Ever since the original Pikmin sprouted up out of nowhere on the GameCube, this oddball puzzle-strategy series has always held a special place in my heart – but when I played Pikmin 4, my heart grew two sizes that day. While the earliest hours started out slower than I would have liked, it reminded me of an onion – in the best kind of way – in that every layer I peeled back added more and more depth, eventually growing into the best version of the idea at the heart of it. Not all of it is as challenging as I’d have liked, but with twice as many enemy types and nearly four times the amount of hidden treasures I loved gathering in past games – along with its fantastic musical score, improved graphics, and next-level post-game content – I just couldn’t put it down until finishing everything it had to offer.
Right from the very start, there’s a series first: While previous games have starred fan-favorite heroes such as Olimar and Louie, Pikmin 4 allows you to customize your character’s hair, body type, and suit color. Though it’s not the most spectacular character creator next to something like Street Fighter 6, it’s a nice touch as your color choices apply to your ship and everybody in your space crew as well.
However, I spent far more time taking in the beautiful worlds of Pikmin 4 than checking out my own character. Pikmin 4 continues the series’ tradition of playing as an alien the size of an ant exploring an Earth-like planet that is probably actually Earth. Charmingly most of the treasures you end up collecting are named after their appearance, so “Space Spinners” and “the Stone of Advancement” are really just fidget spinners and a Game Boy Advance SP.
Everything from the soil on the ground to the foliage everywhere on the maps is vibrant, and each location feels distinct. A simple garden filled with (literally) larger-than-life insects and flowers that tower over you is filled with obstacles like a broken potted plant that blocks a passage and a puddle in the dirt that becomes a small lake. A sandy beach reveals new paths to navigate and enemies to battle after the tide recedes, and a house with multiple sets of stairs becomes mountainlike until you find a way to create ramps so your tiny followers can recover the treasures hidden inside.
Much of the fun and strategy of Pikmin games comes from collecting and commanding different types of obedient little plant creatures to do your bidding, and generally avoiding sending them to their doom. It’s not a full-on real-time strategy game like StarCraft, since there’s no base-building and outside of the newly added night missions you don’t have to worry about an enemy army attacking you back, but there’s always a lot happening on screen when you have dozens of these multicolored minions doing things like digging tunnels and carrying treasures and you’re literally hurling them into combat.
For those jumping into Pikmin for the first time, it can seem like a lot, especially with nine types of cutesy creatures to master, having to split your attention between multiple objectives, and learning to manage your resources. To its great credit, Pikmin 4 does a gentle job of rolling out new Pikmin, items, and abilities at a pace that won’t overwhelm with too many options too soon. Your first steps onto this world come with a large number of tutorials and explanations – though someone like myself, who has been playing Pikmin games for 22 years, may not be able to skip the dialogue fast enough because it rarely covers anything we don’t already know.
One of the most immediately noticeable differences between Pikmin 4 and its predecessors is that here there’s no limit to the number of days you have to finish the story like in the original, nor is there any threat of running out of supplies like in Pikmin 3, making it more of a casual rescue mission than a race against the clock. This decision is especially great for newcomers because it removes the pressure or worry of doing something wrong and being punished for the rest of your playthrough, but I enjoyed it too because it allowed me to tackle objectives in any order I liked and fulfill my inner need to see that 100% completion on each stage. It’s comparable to how Dead Rising removed its time limit in the fourth game in recognition of the fact that, more often than not, people play games to escape from the tension of impending deadlines that haunt us in school or work.
Even without a lot of time pressure, mistakes will still happen: maybe you’ll misjudge an enemy attack range and become frozen, allowing a nearby enemy to crush or devour your Pikmin before you can react, or maybe you’ll just accidentally chuck a few Pikmin off the map while you were trying to toss them at a piece of treasure hanging from a spiderweb to weight it down and break the web so you can bring it back to your ship. In previous games careless errors like these would’ve meant spending precious time replenishing Pikmin before you can progress, but in Pikmin 4 we get a handy feature that can bail you out: Until you finish the current day, you can choose to rewind and replay parts of a level to improve your efficiency. It’s effectively a method of quickly reloading a checkpoint save, and as a perfectionist at heart, I found myself taking advantage of this system constantly in order to maximize my efficiency or save my valuable purple and white Pikmin that are scarce early on. It makes much more sense to retry a section rather than spending a chunk of my time the next day replacing Pikmin I lost.
