This review contains spoilers
After playing this one I went back to my score on Pikmin 1 and raised it from a 7/10 to an 8/10. Looking back on it, the annoyances I had with the controls and the AI in that game feel very minor in comparison to everything that it does right. Many of the issues present in Pikmin 4 honestly helped me to better appreciate just how little the original game got wrong in comparison.
The funny thing is, despite the issues I have with Pikmin 4 I'd still consider it to be my second favorite in the franchise (though this may admittedly be recency bias). The core gameplay loop is still as fun as its always been, and the game boasts much more content than any of the previous three games. It reincorporates and improves upon ideas from Pikmin 2 in particular, removing a lot of the aspects of Pikmin 2 that made that game annoying.
My biggest gripe with Pikmin 4 is that it butchers atmosphere and mood like none of the games have ever done. While 2 and 3 never quite reached the heights of 1 in my opinion, the atmosphere in those games works well for each respective game. Pikmin 2 leaned into more comedic elements which works well for that game, and Pikmin 3 had a unique blend of 1's seriousness and 2's humor. I couldn't really tell you what's going on in Pikmin 4 however. The best way I can describe it is that Pikmin 4 feels less like a Pikmin game and more like a Nintendo game; it felt less like I was exploring an alien planet, and more like I was playing a video game. It felt nearly impossible to get immersed in the world of Pikmin 4 in the same way I did in the previous games.
You can feel the Nintendo-ification of Pikmin 4 from the very start of the game, with its overly long tutorial that goes for way too long. And while the previous games also had decently long tutorial sections, at least in those two it felt like you were actually playing a game since you gain access to pikmin pretty much immediately. In Pikmin 4, after the initial section with Olimar, too much time is spent in the tutorial listening to boring characters talk while you learn all the intricacies of controlling your new pet partner Oatchi instead of playing with pikmin. Funnily enough, this emphasis on Oatchi in the tutorial feels like unintentional foreshadowing to how combat plays out in the rest of the game.
Those boring characters don't stop talking once the tutorial is done however, and the way they force themselves into the game right up to the very end contributes a lot to how wrong the atmosphere is in this game compared to the others. All of your rescue crew feels the need to comment on everything you do throughout the game with annoying pop-up reminders to use your survey drone and not-so-subtle suggestions to use their new rewind time feature whenever more than 3 pikmin die in a fight. In Pikmin 2 the tutorial messages that come up throughout the game are very infrequent compared to 4. The Hocotate ship would only interrupt you once the first time something unique happens and never again. It also helps that the Hocotate ship is intentionally written to be a bit of a snarky asshole, so being annoyed by the ship feels like the intended emotional response the developers were going for, while still being able to provide tutorial information. In Pikmin 3, the pop up messages are much more infrequent and are less egregious due to how the characters talking are actually present in the situations they are talking about. To me, that is the key difference that makes Pikmin 4's characters so insufferable. They constantly backseat you with information that you already know without ever actually being present in the gameplay, with the keyword being backseating. It feels like playing with a little sibling sitting with you that comments on every little thing you should be doing instead, like when a Twitch streamer gets annoyed at their chat for complaining about the way they're playing their game. The annoyingly talkative cast of the game is only emphasized by the fact that our protagonist is of the silent variety. There's no back and forth between our character and the other characters, no relationship, no personality; when Russ reminds you to use the night radar to track creatures for the sixth time in a row, it's made all the more annoying and condescending since he's talking to you, the player, and not the character you are controlling.
My annoyances with the characters are indicative of a larger issue that affects both Pikmin 4 and Nintendo games as a whole. It's obvious that the only reason the characters talk the way they do is for the kids. I'm sure that everyone who has played and enjoyed Nintendo games is aware of the trend of modern Nintendo games being needlessly handholdy and baby-proofed. Pikmin 4 is no exception to this trend. There's the aforementioned tutorialization of the entire game via the NPCs, the addition of purchasable single-use items to make combat easier, the awkward auto-lock on, how the game stops you from throwing more than the minimum number of pikmin to carry something, how Oatchi's rush trivializes all combat encounters. All of these examples only serve to emphasize this idea of excessive accessibility. I understand that Nintendo is trying to appeal to a broader audience with these changes but that doesn't make me any less disappointed and annoyed by these changes.
