Pikmin Retrospective

A deeper look into the first Pikmin game

[Author’s Note: I mostly write about real-time strategy on the PC platform, with a focus on competitive multiplayer. While I appreciate every subscriber, I’d discourage anyone from subscribing based solely on this article, as it’s not representative of the average thing I write on here. Check out my backlog if you’re interested! Anyway, cheers and hope you enjoy.]

I’ve been meaning for several years now to write a retrospective on Pikmin. I love this franchise: it’s a really special series of games that’s managed to carve out an extremely fun corner of the real-time strategy space. There’s no other game that I looked forward to more than Pikmin 4, which to this day remains the only thing I’ve ever setup a Google alert on. And now that the game is out (and is awesome!), I figured it’s a good time to reflect.

I first came to Pikmin in 2016, when I played through the co-op missions of Pikmin 3 with my then girlfriend (now wife). I loved solving puzzles, collecting treasures and optimizing for efficiency in a real-time setting. I went on to play the single-player campaign, which I enjoyed a great deal - and then I went back and played through the first and second games, too, through the Wii U’s nifty virtual console.

I remember how surprised I was when I learned that Pikmin is a real-time strategy game - but also, how naturally that description fit once I heard it. Pikmin is definitely an RTS: players work in real-time to execute on a strategy, leveraging different tricks and tactics and flexing their mechanical skills along the way. But the franchise does it in such a unique, Nintendo way, that you almost don’t realize it’s an RTS until someone points it out to you.

Today I want to focus on Pikmin 1. The first game is interesting because, in retrospect, it’s so different from the later entries in the series. I don’t see that as a good or a bad thing; rather I think it just makes it important to discuss the games one at a time. Sometimes in franchises, you get a sort of natural iteration where later games are just objectively better in some ways, because the developers figured out the kinks in the formula. I think that’s fair enough and probably usually true to some extent, but I also think that when it comes to this series, the differences aren’t always good or bad; they’re just different games, with different takes on the foundational ideas.

Content-First

I think the origin story of Pikmin is pretty famous by now, but for readers who are unfamiliar, I’ll provide a quick recap:

One day, around 15 years ago, Miyamoto was relaxing on his patio and saw a line of ants marching past his feet and off into the grass, carrying leaves towards their nest. Then he imagined for a moment – because this is how the Miyamoto mind works – what the scene might look like if they were tiny people.

“Ants, as you know, always have a leader, and tend to be carrying things, and as they move they create a kind of rail,” he says. “And I started thinking about a game about lots of small people carrying things in a line, following a leader, with everyone going in the same direction.”

Guy takes a break in his garden, and walks out having designed one of the best real-time strategy franchises ever made. Good for him!

Jokes aside, I think what makes Pikmin work, fundamentally, is that the game concept came first, and the actual mechanics of gameplay came second. It’s an RTS in the sense that the mechanics it arrived at happen to be the mechanics of real-time strategy; and because once you place down a few foundational building blocks (like real-time problem solving with heterogenous units), it makes sense to start laying down the others, because they synergize with one another (like an army composition strategy component, or mechanical depth in unit control, things like that).

While talking to Miyamoto, you realise he’s as much a discoverer as a designer. Like Newton or Einstein, he has found something fascinating out in the world – in his case, fun – and then dove in between its cogs and springs, working out the rules that govern it.

I mean, granted, I’m just spitballing here - I wasn’t there when they designed this thing. Maybe the man had a meltdown after getting 5-pooled and thought, I can do better. But personally, I lean towards the notion that the genre-ification of Pikmin is downstream of the original concept - and that the final product includes so many RTS-like mechanics because those mechanics just make sense with one another.

One reason I think this way is that most examples of home console real-time strategy games are more or less direct ports of the PC experience with streamlined controls for a handheld controller. I’d argue this even includes ostensibly console-first titles like Halo Wars. I’m of course not claiming that they’re all equally successful - Age 4 on Xbox is notably pretty decent - but it’s often the case (sometimes painfully so) that the game mechanics are being transplanted onto a home console rather than emerging organically from what actually makes sense when you have a controller.

Pikmin doesn’t have any of these rough edges because the mechanics emerge from the gameplay. For instance, the game centers the strategy experience around a single leader unit, much like a typical Nintendo platformer but with a move set derived from the use of Pikmin rather than directly being able to jump or climb. This makes sense at a basic level because multi-tasking is incredibly hard to do with a controller, even though it’s arguably a key component of your typical RTS. By focusing the action on Olimar, Pikmin sacrifices huge chunks of the RTS experience, but carves out the best possible version of one narrow slice of gameplay.

