First time playing through Pikmin. I have been meaning to for years but stuff always came up or gotten in the way of me actually doing it. My earliest real memories of the series is Pikmin stuff being in Brawl (although I do remember watching the trailer on Luigis Mansion). With the stage that was included with Brawl, I was convinced for some reason that I had played “that game” before, when I was younger. But. I was actually confusing Pikmin with Zapper, another bug like Gamecube game (probably cashing in on the ascetic the same way that Shark Tale did to Finding Nemo (Except WAY more niche and less lucrative)). I played alot of Pikmin Bloom prior to this and have the entire series, I just wanted to play them in chronological order. Going into it I was kind of nervous. I didnt fully understand how the game works and when a game has a time limit, it makes everything 10 times more stressfull to learn fast. I kind of had the impression that the game would be like Majora’s Mask but on crack, where if I make too many mistakes, I basically would have to start an 8 hour run all over again after getting the bad ending. I played the first few game days like this, only realizing at about game 7 after a horrible day that I dont HAVE to save my progress. This made me feel like I had a huge weight off my shoulders and felt like I could take my time more and actually think. I would sometimes do scouting days where I would just spend an entire day when at a new area just looking around and forming a battle plan. I then became obsesive for the next few game days, going for perfection because I was way behind on parts from my bad first 7 days and was trying to master things to get at least 2 parts a day for a while. I liked playing lik this because I found myself while the game was off, or I was at work, thinking about the game and what I can and would do to optimize a route to get as much as possible. I think thr beauty of this game is definitely on repeat playthroughs. Its very fun and a great first time experience, but I think on repeated playthroughs, going for high scores, where you know where everything is and its just up to you to figure out how to do it most efficiently, thats where the meat of the game is. I ended with getting all parts at 21 days and my best day consisted of me getting 3 parts at once. Going to play Pikmin 2 in the near future.