to prevent massive time and population losses. Some weeks I’d play simple and juggle basic tasks to nab a part or two a day, whereas other times I’d find myself playing more towards chipping away at level hazards one day, and then cleaning up with 3 or 4 parts in a single stretch the next. It’s a testament to the complexity and density of the admittedly small levels that even after multiple reasonably efficient runs, I still couldn’t even begin to chart out anything resembling an optimal path to get parts as quickly as possible.

So how about the timer? Well, it's maybe not a direct threat in the way the developers intended. On a first playthrough you have more than enough time to collect all 30 ship parts and get the best ending (on my first playthrough with minimal resets I managed to beat the final boss on day 27, and collect the final part on day 28) and you’ll likely continue to shave off time with every subsequent run, so on paper it may seem like it the timer may as well not be there at all, right? I’m not convinced.

The reason I find the time limit to be such a captivating piece of the puzzle is not because it’s a particularly challenging thing to work around on its own, but for how it shifts your perspective on every mechanic and every choice you make over the course of a run. If you took this exact campaign and all it’s challenges, but lifted the 30 day timer, the way you’d approach each level would completely flip on its head. Multitasking would be unnecessary as you could execute a plan as slowly and carefully as possible, you would have all the time in the world to plant the maximum amount of Pikmin for any one scenario, and the punishment for mistakes shifts from added tension and short-term changes of plans, to simply robbing you of more of your time. In layman's terms, removing the timer would probably miss the point.

It’s been said that people tend to optimize the fun out of something if given the opportunity. In the case of Pikmin, this has completely different insinuations depending on the existence of a timer, and that’s what makes it such a fascinating inclusion to me. No matter how well you understand the game, no matter how sharp your execution is, it doesn’t matter. The timer is always looming overhead like an albatross subtly weighing on your psyche and steering your every move. Some may view it as something that just restricts player freedom, but with how loose the balance of the game and the timer admittedly are, it somehow perfectly balances itself as an element of the game that always subconsciously keeps the player in check. Few titles before or since have promoted optimisation in the face of a looming failure state so well, and this coming from a Nintendo game of all things could very well steer younger audiences to explore more games of this niche, and I just sorta love that prospect honestly.

This type of psychological tension is something I wish would be explored in more inherently childish games like this, and not just reserved for “mature” games. I sorta understand why this hasn’t been a common design principle - especially for a modern children’s game - but I love that the Big N was willing to put something like this together with their own flourish and have it come out so perfectly realized despite being such a bizarre mismatch of aesthetical and mechanical sensibilities. It would be easy to call it just a tech demo given its compact size (and it’s literal roots in GameCube tech demos) but that would be a mistake. The original Pikmin still stands as one of Nintendo’s boldest games to date, and I think it deserves to be viewed in the same glamorous light as every other masterpiece released on the purple lunchbox at the time. We need to do our best to cherish this game now, because I think the time of its potential influence and popularity has already begun to fade.

Trivia Time!

While you may know that Pikmin began as "Super Mario 128", a tech demo created to see how many AI-driven NPCs could run concurrently on the GameCube, you may not be aware that the change to 6 different colored tiny character models was a subsidized colorblindness test funded by the Japanese government.

Growing concerns of widespread colorblindness (and its close link to リグマー Disease) caused the Japanese Secretary of Health, Labour, and Welfare to reach out to Nintendo, requesting that colors such as Quant, Hoxozo, and Blorgle be added to a game in which telling colored characters apart would be crucial. Pikmin Director Shigefumi Hino devised the plan to include those three colors alongside the three hues which they are most often mistaken for: Red, Yellow, and Blue.

After much playtesting, it became apparent that over 95% of players only saw three colors of Pikmin, so rather than leaving the game unplayable for them, the total of individual roles of Pikmin was halved from 6 to 3, combining their abilities (fireproof Quant Pikmin and attack-buffed Red, for example). However, in accordance with the Japanese Cabinet's direction, each Pikmin rendered in-game would have a 50/50 chance of being Red or Quant, Yellow or Hoxozo, and Blue or Blorgle, respectively.

Are you able to tell Quant Pikmin from Red? Let us know if the comments below!

Stay tuned for more Trivia Time segments in the near future!

Coming to this after growing up on Pikmin 2 and 3 was harrowing - Pikmin AI is borderline nonfunctional, their capacity to take any initiative without your direct babysitting is obscene. Every enemy encounter is ruthless, something as mundane as a Bulburb can rinse 9-15 of your troops if you do anything less than completely dogpiling it. There's very specific quirks and annoyances that don't even feel like the result of its time, but intentional choices to make the world feel more hostile and out of your control.

