Very good game. Honestly super glad I tried out Pikmin this year since my copy has been rotting on my shelf for years. I never found myself getting past like the 2nd level as I was stuck and had my pikmin always dying. Thankfully, I beat it, and it's a pretty short and definitely sweet game. You could probably beat it in one sitting if you know all the part locations and the puzzles and such... Alright then, on with the review-time! Story first. It's very simple, Captain Olimar is flying somwhere for a vacation and then he gets hit by an asteroid and crashes down to an unknown planet. He crash lands, making 30 of his ship parts go missing all over, and he can only survive on the planet for 30 days, since oxygen is posinous for him. So yeah, you have a time limit basically. And plus, only 25 parts are required to get a decent ending in this game (yes there arem ultiple endings) Olimar arrives at the Impact Site at the start of the game and you meet these pikmin! Small plant like creatures that look like carrots to Olimar. You can throw them, make them push down walls, fight enemies, and stuff. There are three kinds all with unique abilities. Red being immune to fire and have high attack power, blue being immune to water (as every other is not), and yellow being able to pick up bombs and be thrown very high. The pikmin live in designated onions, each for their own color, which are like their spaceships i guess. At the start of each day, you can deposit how many you'd like from each onion, which adds even more planning into what you want to do in that day. You first start off with red pikmin, but you quickly unlock yellows, then blues. So yeah all of these make for some interesting strategies, youd say? okay but we have my first issue... The yellow pikmin abilities seem a little shoe horned in... The rest of the pikmin get super neat and unique abilities that actually make you wanna choose this specific pikmin for battle or something.
But yellow pikmin, my first playthrough I chose to have not that many since they're only used for like 5 puzzles and 2 battles, which is quite dissapointing in general. You only need like 20 for the entire game, so don't farm that many yellows. This is a real time strategy game or whatever... so fighting enemies could be pretty simple, just rush pikmin into them, or throw it on them to deal damage. It's super duper satisfying with that bongo sound thing playing every time you deal a good hit, and even then some enemies are tough to figure out their patterns for. Wollywogs are very infamous for being a struggle for most players since they can kill like an entire army of pikmin with one stomp! However,... i really like this though as not every enemy is not gonna have the same strategy to deal most damage on them, and plus ive gotten good at defeating wollywogs so yeah whatever. You might want to strategically throw them, rush into them at the back, or use only a specific pikmin. And all of the enemies have pretty cool designs too, which adds even more charm to this game. Alright, time for the levels... and overall theyre decent. Like I said earlier, this game is pretty short, and there are a total of only 5 levels. Might as well go through them all. Impact Site, its the beginning area and its pretty good. Although a little later in the game, you can come back here and farm so many pikmin which makes it definitely worth going back to. Forest of Hope... I love this area. The music is super great, theres so many ship parts here, and its a pretty nice and peaceful area to traverse through. Also, you unlock the yellow pikmin here. Forest Navel, this area is pretty dark so I recommend using the map which helps out a ton. It's where you get the blue pikmin too. I like this area a lot since theres a neat boss battle involving some strategy and planning, and a cool puzzle which gets you two ship parts on the side of the map. Distant Spring, holy shit this area is huge. Blue pikmin definitely are needed for this area, since most of it is water. Lots of people say this area is hard, and I guess it is. I recommend just beating as many enemies as you can the first time you get here, it just helps a lot. Also, the music here is pretty damn relaxing, go listen to it. And finally (hehe), the Final Trial!!! Oh my god, the entire level is one good puzzle involving literally all of your pikmin. And then, of course, the final boss battle. We will get to that a little later. So overall, the levels are good, but it leaves a lot to be desired tbh. I know I said good things about it, but the amount of levels could've been increased. I mean, this game is short. Plus, the variety in
levels isn't that spectacular. Basically, you're in a grass level, a forest/grass level, a cave, a grass level, and another grass level. Yeah... could've been way more interesting. Assuming the planet you're on is Earth, they could've included like a volcano or something.. that wouldve been sick! Im pretty sure this is fixed to a degree in Pikmin 2, and I'll play that pretty soon so eh. Alright, lets talk final boss time. SPOILER TERRITORY BTW, if you care!!! Remember when I said yellow pikmin are useful for only a few battles? Well, this is one them. Meet Emperor Bulbax (wish i could show an image) Bomb rocks are highly recommended for making this boss much easier. You can throw them when it opens it mouth, and that will stun it for a bit and then you can go nuts at bashing it with the red pikmin. Pretty good boss tbh, couldve used like a second phase or something idk, just to spice things up. After you defeat it, you get the final ship part, which is the piggy bank (i think). And damn, does it feel ever so satisfying, making your pikmin army carry that prized treasure to the almost complete ship. Btw, i think this boss is optional since this part is also optional so you dont have to do the final trial really lol. Anyways, for the good ending, you finally get all 30 of the parts. And head back home, or something. I think the pikmin learn how to defeat enemies on their own shown in the cutscene where they attack a bulborb.
And yeah, Olimar goes back to Hocotate and stays safe. HOORAY!!! In the 25 part ending, i think its the same ending, but Im not sure if the pikmin say goodbye or not. Honestly i dont remember sorry. But it is slightly worse i guess. You probably should go for all 30 parts instead of 25 if you ever play this game, it's not really that bigger of a task. And plus, you can get upwards to 2 parts a day easy, (3 if youre good). And then the bad ending. The ending you get if you don't get nearly 25 ship parts and the 30 day time limit ends! Well, you're stuck on the planet and you die from the oxygen. And as I said with the other endings, I don't remember this one fully, but the pikmin carry your corpse to one of their onions, and turn you into a olimar... human pikmin. Kinda brings up a bunch of questions but whatever. THE END! Oh and you get shown a beautiful credits along with a good theme too, and an awesome creature montage. So that was my long ass fuck pikmin review. Kinda was all over the place, and I don't think I covered nearly everything, but its fine. Overall, this game is great. I just love the charm of it all. It could've used a bit more content, but its the first game in a beloved series, and it has an amazing concept. I really want to play the next 2 pikmin games this year as I hear theyre better in a lot of ways, and thats definitely exciting! Anyways, thanks for reading my thoughts, and perhaps ill write more reviews like this. Bye!