Anyway, since I've kind of gone over my main point/issue with Pikmin 4, here's some scattered thoughts/criticisms/praises organized similarly to my other Pikmin reviews:
- The dandori challenges/battles being integrated into the overworld were interesting. These gamemodes were relegated to side content in previous games but they added a lot (mission mode in Pikmin 3 in particular raised my opinion of that game quite a bit actually). As fun as they are, they felt a bit out of place and broke immersion for me.
- Related to the above, there's a weird disconnect between the lack of any time limit and the game's insistence on the importance of dandori. I don't consider the lack of time limit to be a massive issue in Pikmin 2 because I see it as a shift from strategy to combat/exploration, but now Pikmin 4 is insisting that strategy is a big deal in the game when the lack of a time limit suggests otherwise. The only times when dandori actually matters are during the dandori challenges/battles, and Olimar's tale (which I found to be very fun).
- While combat was boringly easy throughout, there were some surprisingly difficult and fun dandori challenges. Nothing vastly crazier than some of the harder missions in Pikmin 3 but overall the dandori challenges themselves were fun and well designed.
- The night missions always felt so one dimensional, they're kinda neat the first couple of times but they lack the depth to be consistently enjoyable. Every single night mission played out the exact same way: throw glow pikmin and piles of star bits, station your captain and dog next to lumiknolls, and hold X to win. They always felt like an obligatory interruption to the main game that I actually wanted to play.
- Lots of new mechanics in this game feel so videogamey in a way I don't like, my immersion is constantly broken by reminders that I am playing a capital V video game. Was anyone asking for sidequests in Pikmin? Why are upgrades bought with currency? Bosses dropping unique upgrades in Pikmin 2 was a lot of fun in that game because you always had something to look forward to at the end of a cave (even if the upgrade wasn't the craziest thing). Even the main goals are tied to quests that play a fanfare and check a box whenever you complete them.
- Caves were cool in Pikmin 2 because they were gauntlet-style endurance tests where if you lose pikmin, you can't just sprout more of them. In Pikmin 4, abandoning a cave doesn't forfeit treasures gained during the expedition, and when you return to a cave you can select any previously explored sublevel to immediately go to, which kinda makes what caves mechanically interesting in Pikmin 2 kinda moot. I guess the only reason for caves to exist now is to provide the player with smaller-scale challenges and areas to explore sequentially.
- In the previous point I suggest that caves mechanically don't add anything to the game since you can now theoretically just leave and come back with more pikmin if you lose any. However due to the rewind feature you would never actually do that if you lost a lot of pikmin.
- In the previous point I suggest that if you lost a lot of pikmin you could use the rewind feature. However, Oatchi dumbs down combat to the point where its unlikely you'll ever lose enough pikmin to feel the need to use the feature.
- From what I can tell caves are no longer randomized. I don't think randomization added that much intrigue to the caves in Pikmin 2, so the lack of randomization means that some caves have some unique puzzles that span the entire subfloor rather than puzzles just being localized in a single room like in 2.
- However lack of randomization didn't really add a lot either. Half the cave layouts feel like they were generated by a computer regardless, and only a few puzzles in the caves actually felt particularly interesting. Similarly to Pikmin 2, the longer I spent playing the caves the more boring they got since there were less and less unique enemies and concepts they could introduce to me.
- I'm not a professional game designer by any means, but the more I think about it the more I like the idea of making it so that Oatchi can't go in caves. Obviously the design of some sublevels would have to be modified, but it would make caves and the enemy/boss encounters inside of them feel more unique, and dangerous.
- Oatchi is pretty cool conceptually. He acts as an additional captain enabling more dandori options and multitasking with the additional gimmick that he can also help pikmin out with tasks. The only major flaw with him is just that he can carry any number of pikmin on his back, which just kills the risk/reward dynamic of bringing a large group of pikmin to a combat encounter. With Oatchi, it's all reward, no risk.
- Having all the pikmin types available was kinda cool but so many of them feel so underutilized that it feels like they did it more as a fanservice thing than anything else.
