Pikmin 1 is the best Pikmin game (because it's the worst Pikmin game)

I have recently beaten Pikmin 3 as part of my ongoing, foolhardy quest to actually play through enough games in my backlog to make it decrease instead of increase. Pikmin 3 was a long time coming, I originally got Pikmin 3 as part of the deal Nintendo had back when Mario Kart 8 was coming out where you'd get a free first-party WiiU game alongside it and I had played through basically the entirety of it back then. I had collected all of the fruit, found all the data files, etc. The only thing I had yet to do is beat the final dungeon and the final boss. A rational person would likely just go do that but instead I chose the much more insane option of "play through the entire game start to finish so that I have accurate data on my spreadsheet", which, let's be real, updating your spreadsheet is the most fun part of game clearing.

Replaying it, I feel, ended up being the correct choice though. First of all, I had literally not played it in over a decade so I would not have been able to easily slide right into the final boss like it was nothing. But more importantly I think starting from 0 on Pikmin 3 allowed me to analyze it in a new way and come to different conclusions on the game than I had previously. I won't get fully into it but the too long, didn't read is who I was when I had initially played Pikmin 3 was a person who enjoyed series. Pikmin 3 was a game I loved a lot in 2014 because it was a Pikmin game, and a great Pikmin game at that, and I loved Pikmin. A decade later though, I find myself being more of a fan of works, how an individual game exists on its own merits disconnected from a branding I may be attached too and only evaluating the game in question in context of its series to compare and contrast how well it compliments a previous work.

A brief review of Pikmin 3 since we're already here

Pikmin 3 is, in many ways, the best Pikmin game. I know it has ended up being a rather controversial entry in recent times due to its general lack of difficulty and it stepping back on many features introduced in Pikmin 2, but I feel it is, by far, the best the series has been as a strategy game. Pikmin 3 utilizes the WiiU Gamepad excellently, allowing you to easily command your captains to move and work autonomously while you are busy accomplishing more complex tasks on your own. While I do often think the three captains are a bit too much as, frequently, it feels like one captain is just off doing nothing, waiting for other tasks to be done so they can gather up the wayward Pikmin, it is undeniable how much map control you get in this game, both from the multiple captains and the ease at which you can move them about the map and switch between the three.

As well, Pikmin 3's usage of three captains allows them to really play around with the complexity of the puzzles. There are several instances where you'll encounter a puzzle that needs all three captains to be doing various different things, be it stepping on weights to balance out while the third captain manages Pikmin distribution between the two others, throwing other captains on ledges and then having them go on individual ventures to reunite the other captains, or just using captains as middle men to easily get a squad across a large untenable obstacle, like a river. It leads Pikmin 3 to being incredibly fast paced while maintaining the depth of the previous entries.

This pacing is also enhanced by how snappy combat tends to be. The introduction of the Charge mechanic, allowing you to dismiss your Pikmin to swarm an enemy you've locked onto, allows most combat encounters to be over quickly, as your entire squad can decimate an enemy health bar like it's nothing. This does, of course, tend to make the game a bit easy, but I also feel like it's a well designed mechanic, streamlining gameplay while still providing enough of a risk to make you think about how you use the mechanic, as overestimating your Pikmin's abilities can now have disastrous consequences.

That's not to say that Pikmin 3's gameplay is perfect, however. The game is, often, let down by the console it is on. Pikmin 3, being on the WiiU, opts to include multiple different control schemes, touch controls, classic controls, and motion controls, a sort of best of all worlds. Touch controls allow you the best map control, allowing you the easiest usage of the map and, by extension, the best map control. This comes at the cost of having a lot of inconvenient gameplay/combat controls, like having to tap to throw Pikmin. Classic controls, in contrast, gives you a more typical controller layout, with almost everything being mapped to the buttons. This control scheme does give you minor touchscreen access as well so you can still do all the things you would be doing with the touch control scheme. The issue with Classic though is that "Classic" in this instance means "GameCube" and in the GameCube Pikmin games, your cursor was locked in a straight line directly in front of you, meaning actually controlling the game becomes way more stiff and awkward. Lastly we have motion controls, this control scheme sees you hooking up a Wii Remote and Nunchuck to control the game as if it were one of the Pikmin ports on Wii. Undeniably, this gives you the best field control, you have a pretty useful button layout while also having full control of the cursor. To many people this is the definitive way to play Pikmin, I take issue with it, though, as while it gives you the best control in the field, you lose a lot of the convenient map functionality of the Game Pad. In short, Pikmin 3 has three control schemes, and every single one of them does exactly half the job you want it to. To be honest, all I want is "GameCube controls but you control the cursor with the stick and the map with the screen" and I would be happy.