But I liked it for that really. You gotta corral the pikmin around as if they were dawdling ankle-biters and you're a begrudging parental figure. Olimar says as much in one of the travel logs. And as any responsible father should, I took immense pride when my dumb idiot gremlins somehow completed their menial labor without falling in a lake.

The Children Yearn For The Mines.

this ended up being more of a view into my personal foilbles as a gamer than anything: that ticking 30 day timer pushed me into a level of perfectionist agonizing I wouldn't have expected from a nintendo game. it was really to the point that I got to distant spring, took a look around, and promptly put the game down for nearly a year due to the anxiety. totally a needless drive too, considering I had ended up with something like seven items left and 12 days to grab them in, so I was really under no pressure at all! but sometimes it requires a break to regroup and put things into perspective.

the design here is all good though; it's absolutely novel and toys with RTS tropes in a way only nintendo at their creative peak could capture. base-building is eschewed in favor of exploration, experimentation, and plenty of pikmin micro-management, most of which the game neatly handles for you. the pikmin AI vascillates between intuitive and incomprehensible at a moment's notice, meaning that sometimes the pikmin will clue in to exactly what they're supposed to be handling and then minutes later decide to frolic off on their own to pull up weeds or stand stock-still in front of wily beasts on the move. combat also can quickly switch between these two extremes: sometimes you'll nail the throws and your pikmin will rack up damage, whereas other times it feels they're unresponsive and helpless. this is where the limited day count really hurts the game, as it made me feel like every major pikmin loss was a major reset point. it perhaps would have felt more immersive if I could take my survivors and lick my wounds back at base, all the while devising ways to get my numbers up again or try to take on the opponent a new way. instead I often reset if I couldn't get through my chosen encounters with an acceptable amount of losses, which led me to redoing numerous other objectives along the way past the point of frustration.

when the game works though, it's a surprisingly clever take on puzzles and resource management from the big N with a lot of heart and an elegant internal ecology that adds to the mystique of the alien planet. lining up two pieces in a single day always made me smug, enraptured in my own success even when on the heels of multiple resets. eventually I convinced myself to eat losses here and there as long as I kept things moving; after all, the game smartly lets you take any enemy you've killed back to base to sprout new allies. occasionally these puzzles push at the limits of the controls on gamecube -- for example, in the final trial where you must throw yellow pikmin carrying bombs across water while making sure they don't drop in and also without signalling them for some odd reason -- but the game is generous with how most thought-intensive puzzles are light on enemies. I wish that I could've pressed on originally instead of having this awkward gap in playtime, but this return visit to cleanup the endgame has left me overall much more positive on where the game truly sings rather than preoccupied with the hidden frustrations behind it.

Charming lil creature em up actually. I wish every Japanese game had a kids & adult mode to determine how much kanji is used in the reading, genuinely the most innovative thing about this game which I never see brought up.

Visually it's easily one of the best games on the Gamecube. The textures are just detailed enough to have a sense of photorealism for the player to feel immersed in a world like our own, while also having quite vibrant colours to make the Pikmin stand apart. Overall a great approach.

I don't have any particularly strong thoughts on most of the music, but I do find it really funny how this song outsold the actual game (going by Japanese sales alone) and how surprisingly (unsurprisingly?) melancholic it is for this game https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SL2ePovKMtg

Where Pikmin shines is really the gameplay. I was worried at first about the time limit, but even playing fairly suboptimally as I was, I still managed to just barely squeeze by in under 30 days for every item. Not letting the player access the map immediately was a neat way to make the UI diegetic. I wasn't very big on the actual battles in all honesty. A lot of them boiled down to tossing as many Pikmin as possible at certain enemies until they died, and ones like the water boss were easily killed by exclusively using blue Pikmin. The rapid throw of Pikmin was also a bit tight due to requiring a bit of a precise circle with the c-stick. Micromanaging with the bomb rocks and such was a bit of a chore I found. Still, the exploration itself was mostly fun and the time-cycles were well implemented, really got a sense of how tearing apart big gates was a colossal feat for these tiny little creatures.

Overall, the game was a charming little thing to play for a few sessions. It was just the right length to make any grievances mostly forgivable and a satisfying clear. I will probably play the sequels before I die but I wasn't ultra invested to jump straight into Pikmin 2 since I've heard it's extremely long, and skipping entries in series' is for cowards tbh

tldr 7.2584/10 would pickmen as my partners
I subtracted 0.5 stars because I received a copyright complaint from my ISP for pirating it

Oh, Pikmin... You're the one game I wish I could play again for the first time.

Growing attached to my small group of Pikmin, really feeling the loss of each individual Pikmin, only to grow into a horde where each death is merely a statistic, a necessary evil to optimize progress... it's a little chilling, and I think the team intended that, with Olimar even finding a certain peace in his position of power over the limited environment he finds himself in despite the deaths of the Pikmin, assuming you're actually good at the game.

