Pikmin is a real time strategy game developed by Nintendo and released for the GameCube in 2001. My first exposure to this game was when I borrowed my friend's Cube and the game for one day in the summer. He promptly, as was my experience with borrowing things, asked for it back, so I wasn't able to get too far in it then. I also tried playing it through with my son when he first moved in with us, but wasn't able to get too far before I was a little frustrated and he was very frustrated, so we made our amiable peace with not finishing it and went back to playing Lego Batman (or something of that ilk). However, with a substantial chunk of my backlog cleared and a free CRT ready to go after yet another play through of Link to the Past, I was ready to dive back into my old foe and give it a go.
You control Captain Olimar, some sort of space explorer. His rocket is struck by a meteor and crashes on an alien planet with a toxic atmosphere and all kinds of hazardous life forms. He is able to befriend one of the species of life on the planet, however, the plant like and innocent Pikmin. These chaps are the lowest item on the food chain and are desperately looking for a leader to help them access their untapped potential and be able to do more against the more physically imposing fauna on the planet. They are also good at destroying obstacles that stand between you and your ship's parts that are inconveniently strewn around the island, and also at carrying those parts back to your ship to get it in a state of repair that will allow you to escape the planet and reunite with your wife and children.
The game is split into thirty days (they're about a half hour long in real time). There are 30 missing parts necessary to restore the ship to full function, and the more you get, the better your ending is. So, you need to shoot for about 1/day in order to get the ship back fully in order. You can order your Pikmin around and have them attack enemies, throw them across gaps, and leave them to complete tasks while you take a separate team of Pikmin to another area of the level. There are three types of Pikmin, each with their own special sets of abilities that will allow you to solve all of the different puzzles and hazards on the island. You can grow more Pikmin by bringing food back to their bases, and managing how many of each kind you have available to you will be critical to being able to restore your ship to full function.
The gameplay is very fun and engaging, with clever puzzles that will make you think (but not too hard). The controls can be a bit wonky at times, and the Pikmin can be extremely stupid, both of which are frustrations. You can control 100 Pikmin at once, but being able to select that one kind you want for solving a given puzzle is the biggest frustration in the game, particularly during the boss fights. You'll end up losing hundreds of Pikmin, if you're anything like me, just fighting controls and having them get squashed, eaten, drowned, or lit on fire by some monstrous beast. There is absolutely a degree of difficulty modifier that Nintendo gets here, though. RTS games are intended for PC, or at least for consoles with mouse support. There is absolutely no qualifier for that statement. When you consider that fact, Pikmin looks reasonably good compared to competitors in the same genre on console. The C-stick is used to good effect to control them en masse, and the game is generous in the amount of food you're given to grow more, so prepare for a Pikmin holocaust (over 800 died during my 30 days on the planet). You can also just take out whatever kind you need for a given puzzle so that none of them are out of place, but that seems like an inefficient solution, particularly when some challenges require the use of multiple kinds of Pikmin. All in all, the controls are clunky and you'll fight them, but they did enough to put an acceptable RTS interface onto a console, and that is definitely an achievement.
The game is remarkably effective at storytelling, using only brief journal entries between levels and the unspoken narrative of existence on the planet as storytelling tools. You will genuinely begin to care about your Pikmin apart from the value that they provide to you. They sprint to you excitedly and squeak happily when you call them down out of the base. They easily become distracted and you must gather them all together again to keep them on track. You feel awful when they are harmed or killed during your adventures, and feel a real moral quandary about sacrificing their happiness for a greater mission. And at the end, you can see that all of the heartache, toil, sacrifice and loss were worth it in the growth of your little ones from defenseless victims to seasoned adults capable of defending themselves against the dangers of a vicious planet. It's a twisted kind of metaphor about parenting, and the kind of story that can be told more effectively by experience, rather than by dialogue, lending itself well to the video game format.
The music is charming and delightful. It's more of an ambient background amidst the relentless action of the game, but it does its job effectively.
Technically speaking, the game is excellent. Despite controlling 100 Pikmin at once, there is absolutely 0 slowdown. The game still looks nice, using its cartoony art direction to give it a timelessness that other games of the era lack. The maps are very large, and you have several of them to explore.
All in all, this is an excellent concept that really belonged on PC. The controls will absolutely frustrate you, and there is no way around that. But if you come with an open mind and an appreciation for what console RTS ports looked like before this, I think that you will find a charming, fun, and original game that tells a rich and vibrant story. I'll give it an 8.8/10.
I have finished SO many games in the last week it's crazy. Here's a teaser for the game that's coming up next...
-TRO
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