I, of course, cannot stop talking about Pikmin 3 without talking about its visuals. It is no exaggeration to say that Pikmin 3 is not only the most beautiful Pikmin game, a high bar for a series that has always pushed the graphical capabilities of the systems they are on. It's also arguable that Pikmin 3 is the most beautiful WiiU game and, honestly, maybe even the most beautiful game Nintendo has ever made. Its environments are serene and bizarre, finding a deep beauty in scattered trash of the old world that has been reclaimed by the new environment. The lighting is dynamic and sharp without being overbearing or too bright like many other WiiU games tended to skew. Its water visuals are some of the best ever produced, the water Miiverse guy must've had a field day with Pikmin 3, I swear. All these visuals are also enhanced by wonderful sound design, the environmental noises in this game are superb, I cannot tell you the joy I felt the first time I encountered a rainy day and the world was filled with frog songs. While I've had my problems with Pikmin 3, I do like it a whole lot and think it's a great game, I find it unlikely it'll make my top ten list for the year (mostly because, at the time of writing this, it's already down at number 7) but it's absolutely going to be an honorable mention.

A bizarre relationship with the Pikmin series

But, there was something else that was eating at me the entire time I played Pikmin 3. As I previously stated, at a certain point in my life I considered myself a Pikmin fan. You could've counted me among the ranks of people like "the Cookie Monster but for people who refuse to admit that the GameCube sold poorly" and "monotone Scott the Woz". A large part of this love of Pikmin came from a very singular source, the first Pikmin game. I played Pikmin 1 on its rerelease for the Wii and fell in love with it, for a long time it ranked amongst my favorite games of all time. I used to keep a rather extensive catalog of what I considered "5 star games" on my Backlog but kinda retired it after both finding it difficult and insufficient to upkeep, as well as doing a lot of rethinking on how I rate and rank things, and up until that change which came literally about a month ago, Pikmin 1 was on that list. I genuinely would've told you that Pikmin 1 was one of the greatest games ever made. I also would've told you that Ecco the Dolphin was one of the greatest games ever made, so maybe my scale is broken, but I think I'm right about Pikmin.

As I was playing Pikmin 3, I could not help but feel myself drift to thoughts of Pikmin 1. Despite loving Pikmin at least through 3 initially, I have not played 4 because that was well after the point I stopped just getting any game that had a brand I thought I liked on it, something that has always been true is that no Pikmin game has ever hit as hard for me as Pikmin 1 has. It's always been a bizarre dichotomy, I always acknowledged that, as games, the Pikmin series was constantly improving, becoming more fun with each entry, becoming better as games.

And yet, something about them never felt as right as the first game. For a long time I just chalked this up to nostalgia, that while I love Pikmin 1 the most, it's obviously not the best Pikmin game and as time would go on while I would continue to look at the first game through rose-colored glasses, I would eventually come around to preferring the newer entries on the level of being better games. Or, I would say "well, it's not that Pikmin 1 is necessarily even hitting harder for you, sure you love it the most but it's also the most unique". I'll admit, as much as I don't want this to be true, I have ultimately grown to value uniqueness. It's not a total blanket opinion, that something unique is inherently better and that later versions of said thing are always going to have diminishing returns, just this year already a serious contender for my game of the year is a sequel that has near identical gameplay and keeps almost the same tone, structure, and design as the first game, down to having half the game take place in the same location. But despite this I do tend to value a game being something all its own, even sometimes gravitating towards games most would find terrible due to them being weird, surreal, unique pieces of art.

This playthrough of Pikmin 3, however, was illuminating. As I was in the trenches thinking about what did and did not work about the third Pikmin game, at least in my opinion, I found myself gaining answers to these long held questions. How is it that, in a series that objectively gets better with every entry, I find myself underwhelmed by every single one after the first one? Does Pikmin 1 bring things to the table that other entries have been unable or unwilling to recreate? Why am I like this where I can't just like a game without making it a thing? I did not find an answer to the last one, for what it's worth. However, I think I have found my answer to the previous two: I think Pikmin 1 is the best Pikmin game specifically because it is the worst Pikmin game. Let me explain.

A summary of the first Pikmin game, AKA "What is Pikmin?"

In 2001, Nintendo released Pikmin for the Nintendo GameCube, barely missing the console's launch by a short enough time that most just consider Pikmin a launch title. Pikmin is noteworthy for being one of the last new IPs to be created by industry icon Shigeru Miyamoto, as he would spend the rest of his career as a general producer for most of the Mario, Zelda, and subsequent Pikmin titles, only really creating Nintendogs after this. Pikmin is, famously, as much of a technical showcase for the GameCube as it is a video game. It is built off the software from the tech demo Super Mario 128, a tech demo meant to show the GameCube's ability to render an impressive number of models who can all partake in individual actions and which was believed for many years to be an actual cancelled sequel to Super Mario 64. Kind of wish that were true, I would love to see what the game of "128 Marios on a giant pizza in space" would've ultimately entailed, however, Miyamoto and likely most of the other people involved see Pikmin as Mario 128's full release.