- They did the lineup trumpet kinda dirty with how late in the game is shows up. It kinda felt like another fanservice addition that wasn't actually thought out. The charge whistle is so overpowered that the lineup whistle is made irrelevant far far before you can unlock it.
- The idler's alert is crazy. It's dumb for all the reasons that the "Assemble All" command in 3 deluxe is dumb (which also returns in the form of a purchasable upgrade). I felt that all the dandori challenges I underperformed on was due to me not abusing it enough.
- Kinda related, it feels like dandori challenges/battles maybe should have had a set amount of upgrades that would always be the same, since many upgrades make the challenges objectively easier, meaning that winning/losing is affected by factors other than dandori.
- The first time I saw a giant yellow wollywog in the trailer I thought it was pretty funny, and then it was the final boss of a cave and I was like "huh, really?". And then more and more "new" enemies were just normal enemies that got scaled up, and I just got more annoyed the more it happened. Sure, some of them had slightly different movesets but it just felt so lazy. How many of the new enemies added are actually new, and how many are slight variants on old enemies?
- Am I the only one who feels like pikmin AI got worse from 3 to 4? There are a few caves where the game wants you to drop down from a higher ledge to a lower one while dismounted from Oatchi, and I swear every time this happened at least five pikmin would just jump into the void for fun and die.
- Winged pikmin also definitely got more stupid and refuse to take obvious shortcuts through the air. In any use case where they weren't strictly required I would prefer to use white pikmin to quickly transport objects.
- When throwing pikmin onto an object to get them to pick it up there were so many cases when one pikmin couldn't quite run to the exact pixel the game wanted (due to the object being too close to a wall/enemy corpse) and thus the pikmin would eventually refuse to help pick the object up. This wasn't an issue in older games since you could throw more pikmin than required onto an object to subvert this issue, while this game just really really hates whenever you try to do that. Just felt really janky considering this is the newest entry in the series.
- The game hands out ultra-spicy spray like candy. I had like 33 spare by the time I got to the final boss, and pretty much never had my pikmin farm burgeoning spiderworts. Just got them naturally from eggs and popping frozen enemy pinatas.
- Final boss was simultaneously cool and disappointing at the same time. For what I thought was cool, it was one of the only interesting fights in the entire game since it felt like one of the only ones designed with the existence of Oatchi in mind. So many difficult bosses returned from previous games just to be trivialized by all 100 of your pikmin being bundled up on this dog rather than trailing behind you. This one was a nice change of pace, and felt much less cheesable than some of the final bosses in the previous games.
- On the other hand, it thematically felt very lame. Since the "gimmick" of Pikmin 4 is that there's a dog, the final boss must be a dog but evil I guess. I had a lot of high expectations due to the way things were being set up at the start. The introduction section with Olimar and the pikmin behaving abnormally when entering the house honestly filled me with a lot of intrigue. I was wondering what kind of cool, otherworldly force of nature we were dealing with in this game, perhaps akin to the wraiths/the smoky progg from the previous games. When the answer is revealed, turns out it was just some gold salamander miniboss that the player likely has already fought in the same area, and I felt a little let down as I thought the answer would be related to the final boss. I maybe hyped myself up a bit too much but I couldn't help but be disappointed by the final boss just being a big scary dog. Perhaps I wouldn't have felt this way if this game had introduced it's own unique otherworldly creature like the other games (Smoky Progg, Water Wraith, Plasm Wraith).
- On the other other hand Groovy Long Legs is maybe the best boss in any video game ever.
Anyways I've already written a lot already. This game is massive so there's definitely some stuff I forgot to mention that I wanted to talk about but whatever. Despite all of my criticisms I enjoyed the game a lot, the core gameplay loop is so unique and fun that all the complaints I have are pretty petty in comparison. With that being said I can't say I necessarily agree with all the 10/10, 5 star reviews I'm seeing here. 10 years from now, when Pikmin 5 is about to release, I feel like people are going to shit on this one the same way people were shitting on Pikmin 3 just before the launch of 4. I can't help but feel that fans would've been happy with anything that wasn't Hey Pikmin, and all the high ratings really deny the fact that there was a lot of room for improvement in this game. At the end of the day I really loved this game, but everything I loved about it was stuff borrowed from previous entries in the series, while almost everything new that this game introduced fell short of expectations.