If yo uwant my full thoughts, wtach my video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IxeKi_IF-j

After having not beaten Pikmin as a child because Puffstool turned all of my darling boys into violent delinquents who beat me up and got eaten, and then I decided "that's enough" and never came back to it, going back to play it is a fascinating task. What I'm presented with is essentially a simplified RTS where you simply drag one of your three units to the proper location for them to be useful, fulfill their function, and then repeat across a map before a time limit runs out. But sometimes they get caught on geometry or drown for no reason, because they have no idea what a bridge is and choose to dive into lethal amounts of water instead of following safety regulations that they themselves established. And it's here where Pikmin is at its weakest - its environmental puzzles are fairly rudimentary, the Pikmin themselves are clumsy, your actual throw is clumsy because it's tied to your walk so sometimes you'll just toss boys directly into the mouth of a lil' dwarf bulborb, and the actual matter of traversal is solved as simply as "did you make all the bridges and bomb the walls that are in your way?" Or just by throwing boys at the problem, typically nothing - enemies or puzzles - knows what to do when you throw Pikmin on its backside.

But it's that element - the enemies - that brings Pikmin to life. Due to the combination of the constant time limit and the fact that you have such limited resources - and they're ALIVE and make sad noises when they die and it's your fault like 70% of the time - every encounter with a new enemy type is a nerve-racking experience. You need to properly discern their behavior before they end up killing the battalion of boys you brought with you, and often times, ANY form of aggression ends up being an incredibly scary prospect! Things can turn from bad to absolutely untennable in Pikmin with just a single move, and god help you if more than one enemy is coming at you! Bosses, likewise, become a wager on how quickly you can figure out their gimmick before they wipe your squad and make you completely ineffectual. And this level of anxiety, trying to prevent things from going from bad to worse and failing constantly, is the heart of what makes Pikmin such an engaging experience. When you finally learn an enemy's patterns and manage to take 'em down no problem, using them as fuel for the fire, THAT'S the best of the game.