Let me use one example that’s meaningful to me personally. One thing I really enjoy about RTS is the feeling of queueing up some actions, going somewhere else for awhile, and then coming back to see all the cool new stuff you have. Pikmin - particularly its third world, The Forest Naval - captures a lot of the magic of this experience because it structures its levels like mazes. You’re constantly going back and forth and running into your own squad, who are busily bringing stuff back to your ship or building a bridge or doing whatever task you assigned them to previously. While the camera controls don’t enable you to actually observe multiple tasks at once, the level design still enables you to appreciate the experience.

I think here about the contrast with Pikmin 3, which utilized the Wii U gamepad to introduce a number of RTS-like components, including genuine multi-tasking and a proper top-down map view. I think it’s notable that despite controlling much better than the original game, these specific features feel awkward, at least to me. They feel like an attempt to shoehorn in RTS-like features, rather than starting from the concept and iterating it to the next level, the way that Pikmin 4 does with Dandori challenges.

The mechanical design really becomes noticeable when you realize how much Pikmin leans on organic discovery of the game mechanics. The first Pikmin game explains very little to the player, leaving them to figure things out through trial and error. The mechanics need to be intuitive for this to work. I personally love it, although it’s hard to say whether it’s successful. I continually come across stories on Reddit of players that simply tried and failed to get into the first game, even though they would later play and enjoy other entries in the series. You could argue that this style really just translates to an accessibility issue - at least, that’s how Nintendo seemed to interpret it, given the way they beat you over the head with exposition starting with the second game.

Timing

Pikmin 1 is the only entry to enforce genuine time pressure on the player; the third game half-heartedly includes a similar component via its fruit system, but aside from a minor scuffle in the mid-game, there’s no point in the experience where the player is genuinely worried about running out of time. Pikmin 1, by contrast, is sufficiently hard and rigorously sequenced, meaning that even on my most recent fifth playthrough, I was still using up the majority of the allotted time to collect all 30 parts.

(For what it’s worth, you can speed run the game in 6 out of the 30 available days.)

I think time pressure is a controversial mechanic. I myself didn’t buy the game on the Gamecube because it scared me off. I like to explore and roam around, and I felt like it wouldn’t be fun to have an axe over my head the entire time. I think this is a fairly common feeling, too, as I see it pop up frequently on discussions of the game.

I’ll start my thoughts on this by noting that the time mechanic seems to have been an intentional decision with respect to puzzle solving:

“Our main aim in Pikmin 2 was to get rid of any stress as much as possible, so that it would be very user-friendly,” said Miyamoto. “Well, I myself couldn’t agree with that direction perfectly. That kind of nature of Pikmin 1 was exactly what I wanted to reproduce and I was actually intentionally doing so, so that Pikmin 1 could be a strategic game.”

To try to steelman this perspective, managing time as a resource encourages the player to think strategically and plan their moves thoughtfully. I’d also add that Pikmin goes out of its way to present the experience as arcade-like, offering restarts from the beginning of the day, the option to save or not save after each day, and so forth. I actually think the designers may have envisioned players as quite detached from their squad, seeing the game as a series of puzzles that they could try over and over in fifteen minute blocks. From this perspective the timer is less a pressure point and more an anodyne guardrail - don’t waste hours and hours of time trying to figure this out, but rather, give it a go, try some stuff out, and go again if it doesn’t work out.

I think, in practice, there are better ways to encourage strategic thinking. But the broader challenge is that players invariably identify with their Pikmin and their progression in collecting ship parts, and they don’t want to lose them. And I think the general vibe of the game as a Nintendo-style exploration-adventure is at odds with a strict time crunch.

I think the thing that bugs me most about the timer is that it makes it harder to enjoy the moment-to-moment mechanics of the game. Maybe this has its own benefits - Pikmin’s mechanical controls feel dated, and the pathing and AI leave a lot to be desired, so perhaps it’s for the best that the game is designed to push players past all that. But I think one of the funnest parts of these games is the actual doing of the stuff - tasking Pikmin with something, running off to do something else, coming back to see what’s been done. For me, what makes the strategy aspect of Pikmin so satisfying is that you’re actually there, in the action, participating every step of the way. The timer, though, acts as a sort of looming guillotine, taking you out of the experience in the process.

It’s not the end of the world by any means - this is a game that I really like, after all - and I do think it actually works for reasons other than gameplay design. On a kind of basic, fundamental level, Pikmin just does not have as much going on in its worlds as comparable (for the time) Nintendo titles like Banjo-Kazooie, Super Mario Sunshine, or even Luigi’s Mansion. It’s weird but when you really think about it, the original game’s world is somewhat sparse. In fact, there’s a bunch of mechanics that work in tandem to hide this fact, like the forced downward camera angle and the limited ability to zoom out. If you could explore Pikmin’s worlds freely, you might start to feel like they’re too empty, and think that there’s not enough to do aside from the core objectives.