In Pikmin you play as Captain Olimar, an astronaut from the planet Hocotate. On the trip back to his home planet from a deep space mission, Olimar awakens to find himself stranded on an unknown alien world after his ship has crashed. The atmosphere of this world is toxic to his Hocotatian physiology and without the ability to easily find food befitting of his anatomy, Olimar is, at first, in a lose-lose situation, unable to repair his ship or survive on the planet should his resources run out. As he investigates this strange, alien world though, he quickly comes across his ship's missing engine, a potential glimmer of hope. If he could just find a way to carry the piece back to his ship, then he could work on getting the ship capable of flight again and maybe starting to search the planet's surface for the remaining missing ship parts. And this is when Olimar discovers the Pikmin.

Pikmin are these tiny little creatures native to the planet that Olimar names "Pikmin" due to their resemblance to a foodstuff on his home planet, the Pikpik carrot. Pikmin come in three distinct varieties, at least in the first game, the Red Pikmin who are generally stronger than the others and can easily exist in high temperature environments, the Blue Pikmin, who have evolved gills to allow them to move easily underwater while most other species of Pikmin drown, and the Yellow Pikmin, who are the most aerodynamic of the three species, allowing them to be thrown higher and further than the others. Also, only in Pikmin 1, the Yellows are the only species of Pikmin capable of using Bomb Rocks, last Pikmin games open up bomb rocks to everyone and give Yellows resistance to electric currents and the ability to conduct electricity through them. Individually, Pikmin are incredibly weak, serving as little more than foodstuffs for the various predatory creatures that call this planet home, but as a unit, Pikmin become incredibly strong, tearing through the same creatures that would otherwise seek to eat them and turning the tables on them, using their defeated foes as sustenance for their main spawn point, the onions, which will convert the creature into more Pikmin seedlings. And good news for Olimar, they're very receptive to his commands.

For some unknown reason, Pikmin naturally gravitates towards Olimar and his suit's built-in whistle. It's possibly behavioral, Olimar represents some sort of leader role the Pikmin are naturally lacking, someone with a more tactical thought process to turn their disorganized power into an organized battalion with which to combat their natural predators. It's possible that, due to Olimar plucking them out of the ground, they see the captain as something of a parental figure, in the same way birds may imprint onto a person if said person was there when they hatched. There's even the implication that the Pikmin were near extinction and Olimar's awakening of the Onion brought the species back. If Pikmin have some manner of higher brain function, they may be following Olimar due to gratitude for saving their species. Or maybe they just like the whistle. Regardless, the Pikmin become exactly what Olimar needs, an army to aid him in the acquisition and retrieval of the parts to his spaceship. Olimar's goal is now clear: use the Pikmin's aid to overcome the dangers of this strange alien world, retrieve the parts to his ship, and successfully repair it before his suit's life support systems shut down in 30 days.

Why I like Pikmin 1 so much

After overcoming the first day and the "setup" of the game, Pikmin wastes no time throwing you to the wolves. You start by landing at the second area of the game, named by Olimar the "Forest of Hope" due to containing his hope to get home, and here you enter a world that, simply, wants you dead. Giants roam the land, monsters that seem to even overwhelm your army of Pikmin despite its massive numbers just due to the size of the creatures. These monsters are also not passive, they are predators, seeking to consume not only yourself but to decimate your numbers. The singular kindness you have is that many of these predators are nocturnal, allowing you to sneak up on them to gain a small advantage over them in combat. Or at least this would be a kindness if it wasn't for the smaller but similarly deadly creatures that surround the giants. And that's not even to mention the things that have hidden themselves underground. This world is brutal and deadly, a harsh, alien landscape testing Olimar's will to fight at every turn. And I love it.

Pikmin 1 is, in my opinion, one of the best survival narratives in the medium's history. This world feels truly like a world that could exist, a planet with its own rules and ecosystem and complex evolutionary history that Olimar is a stranger to. The various creatures of this world don't feel like "just video game enemies" but rather animals, they behave in a very understandable way. Many creatures are opportunistic, not actively hunting the Captain and his army but instead lying in wait and only striking when an opportunity to feed presents itself. They don't tend to chase Olimar indefinitely either, they'll get tired and realize the hunt isn't worth it, which does serve as a convenient moment for Olimar and his Pikmin to regroup but also feels very real. The creatures that aren't predators that also stand in Olimar's way are equally dangerous but in ways that, while eccentric and not always logical (hi Fiery Blowhog), behave in very real ways. They feel threatened by a present predator, the Pikmin, and use their defense mechanisms in turn. Sure, eventually you'll learn the AI and these creatures will seem less real than they once did, but Pikmin 1 makes impressive strides to making this planet feel very real and make you feel as if you don't belong in it.