Ultimately, Pikmin isn't quite sure what it wants to be at this stage. It's an ultimately survivalist narrative with fantastic characterization for Olimar as this bumbling salaryman who's easily scammed but earnestly fascinated by the world around him, but it's presented as a score attack game where you wanna get better to have awesome speedruns with minimal losses. It wants to pressure you with a constant time limit, but there's true beauty in its world to appreciate. It wants you to be able to multitask between squads for ideal set-ups, but the learning process of enemies is the most fun part about the game! Ultimately, I think that Pikmin needed to grow from this first title - and I know in the future it did grow out from what this game set out to do - but I appreciate the unique little adventure all the same. It's clunky, but oddly accessible; if it didn't end up as an entire series, it'd be this fascinatingly unique cult classic! As-is... it's kind of that within its own series, anyway! A fun time to learn, but I eagerly await what future games hold for this series!

I'm flabbergasted Nintendo keeps taking another roll at this god forsaken IP to see if the next one will be successful for once, but without addressing the root problems that make it fundamentally an awful videogame series.

It's all maidwork. The amount of little plant folk that you can have following you around seems impressive at first until you hit the unit cap before you know it and suddenly it seems like this oppressively limited amount. There can be red pills lying around every freakin where and thats when it becomes apparent that those are essentially health pickups and that the unit cap is essentially a health bar. The game ceases to seem unique or interesting at that point. It's about trading health to achieve tasks and then replenishing said health, and taking note of the locations of unneeded red pills so you know where to find them later, like it's a 90s PC FPS.

By tasks of course I mean gathering collectibles and killing enemies. (Very original!) How do you gather collectibles? Throw the plant folk at them until the gauge is filled. You're simply filling gauges in Pikmin. It's a gauge filling simulator. You defeat enemies the same way. It's not really clear how the plant folk actually attack the enemies since they have no teeth or claws or any visible means to damage enemies much larger than them, but you're not really paying attention to that. You're just looking at the gauge that appears onscreen to show how many plant folk to put in the cup to make the big bad go bye bye. Filling gauges. So quirky. Pure Nintendo. Brilliant.

And the sundown timer. That reminds me of when it was time for bed and my dad would count to 10 slowly before he would shut the console off, and that's how much time we had to reach a save point. That's literally what playing Pikmin is.

When night falls in game you know you're done playing Pikmin because instead of being able to start the next day immediately you have to read the main character monologue for like twenty minutes. ("Make 'em reeeead!!" -Miyamoto, probably) I think the final screen in the game occurrs when you have a choice between two levels to land into, which is a fantastic way of introducing our generation to the concept of choice paralysis. Either way you use up one of your remaining days of oxygen or whatever you have left to finish the game in. So BETTER NOT SQUANDER IT, IDIOT. Better make sure to play each day 100% optimally, not just stumble through. Definitely don't start this level or that one if you're just playing for fun. But it's not as if you're playing games for fun?? I mean who does that.

i never made it to the end as a kid. past that, i don't think i even collected more than one treasure in the second zone, as a kid. i mean i was in a perpetual cycle of days 1-3, heartbroken at the sight/sound of one of my little friends dying and losing their soul to the atmosphere. it was just so much easier to play pokemon/mario where i didn't feel guilty when my videogame friends died. as an adult, the first pikmin game was a fun and quick game that was a perfect slice of game for me. the moment i started to feel like i had gathered everything that this game wanted to tell, it was just about over.

as a child, any boss that wasn't a bulborb was monstrous. but i LOVED discovering each new boss and seeing how kooky they were. i also felt so smart when I figured out how to solve a puzzle/get a bunch done in a day/beat a weird looking boss! siding with all the pikmin lovers that the ost and charm are here. haven't played other games in the series yet but super excited to jump in!