The timer obfuscates this quite well, pushing the player to focus on collecting ship parts rather than lollygagging about. One reason I feel this way is that I personally remember the overworlds of Pikmin 2 as somewhat barren, which is odd because I should arguably feel that way about Pikmin 1, too. (But I don’t). I guess it doesn’t help that the game starts you off in a snow area.

Keeping It Simple

There’s a thing that happens in franchises where each new game feels the need to add new mechanics in order to differentiate it from previous entries and improve upon the formula. I think this sometimes creates an almost hipster-like attachment to the simplicity and straight-forwardness of the first game. For me, the clearest example is Ocarina of Time: simpler than later entries (particularly the more recent open-world ones), but it feels better and more focused, at least to me.

Perhaps this is a controversial opinion, but I do not think this applies to Pikmin. While I admire how much mileage the first game gets out of its three Pikmin types, the franchise is immensely better off from the introduction of new Pikmin types, particularly the white (gathering gold and being immune to poison) and rock (breaking glass and mechanical depth when fighting enemies) varieties.

It’s easy to forget that the first Pikmin game is quite short - 30 days at 15 minutes a day is just seven and a half hours of gameplay, assuming you don’t redo any levels. My most recent 100% playthrough on the Switch edition took a mere 5 hours, and I was just relaxing and enjoying the experience.

I think this shortness is related to a basic lack of content. To be clear, I’m not trying to say that longer = better; rather I’m arguing that the mechanics featured in Pikmin could not support a longer experience without diluting it. There’s just not enough source material, between the 3 Pikmin types and limited environmental options.

Of course, I don’t think all the new mechanics added in later entries are a pure value add, and the first game stands out here in the purity of its implementation. For me, the best example of this are the pink Pikmin, who are by design outside the bounds of what works well in this franchise because they can get around any obstacle (other than the made-just-for-them spider webs). Pikmin 4 conspicuously reserves their onion for the very final part of the game, which to me is the developers’ way of saying that they knew they couldn’t cut an entire Pikmin type out of the game, but also didn’t know how to make them work mechanically.

Pikmin 1 includes none of the fat of the later games, featuring a few-hours magical experience from start to finish - but as a direct consequence, it’s a much shorter experience, too.

See-But-Can’t-Do

I’ve commented before that Pikmin is the Banjo-Kazooie of real-time strategy, and I figure it’s worth exploring that idea a bit more. It’s an unrelated aside, but I’ve always held the unpopular opinion that the third Banjo iteration, Nuts & Bolts, was very much a direct and proper sequel to Banjo-Tooie. I totally get the notion that a car building game is not a collect-a-thon platformer, but I argue from the perspective that Nuts & Bolts delivers on the same basic experience as the other two Banjo games. It just does so with a very different set of mechanics.

I’d say the same about Pikmin - the later games in the series capture the mechanics better (particularly free exploration), but the first game still manages to capture the vibe.

See-But-Can’t-Do, for example, is one of the cornerstones of the design of the first Banjo game. It’s also a big part of Pikmin, which from the very first level is showing you areas that are explorable but presently unreachable.

There’s other stuff, too: the ramping exploration complexity in the level design (including shortcuts), the differently themed and colorful game environments, the unlocking of new movesets (via new Pikmin types), the charming but somewhat clumsy protagonist. Pikmin really feels like a Banjo-adjacent game to me. I get the natural counter-argument that some of what I’m describing is just “Nintendo game”, and so this isn’t something I’m trying to push as some kind of empirically supported observation of the game design. But I think this is one of the reasons this franchise is so special to me.

I’d honestly say that if you’re a Pikmin fan, you’d almost certainly enjoy the Banjo games. (They’re available on PC nowadays via Cloud Streaming!) That’s not saying much because most every gamer would enjoy the Banjo games. But hey, this is my retrospective! I’m well within my rights to have opinions. ;-)

Final Thoughts

Pikmin is a franchise that, to me, has never truly been replicated. I’ve played many similar games and, while I enjoyed them (Masters of Anima comes to mind), none captured the magic and spark of PNF-404.

Pikmin 1 is where it all began. I think the clearest takeaway is that building a game around an idea seems to work a lot better than building an idea around a game - at least, that’s how I feel anytime I play other console RTS games. The mechanics are dated, sure, and honestly more so than contemporaneous titles that didn’t face the technological constraints of AI and pathing for 100 different dudes. And the simplicity and purity of the design also mean that the experience is quite short.

But the game nonetheless holds up quite well, even now. I’d encourage folks to give it a shot on the Switch, particularly if you liked any of the other games in the franchise. And, as for me, well - my sixth playthrough is a-callin’.

Until next time!
brownbear

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