Pikmin 4 was just announced. I don’t go onto Twitter often, but as I’m currently applying for jobs, I logged in to chat with a talent agent. I happened to see Arlo trending, so I clicked in to see that this announcement had happened 2 minutes earlier.
For those unaware of Pikmin, it is a game series where you are a little guy who leads a group of even smaller alien-plant people to collect things. If that sounds like an absurd premise, you’d be right, and yet it is one of my favourite game series.
A Piece of Promotional Art of Pikmin 1
There isn’t anything quite like Pikmin, so I’ll do my best to talk about the games here, but they are best understood by playing the games yourself.
The original Pikmin is about Captain Olimar from the planet Hocotate. He crash lands on a planet – likely earth – and has to repair his ship by finding 30 pieces of it in 30 days. If he cannot, he will suffocate from the deadly oxygen atmosphere. While looking for these pieces, he finds the titular Pikmin, small humanoids of varying shapes and colours. They begin following him and assisting in his work around the planet. He doesn’t force – or even ask – them to follow him, they just think he’s neat. The Pikmin return to their onion (the onion is their home/ship) come nightfall, and both they and the Player-character go into orbit for the night.
The following two games aren’t very different, and they tend to only add to the formula instead of subtracting. The second game has a second character you can play as, and adds new Pikmin and mechanics, like unlimited days and dungeon-like caves; The third adds even more Pikmin and changes how the day limit works. I’m sure Pikmin 4 will follow this trend as well, given the series’ current track record. You also don’t need to play the whole series, you can just play any one game and understand everything. Kind of like the SoulsBorne series if you will.
Some Yellow and Rock Pikmin
The basic gameplay loop of each game tends to look something like this: Call Pikmin out from the Onion; Explore the surrounding area; Kill enemies/Find parts and take them back to the onion(s)/ship; Repeat until Sunset. The Pikmin do all the heavy lifting, but you need numbers to make this happen. You can have up to 100 Pikmin on the field at once, and even more in the onion. There are a couple of ways to propagate your Pikmin. Either you can collect numbered flower pellets that create the number of Pikmin indicated on the pellet, or you can kill enemies and put them in the onion(s). In the first game, you have Red, Yellow, and Blue Pikmin, each with individual strengths and weaknesses. For example, Yellow Pikmin can pick up things, are immune to electricity, and can be thrown further than others, and Blue Pikmin don’t drown in water, but aren’t as strong as Red Pikmin, which deal more damage to enemies and are immune to Fire. They introduce new types in each game, and none have been left behind to any permanent degree in games so far.
The SS Dolphin after wrecking on earth
If you haven’t yet, I highly recommend you play the first couple of games, or all of them if you enjoy the first ones. Pikmin 1 and 2 are iconic, and 3 is good but doesn’t quite hit the same. My personal favourite is Pikmin 2. There is so much to do, and the difficulty scale can go up pretty high if you fully engage in all it offers. If you don’t have a GameCube, they are easy enough to emulate with a rom and a DS4 controller, so no worries there. Go experience the strange magic that makes up Pikmin, and enjoy Pikmin 4 when it arrives!
Watch the Trailer here!
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