The funny thing is, despite the issues I have with Pikmin 4 I'd still consider it to be my second favorite in the franchise (though this may admittedly be recency bias). The core gameplay loop is still as fun as its always been, and the game boasts much more content than any of the previous three games. It reincorporates and improves upon ideas from Pikmin 2 in particular, removing a lot of the aspects of Pikmin 2 that made that game annoying.
My biggest gripe with Pikmin 4 is that it butchers atmosphere and mood like none of the games have ever done. While 2 and 3 never quite reached the heights of 1 in my opinion, the atmosphere in those games works well for each respective game. Pikmin 2 leaned into more comedic elements which works well for that game, and Pikmin 3 had a unique blend of 1's seriousness and 2's humor. I couldn't really tell you what's going on in Pikmin 4 however. The best way I can describe it is that Pikmin 4 feels less like a Pikmin game and more like a Nintendo game; it felt less like I was exploring an alien planet, and more like I was playing a video game. It felt nearly impossible to get immersed in the world of Pikmin 4 in the same way I did in the previous games.
You can feel the Nintendo-ification of Pikmin 4 from the very start of the game, with its overly long tutorial that goes for way too long. And while the previous games also had decently long tutorial sections, at least in those two it felt like you were actually playing a game since you gain access to pikmin pretty much immediately. In Pikmin 4, after the initial section with Olimar, too much time is spent in the tutorial listening to boring characters talk while you learn all the intricacies of controlling your new pet partner Oatchi instead of playing with pikmin. Funnily enough, this emphasis on Oatchi in the tutorial feels like unintentional foreshadowing to how combat plays out in the rest of the game.
Those boring characters don't stop talking once the tutorial is done however, and the way they force themselves into the game right up to the very end contributes a lot to how wrong the atmosphere is in this game compared to the others. All of your rescue crew feels the need to comment on everything you do throughout the game with annoying pop-up reminders to use your survey drone and not-so-subtle suggestions to use their new rewind time feature whenever more than 3 pikmin die in a fight. In Pikmin 2 the tutorial messages that come up throughout the game are very infrequent compared to 4. The Hocotate ship would only interrupt you once the first time something unique happens and never again. It also helps that the Hocotate ship is intentionally written to be a bit of a snarky asshole, so being annoyed by the ship feels like the intended emotional response the developers were going for, while still being able to provide tutorial information. In Pikmin 3, the pop up messages are much more infrequent and are less egregious due to how the characters talking are actually present in the situations they are talking about. To me, that is the key difference that makes Pikmin 4's characters so insufferable. They constantly backseat you with information that you already know without ever actually being present in the gameplay, with the keyword being backseating. It feels like playing with a little sibling sitting with you that comments on every little thing you should be doing instead, like when a Twitch streamer gets annoyed at their chat for complaining about the way they're playing their game. The annoyingly talkative cast of the game is only emphasized by the fact that our protagonist is of the silent variety. There's no back and forth between our character and the other characters, no relationship, no personality; when Russ reminds you to use the night radar to track creatures for the sixth time in a row, it's made all the more annoying and condescending since he's talking to you, the player, and not the character you are controlling.
My annoyances with the characters are indicative of a larger issue that affects both Pikmin 4 and Nintendo games as a whole. It's obvious that the only reason the characters talk the way they do is for the kids. I'm sure that everyone who has played and enjoyed Nintendo games is aware of the trend of modern Nintendo games being needlessly handholdy and baby-proofed. Pikmin 4 is no exception to this trend. There's the aforementioned tutorialization of the entire game via the NPCs, the addition of purchasable single-use items to make combat easier, the awkward auto-lock on, how the game stops you from throwing more than the minimum number of pikmin to carry something, how Oatchi's rush trivializes all combat encounters. All of these examples only serve to emphasize this idea of excessive accessibility. I understand that Nintendo is trying to appeal to a broader audience with these changes but that doesn't make me any less disappointed and annoyed by these changes.