The ability to rewind extends right up to the end of your expedition, which is a huge relief – if you have played Pikmin before, you are aware of how stressful it can be when that 10-second warning appears, signaling the end of the day, while you still have 60+ Pikmin carrying multiple objects from different locations. In Pikmin 4, if you are unable to gather them all before nightfall it will tell you how many you stand to lose if you choose to continue, but ask if you would like to rewind time to one of the checkpoints to try again instead. This was a huge time-saver and kept me from having to replay entire levels when I’d only messed up the home stretch.
Among the many things to keep track of in Pikmin 4 is a wonderful new companion: the two-legged lil’ pup Oatchi. He can carry you and your entire army of Pikmin on his back across obstacles like water, sniff out hidden items, and grant you the ability to jump to help you reach shortcuts and items like never before. His upgradable abilities gave me another reason to seek out crew members lost on the planet, because the reward for finding them is ability points that let you increase everything from his ability to carry heavy objects to improving his dig speeds. Those upgrades all felt impactful, though some, like having him fetch Pikmin for me, became obsolete once I unlocked the ability to summon them myself with the press of a button.
Out of all of them, Oatchi’s charge attack became my favorite of his abilities. Higher levels give him the ability to stun enemies for longer periods, while at the same time sending my entire horde of Pikmin onto a target to dispatch them quickly. This proved to be one of the best strategies for combat, and with the exception of bosses, it usually took down most enemies in one move – if I had enough or the right types of Pikmin along for the ride.
That’s the real trick to Pikmin 4’s combat because the 110 unique enemies (including new elemental variants of returning creatures like Bulborbs and Dweevils) increase the need to adjust the composition of your army to counter them. For instance, if you try to battle a Fiery Bulblax with anything other than red Pikmin they’ll ignite and run off screaming to their doom, meanwhile the Horned Cannon Beetle kept its backside weak point hidden unless I tossed one of the larger Purple, Ice, or Rock Pikmin into its blowhole above its head. Discovering my Otachi strategy early was great because it allowed me to spend less time replacing Pikmin lost in combat and more time collecting the 239 treasures across the six locations and 22 cave sub-levels I explored. Though once I fully leveled Oatchi’s Rush ability, it never got old being able to charge through a line of enemies and see the souls of my enemies ascend into the sky.
Some of those sub-levels place you inside machine structures with conveyor belts, a kid’s room filled with structures made from wooden blocks, and a freezer filled with cold-emitting dry ice that will freeze most Pikmin in their tracks. Navigating these kinds of hazards never failed to put a smile on my face – though it’s a different kind of smile than the one that creeps in when I hear the cries of my loyal Pikmin that I sometimes tossed to their certain doom in order to reach my objective. There are also some very cool Easter eggs that I won’t spoil for you, other than to say you will definitely want to give a close look at the musical items.
Most boss battles are saved for the lower floors of the various cave sub-levels, and while there are plenty of returning faces here we also encounter a fun handful of new ones, like the Sovereign Bulblax and the Foolix, the latter of which is a clever evolution on the Goolix from the very first Pikmin. At first he caught me off guard (making me look like a fool, appropriately) thanks to its clever disguise as a drop of nectar. Considering all the new types of enemies with elemental properties and the fact that Pikmin 4 only lets you bring out three types of Pikmin at a time, I felt encouraged to plan out my strategy for the day accordingly. Rock Pikmin are a staple of mine, as their hardy core both deals high damage when flung at bosses and prevents them from being crushed under the weight of larger enemies like the Yellow Wollywog, but I’d often switch between ice, winged, and white Pikmin when I knew I’d need to counter threats like the airborne Lesser Spotted Jellyfloat or the toxic-based Moldy Slooch. Between those and Oatchi’s list of skills, the scales usually felt tipped in my favor.
You can control Oatchi directly, but I found him more helpful as Pikmin 4’s method of splitting up your party so you can tackle more objectives simultaneously. From the map screen you can give him commands to find treasures, lost team members, and specific Pikmin types while you take care of tasks on the other side of the map. This gave me more options in general: while exploring the Serene Shores level, I would send Oatchi and Blue Pikmin to locations only accessible to them. At the same time, I took an army of Yellow and Red Pikmin across the beach, defeating enemies and digging up buried treasure. Getting the hang of this multitasking is a necessity to earn the best rewards in some of the later challenges.
