Pikmin & Pikmin 2
May 23, 2023
I've never touched the Pikmin series before. Sure, I've been aware of its existence, especially with Olimar being included in Super Smash Bros, but I've never actually gotten into the series itself. I never felt the need, since game releases were few and far between. And by the time the release of Pikmin 4 comes around, it will have been just barely over a decade since the release of Pikmin 3.
But with the release of the fourth game in the series on the horizon, I thought that now would be a good time to try and get into the series myself. I've wanted to branch out into new games as of late, so this is a good starting point. Not necessarily breaking out of the Nintendo bubble I've always lived in, but still trying something new within it.
When I first started playing the original Pikmin, I considered the clock to be nothing more than an annoyance. You only had so long each day to make progress, and once it reaches near the end of the day, you had to begin making a mad dash to make sure all of your Pikmin were safe, lest they get left behind. And with the limit of 30 days to complete everything, it meant you were truly limited on your time. Any time used improperly is just completely lost. I found it tedious at first, that you couldn't keep powering through and completing objectives, especially when your total time is limited.
And yet, I eventually came around to appreciate the two mechanics. Together, they made it so that time was just as valuable of a resource in the game as anything else. You needed to plan what to do with your time carefully, or else you would lose it. It helped me to appreciate the game as a whole more, by forcing me to slow down and plan things out rather than just rushing in and doing everything I could.
And then came the sequel...
I went into the sequel appreciating what these two mechanics brought me, that being an opportunity to force myself to slow down and enjoy the game rather than trying to complete everything I can all at once. But for the sequel, they changed things. First of all, they removed the 30-day limit, but I thought of that as no big deal. It couldn't have been that much of an influence anyways, right? After all, I still beat the original game with 7 days remaining.
But the other thing they added to the game was caves... And dear god... I've *really* come to dislike that feature.
Caves were dungeons with randomized layouts that had treasures scattered throughout, and each cave has specific obstacles that you need to prepare to bring in specific species to handle them. Honestly, it's a good idea... At least conceptually. My issues are more with how they were executed. They're too closed in, the hazards are too repetitive, and too often I had entered a floor only to have an enemy spawn basically on top of me giving me no chance to try and avoid them, but that's not what we're here to talk about really.
The big issue with caves, the one that affects the game even when you're outside of caves, is that when you enter them the clock just stops entirely. There's no passage of time while you're underground. This makes it so that once valuable resource that you have to manage tightly has been reduced to something that can just be paused by heading underground for a while and doing some stuff there. But that makes it so there's so much less tension, so much less reason to try and manage your time. Instead, when you're in a cave, it's easier to just try and pick everything off one by one because you don't have to worry about running out of time.
But doing that, combined with the other issues with caves, makes it feel so much less fun. And it also personally made me start being more careless. In the original Pikmin, I was extremely careful with each of my Pikmin. I considered each of their lives sacred, trying to minimize deaths wherever I could. But in Pikmin 2, there just came a point where I stopped trying. I was still upset when they died, but less cause I was losing lives, and more because I wasn't able to replenish their numbers until I left the cave. Death switched from something that I tried to avoid at all costs to just a minor annoyance.
And even on a meta level, I got careless with resetting. In Pikmin, I only reset one time, when I made a massive screw-up that killed off nearly all of my Pikmin, and I never once used the speedup feature on the emulator. But in Pikmin 2, I was constantly resetting because I didn't like the dungeon's layout, and I was consistently using the speedup feature because even though I hadn't realized it, I had become tired of the game. The changes made had just sapped all the fun out of it for me, and I was more playing it out of obligation, rather than for fun. I only realized that once it became an actual struggle for me to pick up the game near the end...
So I talked to one of my friends, and he opened my eyes. He made me realize that it isn't worth playing a game if you aren't having fun. Because at that point, there's just no point.
I finished Pikmin wanting more, excited to play the next game.
I dropped Pikmin 2, disappointed in how the game made me feel.
I still plan on playing the third game, which thankfully doesn't have caves in it at all... But the trailers for Pikmin 4 show that caves are coming back. Hopefully, the decade-long wait means that the developers learned from the mistakes of the previous games.
(Update, 8/14/2023: I've posted a new blog post following up on this one. Check that out here.)