Anyway, since I've kind of gone over my main point/issue with Pikmin 4, here's some scattered thoughts/criticisms/praises organized similarly to my other Pikmin reviews:
- The dandori challenges/battles being integrated into the overworld were interesting. These gamemodes were relegated to side content in previous games but they added a lot (mission mode in Pikmin 3 in particular raised my opinion of that game quite a bit actually). As fun as they are, they felt a bit out of place and broke immersion for me.
- Related to the above, there's a weird disconnect between the lack of any time limit and the game's insistence on the importance of dandori. I don't consider the lack of time limit to be a massive issue in Pikmin 2 because I see it as a shift from strategy to combat/exploration, but now Pikmin 4 is insisting that strategy is a big deal in the game when the lack of a time limit suggests otherwise. The only times when dandori actually matters are during the dandori challenges/battles, and Olimar's tale (which I found to be very fun).
- While combat was boringly easy throughout, there were some surprisingly difficult and fun dandori challenges. Nothing vastly crazier than some of the harder missions in Pikmin 3 but overall the dandori challenges themselves were fun and well designed.
- The night missions always felt so one dimensional, they're kinda neat the first couple of times but they lack the depth to be consistently enjoyable. Every single night mission played out the exact same way: throw glow pikmin and piles of star bits, station your captain and dog next to lumiknolls, and hold X to win. They always felt like an obligatory interruption to the main game that I actually wanted to play.
- Lots of new mechanics in this game feel so videogamey in a way I don't like, my immersion is constantly broken by reminders that I am playing a capital V video game. Was anyone asking for sidequests in Pikmin? Why are upgrades bought with currency? Bosses dropping unique upgrades in Pikmin 2 was a lot of fun in that game because you always had something to look forward to at the end of a cave (even if the upgrade wasn't the craziest thing). Even the main goals are tied to quests that play a fanfare and check a box whenever you complete them.
- Caves were cool in Pikmin 2 because they were gauntlet-style endurance tests where if you lose pikmin, you can't just sprout more of them. In Pikmin 4, abandoning a cave doesn't forfeit treasures gained during the expedition, and when you return to a cave you can select any previously explored sublevel to immediately go to, which kinda makes what caves mechanically interesting in Pikmin 2 kinda moot. I guess the only reason for caves to exist now is to provide the player with smaller-scale challenges and areas to explore sequentially.
- In the previous point I suggest that caves mechanically don't add anything to the game since you can now theoretically just leave and come back with more pikmin if you lose any. However due to the rewind feature you would never actually do that if you lost a lot of pikmin.
- In the previous point I suggest that if you lost a lot of pikmin you could use the rewind feature. However, Oatchi dumbs down combat to the point where its unlikely you'll ever lose enough pikmin to feel the need to use the feature.
- From what I can tell caves are no longer randomized. I don't think randomization added that much intrigue to the caves in Pikmin 2, so the lack of randomization means that some caves have some unique puzzles that span the entire subfloor rather than puzzles just being localized in a single room like in 2.
- However lack of randomization didn't really add a lot either. Half the cave layouts feel like they were generated by a computer regardless, and only a few puzzles in the caves actually felt particularly interesting. Similarly to Pikmin 2, the longer I spent playing the caves the more boring they got since there were less and less unique enemies and concepts they could introduce to me.
- I'm not a professional game designer by any means, but the more I think about it the more I like the idea of making it so that Oatchi can't go in caves. Obviously the design of some sublevels would have to be modified, but it would make caves and the enemy/boss encounters inside of them feel more unique, and dangerous.
- Oatchi is pretty cool conceptually. He acts as an additional captain enabling more dandori options and multitasking with the additional gimmick that he can also help pikmin out with tasks. The only major flaw with him is just that he can carry any number of pikmin on his back, which just kills the risk/reward dynamic of bringing a large group of pikmin to a combat encounter. With Oatchi, it's all reward, no risk.
- Having all the pikmin types available was kinda cool but so many of them feel so underutilized that it feels like they did it more as a fanservice thing than anything else.
- They did the lineup trumpet kinda dirty with how late in the game is shows up. It kinda felt like another fanservice addition that wasn't actually thought out. The charge whistle is so overpowered that the lineup whistle is made irrelevant far far before you can unlock it.