This leads me to a minor gripe about how co-op works in Pikmin 4. Unlike Pikmin 2 or 3, where a second player could take control of another character and the two of you could split up to help reduce the time it took to find everything on a stage, Pikmin 4 instead has your co-op partner play as a reticle floating around the screen that can throw pebbles to move objects or hit enemies as your character does his usual thing. I would consider it more of an assist mode, like what we saw in Super Mario Galaxy, rather than an actual co-op mode. That’s a bit of a letdown for anyone wanting to play through with a friend or significant other like we did in the previous games, but I imagine it will be great for allowing kids to help out a parent or older sibling – or vice versa.
As for the two new Pikmin types, the first you’ll encounter are ice Pikmin, and with them comes the ability to freeze bodies of water and enemies. They quickly became one of my favorites thanks to their freezing effect, which works in tandem with Oatchi’s stun and allows you to chain status effects on enemies big and small – instead of spending time defeating enemies, you can just freeze them for long enough to get in and out. They are also key to destroying various ice barriers, and for navigating some of the caves with freezing temperatures that slow other Pikmin down, making them a solid option in most situations.
Glow Pikmin are the other new additions, but they are only really available in the regularly occurring night missions. There, you’ll trade in your real-time strategy-style gameplay for a simplistic tower defense format where you’re challenged to protect various anthill-like structures until morning (or until all enemies have been defeated) using only Glow Pikmin. The lower difficulty stages started out basic and short but soon evolved into levels with multiple points to defend from hordes of enemies, often requiring me to leave Oatchi on defense while I explored on foot to figure out the optimal routes for protecting multiple points from waves of enemies. I didn’t really care for these early on, but around the midway point of the campaign they added some new terrifying creatures and secondary points to defend, finally introducing the complexity and enemy variety I craved.
As someone who seeks out challenge, I wasn’t a huge fan of one of the other additions: a set of overpowered single-use items. Alongside the standard ultra-spicy spray that temporarily boosts Pikmin performance and the bomb rocks that destroy concrete walls we get single-use items like Lightning Shock that can paralyze everything on the screen with electricity. Being able to toss bombs with homing or proximity effects kills all the tension in battles that otherwise have me frantically dashing around and flinging Pikmin to defeat enemies while keeping my little guys from being eaten or crushed. After testing them all out I felt like I had to artificially limit my use of them in most situations because they removed any need to be strategic. This, again, is great for younger players who are still learning the ropes of Pikmin, and they will surely appreciate the assistance, but since Pikmin 4 doesn’t offer any difficulty settings (like some of the previous games in the series have) they feel like too easy of a solution.
The one limitation on the power of these special items is that the raw materials you use to purchase them is also tied to building bridges to give you shortcuts through levels and permanent upgrades for yourself and Oatchi. Even without using many items, sometimes I would find myself without enough raw materials to build a bridge because I spent too many on upgrades, requiring me to circle back and gather more from deeper in the level to build them.
Upgrades were my favorite use of raw materials because they include everything from boots that increase your movement speed to suits that grant elemental immunities and armor to increase your HP and Defense. While most upgrades aren’t required to finish the story there are some locations, like an entrance to one of Pikmin 4’s many sub-levels hidden in the center of a stove’s burner, which require you to have an elemental immunity for both yourself and Oatchi just to get inside. Purchasing these sorts of upgrades early on made obstacles less of an issue as I scoured the levels for more raw materials and other items, and kept me excited for the next upgrade to become available.
The story took me around 20 hours to complete, but in classic Pikmin tradition, that is less the real ending than a signal of more to come. While I can’t go into detail, I will say that the post-credits content in Pikmin 4 might just be the best the Pikmin series has ever delivered. In fact, Pikmin 4’s greatest folly is that it saves the best of its new tricks until you have completed the campaign’s first ending and seen the credits, because I would’ve liked to have dived right into all of these creative locations, met their bizarre inhabitants, and unlocked its homage to previous Pikmin games.
Beyond the story and what comes after, Pikmin 4 offers a pair of modes designed to test your aptitude at the concept of Dandori: a Japanese word for the practice of organizing tasks strategically and working effectively to execute plans. In the Dandori Challenges you must gather all the treasures in a set location with a limited number of Pikmin, and the final couple of courses buck Pikmin’s trend of being kid-friendly and are sure to test the best Pikmin players out there if they want to earn the coveted Platinum medal. Some of these took me more than a handful of attempts!
And then there’s the Dandori Battle mode, a chaotic mix of combat and gathering, and it’s an enjoyable way to challenge my multitasking skill against an opponent who wants to win just as much as I do. You can play against the AI or a friend in local multiplayer, which is nice, but it’s a shame there’s no online capability.