But replaying the game is always an interesting experience, even if I won't get those exact same impacts again, or at least as strongly. When I started replaying this game for this playthrough, I'd actually played through half of the entire game in a single night, only realizing at that point that the sun was rising and this game had captivated me like few other games do.

It's eternally compelling, much like Super Mario 64. It's static and unchanging - but how you interact with it is a constantly evolving game that offers something new every single time.

Ignoring my Mario biases for a second, if I were to consider one Nintendo game as their magnum opus, this would be it. From beginning to end, in narrative to gameplay to themes, I think this is the most completely realized in a self-contained work.

It's such a shame the series is kept hostage by its sales. Pikmin deserves better.

Strategic survival in an unknown world

Pikmin isn't a hard game to love but it's easy to dislike sometimes, the charm of the characters, the world and the way the Pikmin and Olimar interact with it is pretty cool in a sense. A fun strategy game with a time limit that is pretty scary at first but more than possible to overcome after learning the intricies and annoyances the game offers.

The whole game oozes of classic Nintendo charm along with the gameplay requiring some decent planning and perfect placements at times. When the gameplay flows, it flows extremely well with multiple pikmin moving one object while building another and gives you the dopamine hit when you finally solve a hard puzzle and obtain one of the pieces for your ship. The whole concept is something really cool too: A pilot that crashed on an unknown planet and has to rebuild their ship in 30 days or they perish when their life support runs out and thus you bond with the natives of the world, the Pikmin as you both work together to rebuild your ship solving what puzzles and defeating what enemies you'll find along the way.

Despite all that, there are a lot of things this game could use at least in the gamecube original. Controlling your pikmin is generally okay but there are some nasty and tedious quirks to it that I found annoying throughout the playthrough. An example is let's say you need to get through a stone wall and the yellow pikmin with bombs are the ones you want to control right now, you can't select which color you'd want to control so you'd have to split them up and select them in order to proceed normally and you'd have to do this for every time you want to pick a specific color for the task at hand. This fails to mention if you have multiple yellow ones, you'd have to split the yellow ones with bombs and without so they don't blow each other up. All of these encompasses with a time limit that gives you another level of stress and anxiety, especially if they're barely learning the basics of the game.

Pikmin isn't a game for everyone but it's an interesting title in Nintendo's repertoire that has mostly been known for platformers and adventure games up until this point. Expect to reset a lot if you don't know what you're doing or suffer a lot of death in a day. A charming strategy game that when it works, it works really well with some hiccups along the way.

How glad I am that I persisted in my search without losing hope...
Now I can leave this planet without any regrets.

I think the modern gamer has a tendency to outright dismiss a game's larger worth as a piece of art if it doesn't match a specific ideal of gameplay and presentation. Pikmin is not exactly what I'd consider a pretty game in all respects (there are certainly a few aspects that were technically impressive at the time though), and its gameplay experience seems purposefully tumultuous as much it attempts to simplify the RTS formula down in the typical Miyamoto fashion. But Pikmin is still a beautiful piece of art all the same, is it not?

I first played Pikmin in my teens, and I think it might've been the first game to teach me two things about games as a medium: that friction (and consequences) within a gameplay experience can be meaningful and compelling in its own right, and that a game can be more than the sum of its parts. It's actually kind of cool that the Pikmin AI will sometimes not listen or do something absolutely stupid; the things that modern gamers find annoying are part of what made Pikmin special.

Sure, Pikmin 2 is filled to the brim with content, and Pikmin 3 is a more realized and polished mechanical experience (I am not disparaging either of those games, I love them as well), but Pikmin has the most heart both in how its mechanics force you to think about your time and resources, and in how its narrative is more personal and dire. The bad, neutral, and good endings of Pikmin all stick with you.

Pikmin taught me that failure is okay, at least in the abstract gameplay sense. Olimar may have perished or even just returns home with no fanfare, but the player has another chance to do it better the next time. It's not a particularly hard game, but I do think it's an oft misunderstood game, so I just wanted to give this incredible little game the love it deserves.

Pikmin is so great that its sequels still mange to be really good games even though they completely abandon the first game's core structural feature -- the time limit.

God, the time limit. I love the 30 day time limit in this game so much. It's a stroke of arcade-y genius to have a calendar pressuring you to make every little carrot dude and second of daylight count. And because everything is designed with that 30 day calendar in mind, this game has basically perfect pacing. It doesn't have to add roguelike dungeon crawls or increasingly complicated multi-character micromanagement to stay challenging because the threat of running out of days is the challenge. No need for a side dish when your main plate is a perfect portion.

Also the sounds are all permanently etched into my brain and the water is so watery it makes me want to throw pebbles at my TV.