the ridiculously sluggish and hand-holdy tutorial made me so nervous that i would hate this game. thankfully it was another 10/10. probably the best one so far. i can't wait for Pikmin 5 to come out in 25 years...

extremely specific nitpicks:
- whoever did the treasure names this time around completely failed to emulate the style of the Pikmin 2 treasure names. Pikmin 2 would NEVER have named a tiny plastic sword "Bright Sword". way too literal. it would be called something like "Imitation Branch". someone needs to make a mod that changes the treasure names to be more Pikmin 2-y
- this is a problem Pikmin 3 had too: the production value on the music is too high. Pikmin 1 and 2's OSTs had a distinctive quirky and weird sound that has evidently been abandoned. bring it back!
- some characters' stories are essentially left unexplained. again. again. this time, it really starts to come off as lazy writing. the main story would have been much more cohesive with even like 1% more effort in this area
- text moves too slowly, especially compared to Pikmin 2 which was super mashable and friendly to speed readers