- The idler's alert is crazy. It's dumb for all the reasons that the "Assemble All" command in 3 deluxe is dumb (which also returns in the form of a purchasable upgrade). I felt that all the dandori challenges I underperformed on was due to me not abusing it enough.
- Kinda related, it feels like dandori challenges/battles maybe should have had a set amount of upgrades that would always be the same, since many upgrades make the challenges objectively easier, meaning that winning/losing is affected by factors other than dandori.
- The first time I saw a giant yellow wollywog in the trailer I thought it was pretty funny, and then it was the final boss of a cave and I was like "huh, really?". And then more and more "new" enemies were just normal enemies that got scaled up, and I just got more annoyed the more it happened. Sure, some of them had slightly different movesets but it just felt so lazy. How many of the new enemies added are actually new, and how many are slight variants on old enemies?
- Am I the only one who feels like pikmin AI got worse from 3 to 4? There are a few caves where the game wants you to drop down from a higher ledge to a lower one while dismounted from Oatchi, and I swear every time this happened at least five pikmin would just jump into the void for fun and die.
- Winged pikmin also definitely got more stupid and refuse to take obvious shortcuts through the air. In any use case where they weren't strictly required I would prefer to use white pikmin to quickly transport objects.
- When throwing pikmin onto an object to get them to pick it up there were so many cases when one pikmin couldn't quite run to the exact pixel the game wanted (due to the object being too close to a wall/enemy corpse) and thus the pikmin would eventually refuse to help pick the object up. This wasn't an issue in older games since you could throw more pikmin than required onto an object to subvert this issue, while this game just really really hates whenever you try to do that. Just felt really janky considering this is the newest entry in the series.
- The game hands out ultra-spicy spray like candy. I had like 33 spare by the time I got to the final boss, and pretty much never had my pikmin farm burgeoning spiderworts. Just got them naturally from eggs and popping frozen enemy pinatas.
- Final boss was simultaneously cool and disappointing at the same time. For what I thought was cool, it was one of the only interesting fights in the entire game since it felt like one of the only ones designed with the existence of Oatchi in mind. So many difficult bosses returned from previous games just to be trivialized by all 100 of your pikmin being bundled up on this dog rather than trailing behind you. This one was a nice change of pace, and felt much less cheesable than some of the final bosses in the previous games.
- On the other hand, it thematically felt very lame. Since the "gimmick" of Pikmin 4 is that there's a dog, the final boss must be a dog but evil I guess. I had a lot of high expectations due to the way things were being set up at the start. The introduction section with Olimar and the pikmin behaving abnormally when entering the house honestly filled me with a lot of intrigue. I was wondering what kind of cool, otherworldly force of nature we were dealing with in this game, perhaps akin to the wraiths/the smoky progg from the previous games. When the answer is revealed, turns out it was just some gold salamander miniboss that the player likely has already fought in the same area, and I felt a little let down as I thought the answer would be related to the final boss. I maybe hyped myself up a bit too much but I couldn't help but be disappointed by the final boss just being a big scary dog. Perhaps I wouldn't have felt this way if this game had introduced it's own unique otherworldly creature like the other games (Smoky Progg, Water Wraith, Plasm Wraith).
- On the other other hand Groovy Long Legs is maybe the best boss in any video game ever.
Anyways I've already written a lot already. This game is massive so there's definitely some stuff I forgot to mention that I wanted to talk about but whatever. Despite all of my criticisms I enjoyed the game a lot, the core gameplay loop is so unique and fun that all the complaints I have are pretty petty in comparison. With that being said I can't say I necessarily agree with all the 10/10, 5 star reviews I'm seeing here. 10 years from now, when Pikmin 5 is about to release, I feel like people are going to shit on this one the same way people were shitting on Pikmin 3 just before the launch of 4. I can't help but feel that fans would've been happy with anything that wasn't Hey Pikmin, and all the high ratings really deny the fact that there was a lot of room for improvement in this game. At the end of the day I really loved this game, but everything I loved about it was stuff borrowed from previous entries in the series, while almost everything new that this game introduced fell short of expectations.
MOONTRIPS
9 months ago