The more you play Pikmin 4, the more you recognize the sheer amount of effort that went into it. It’s clear Nintendo put a lot of work into making a great Pikmin game that’s filled with throwbacks for old fans, while also being welcoming and appealing to newcomers of the series as well. The game is filled to the brim with a surprisingly enormous amount of content, and I think that alone is worth four stars at minimum. If this is your first Pikmin game, I’m sure it’ll be quite difficult to find any faults with it. As a Pikmin veteran, I greatly enjoyed my time with it, even if I’m left with some slightly mixed feelings. Overall, Pikmin 4 is a tremendous achievement of a game, and despite my few nitpicks with it, it’s hard to argue against it being best game in the franchise.

The core gameplay of Pikmin 4 remains as fun and addicting as ever, however, the game does introduce a number of quality of life changes that really streamlines things to make it simpler compared to the previous games. This is one of the elements that makes Pikmin 4 feel rather easy as a Pikmin veteran. It’s not quite as insultingly easy as Pikmin 3 Deluxe’s “Normal” difficulty, but if you’re a veteran, Pikmin 4 won’t really offer much of a challenge for a large chunk of its run time.

One of the biggest changes to the gameplay is the addition of the rescue dog Oatchi. Oatchi takes the role of the additional captain in this game. It can function not only as a playable character that can control and throw Pikmin, but it also has many additional abilities that your playable captain doesn’t have. In fact, Oatchi has a very extensive list of abilities, and I’m not sure if he really needs them all. He can swim, carry 100 Pikmin on his back, attack enemies and carry objects. You can also upgrade Oatchi as well as your captain. This will make your abilities and resistances even stronger, which can potentially reduce the challenge of the game even further. Personally, I ended up not getting a large amount of the upgrades out of fear that I’d make the game way too easy for myself, and that was definitely the right decision. Pikmin 4 is easy enough as is, and completely eradicating the challenge would also eradicate the fun as well.

Another big gameplay change that really streamlines things is the auto lock-on that snaps onto objects within your vicinity. It generally functions quite well, and while it can be convenient, I personally think that it removes an element of strategy to the game. There’s also no option to turn it off either. Furthermore, when the game does start to get more difficult, the auto-lock can be a detriment, as it’s difficult to force it to lock onto something specific if there are a lot of objects to target in an area, especially in a small or enclosed one. It’ll often lock onto an object you don’t want it to while you’re trying to target an enemy, and this can lead to frustrating instances of lost Pikmin.

Exploration remains as great as ever in Pikmin 4. You travel to all new locations that are amazingly well-crafted as well as immensely satisfying to search through and clear of enemies and obstacles. The areas are a lot more unique I feel, compared to the areas in the previous Pikmin games. You visit locations that you’ve never really experienced before, and I’m glad they’re leaning even more towards the post-apocalyptic earth angle as far as the setting goes.

Caves make their return from Pikmin 2, after skipping 3. I enjoyed a lot of the caves from Pikmin 2 and I loved them as a concept, but the terrible layouts caused by the random generation, as well as the length of the late game caves made them increasingly egregious. 4’s caves are much shorter and far less taxing to explore and traverse. They also aren’t randomly generated, and have layouts that actually make sense. You’re given a sufficient amount of breathing room to prepare for each sublevel of a cave, but at the same time, caves don’t really offer that much in unique challenges. This leads me to my next criticism. Light spoiler warning, so skip the following paragraph if you haven’t finished/gotten very far in the game.

Pikmin 4 reuses a lot of concepts and content from the previous Pikmin games. The caves are the biggest offender here. Many of the same concepts of the most famous caves from Pikmin 2 are reused, and while the layouts of these caves aren’t completely the same, the aesthetics, gimmicks, music and bosses of those caves are. While they could be seen as fun little throwbacks, as a result, the caves are rather lacking in terms of surprise, and it’s quite disappointing. Outside of the caves, a lot of bosses from the first Pikmin game return as well. There aren’t really many new and unique enemies or bosses in this game in general, and it’s probably my biggest point of criticism with it. While on the one hand, it makes me happy to see enemies/bosses that haven’t appeared in nearly two decades make a return, on the other hand, I already know how to deal with them, and that means there’s no sense of discovery or opportunity to develop a strategy when battling them. They go down in the exact same fashion as they did in the previous games. Coming up with a strategy to defeat a bizarre, terrifying, and unfamiliar creature is one of the most fun elements of Pikmin, and if you’re a veteran, you’re robbed of the opportunity to do that for the vast majority of enemies in the game.

Pikmin 4 offers a multitude of additional modes to play through as well, like the Dandori Challenges/Battles as well as the Night Expeditions. The Dandori Challenges are great, and I loved being tested on my ability to quickly and skillfully manage my Pikmin. The Dandori Battles were… okay, but sometimes they could be frustrating. For some reason, these battles are split screen, even though there’s no reason for them to be since you’re battling a CPU opponent. This impedes your visibility for no real reason. Furthermore, I’ve encountered numerous bugs during this mode as well, such as the Pikmin or Oatchi not responding to my commands or whistling. Rarely did I lose because of these bugs, but it did happen a couple of times in the late game Dandori Battles and it was quite frustrating when it happened. The Night Expeditions are fine. Admittedly I didn’t play them very much, and I wasn’t super impressed with the few that I did play, although the early ones might just be lackluster since they haven’t gotten difficult yet.

Despite my feelings as a Pikmin veteran, I did have a very fun time with this game. While I don’t think my first playthrough of this holds up to my first playthrough of Pikmin 2, I think that Pikmin 4 will end up standing the test of time for me much better. The sheer amount of content it has to offer in addition to how well it’s all tied together makes this the ideal Pikmin for both veterans and newcomers. It might be a little on the easy side as someone who’s played the other games, but it’s still an absolutely spectacular experience that I really hope breathes new life into the franchise and finally gives it the exposure it deserves.