8th Game I've Completed In 2024
Pikmin: Stepping Stone Towards Better To Come

Pikmin began as a series created by Mario creator, Shigeru Miyamoto. The foundation of Pikmin can be found in a GameCube-era tech demo called Super Mario 128, it showed the performance of the GameCube, being able to animate 128 copies of Mario at once, and this concept of multiple characters running at once moved over to what we know today as Pikmin. Pikmin is probably one of the more unique Nintendo series out there. There's your normal Mario's, Zelda's and Metroid's, as well Fire Emblem and Xenoblade for the weebs, but Pikmin as a series is kinda the middle child of Nintendo IPs. It's not as popular as Mario or Zelda, but it's not as niche as Fire Emblem or Xenoblade over here in the west. I initially knew Pikmin only as the series Olimar from Super Smash Bros was from, said 9-year-old me.

I remember trying out Pikmin before, I believe I played either Pikmin 1 or 2 on my old Wii before, I don't know which one exactly, but I never completed it, and I didn't like the controls. I was only a kid at the time, so it was only natural for me to be dogshit at games that weren't Mario or Pokemon. I decided to pick up Pikmin 1 + 2 on the Switch because this was the most accessible version available to me as a newcomer to the series. (I'm writing my review here because backloggd's system when it comes to ports/remasters is dogshit) I am able to play the Wii version of Pikmin 1 & 2, but I've heard about the mixed reception of the motion controls, and with a game like Pikmin, I didn't hate myself enough to subject myself to motion controls, so I got the Switch version. I'll be writing about Pikmin 1 here and Pikmin 2 later, for now, all I have to say about Pikmin 1 is that Pikmin 1 was such a nice change of pace from all the games I've played this year so far.

It was sorta calming to play this game, the soundtrack was composed by Hajime Wakai and adds so much to crafting the atmosphere when you explore this planet as Olimar. Olimar is a Hocotatian (I checked the Pikmin wiki to make sure before I made a fool of myself and say Olimar was human. Pikmin lore goes deep) who crashes his ship onto the planet where the Pikmin inhabit. Since Oilmar's ship is out of work, he befriends the Pikmin and uses them to collect the missing pieces of his ship on the planet to make sure he has all the pieces, or else in 30 days, the oxygen in his space helmet will run out, and he will die. You have limited time each day you play Pikmin, each day matters, and it's best to use each day to its best by either getting a missing piece of the ship or harvesting some more Pikmin. In Pikmin 1, there are only 3 types of Pikmin, Red Pikmin, Blue Pikmin, and Yellow Pikmin.

Red Pikmin are the first ones you get in the game and can withstand flames and anything similar to heat, Blue Pikmin can be brought underwater while the other ones melt to death, and Yellow Pikmin can withstand electricity. Compared to Pikmin 2, and the later games, this is quite basic, but as the first game in the series, it works and works perfectly for newcomers. This is the perfect entry point for me, I was able to understand the 3 basic Pikmin types perfectly, and going into Pikmin 2 after this game felt like a smooth transition. Pikmin isn't a game you play for a story, it's all about gameplay, and the gameplay is so satisfying. Compared to Pikmin 2, it's quite basic since this was the first game, but I still had a fun time with it. It was fun to explore the little planet with the Pikmin and explore to find treasure.

I found myself caring for the Pikmin I had around me, I felt like a guardian protecting its little ones, and whenever I lost one of them to an enemy, I made sure me and my children got sweet revenge by killing it and harvet its body to create more Pikmin. Surprisingly kinda dark for a Nintendo game. (insert Spongebob roller coaster meme here) To be honest, I don't have a lot to say here, because most of my praises are for Pikmin 2, but what I will say is that one of my issues with Pikmin 1, was that I felt that the Pikmin could just ignore you sometimes. Sometimes I threw a Pikmin at an enemy just for the Pikmin to walk around blind like they Stevie Wonder, but also another issue was that compared to Pikmin 2, there's not a lot of replay value. Of course, you can try to speed-run it, but everything after Pikmin 1 just does a better job. Overall, Pikmin 1 was a nice change of pace from what else I was playing this year. I believe this was the first RTS I ever played, and I loved it.

Stats:
Played on Nintendo Switch
Hours into Game: 10 hours
Score: 8/10 (4/5)
Last Statement: Red Pikmin best pikmin