This feeling is enhanced by Olimar's diminutive stature. While you do find this out pretty quickly, there are recognizable obstacles to the player that give Olimar a distinctive sense of scale, it really starts to hit you in the Forest of Hope just how small the captain truly is. When you first encounter the underground insect enemies, the Shear grubs, you realize that Olimar is not just small, Olimar is "the size of random grubs" small. Olimar is a mere 1.9cm or .75 inches tall, just slightly larger than a cough drop. I feel this sense of scale is very important to making this world seem as brutal as it is, you are not a man fighting giants, you are an ant fighting spiders. You are tiny in this world of monsters, so small you cannot even begin to fathom what creatures eat the creatures that are eating you. It not only makes the world feel just that much scarier but also just that much more hopeless. Made even more so by the time limit.

As previously stated, Olimar's suit's built in life support system will only be able to keep him alive for thirty days. At the end of the month, he will simply die and, as depicted in the bad end, become himself food for the Pikmin to produce more. You are on a clock, every minute of every day counts, and you have to solve these puzzles, kill these enemies, build these structures, whatever is necessary for you to recover every necessary ship part before your life support runs out and you die. This sense of urgency it instills is made even more so by the fact that Olimar can only work during the day. See, most of the predators on this mysterious planet are nocturnal, and as such, the planet's surface becomes infinitely more dangerous at night. So much so that Olimar has determined that the best course of action is just to not risk it and to take off at sundown each day. Olimar thus only has 30 days, from sunup to sundown(about thirteen real world minutes) to repair his ship. Admittedly, this deadline is not as tight as one would think it is, as a new player back in 2009 with barely any idea what I was doing, having only seen part of a Let's Play to get my bearings, I still had about a week to spare on this timer. But it does give the game a sense of weight, of urgency. Every Pikmin death feels like it counts so much more when you feel like you have so little time. And if you have a full squad kill? That is an entire day of raising back up your numbers to be able to resume your mission, a day you may not be able to afford. I realize you're probably reading this being like "this seems bad" and that's fair, but I find this all to be infinitely compelling, a true test of survival.

Through all of this though, these insurmountable odds, this harsh environment, the deaths of so many of these tiny creatures who are selflessly protecting him, Olimar never loses hope. At the end of each day, Olimar writes a new entry into his journal. These journal entries contain everything from thoughts about how the day went to scientific theories about the creatures of this odd world (Olimar is a biologist by trade, which makes later games much weirder but we'll get there), to just talking about how he misses his home and his family. It's a lot of great character building, you learn a surprising amount about this kinda stoic, mostly silent protagonist through these end of day check-ins. He feels horror at the death of Pikmin and hope at a particularly productive day. Who Olimar is to you is based on your experience, what you did and didn't do, how effectively you did it. Most importantly though, it gives the player a much needed optimistic outlook in a game with impossible odds. Olimar never gives up, so you never give up. It's kind of masterwork.

All of this comes together to be one of the greatest pieces of survival fiction in the medium, at least in my opinion. It's tense, it's atmospheric, it tells a very gripping story through no dialog, sparse written pieces and player input. It's kind of superb, I genuinely think that Pikmin 1 is one of the greatest works of art that Nintendo has ever made. But, in spite of this, Pikmin 1 has almost been fully replaced by its successors in more modern times. There are some, like me, who are ride or die for Pikmin 1 but they become a smaller demographic every year as Pikmin becomes more popular, the fanbase expands, and frankly like. What's going on there?

Let's talk about Pikmin 2

I want to start the following segments by saying that I have never played Pikmin 4, the most recent entry in the series at the time of writing this. I'm not going to say "oh I'm never going to play Pikmin 4" because I don't know that, if I pick up a copy down the line I'll probably add it to my "shortlist" and who knows, I may play it, love it, and make all this work I've done writing about why I think Pikmin 1 is so good a massive waste of time. It's not a high priority for me at this moment, however and I'm not going to really consider it in this essay as a result. I'm more interested in analyzing the Pikmin series from my perspective as, I guess a lapsed fan is what you'd call it, and why when I was a fan of the Pikmin series, I felt this feeling that I still feel to this day of no Pikmin game reaching the heights of Pikmin 1. It's been rough, I've had to cut out a couple jokes already from this thing because they were little jabs at Pikmin 4 and I felt that was unfair given I hadn't played it or watched someone else play it. Now that we've gotten that out of the way, Pikmin 2.

The second Pikmin game, appropriately titled Pikmin 2, released for the GameCube almost three years after its predecessor in 2004. It sees Olimar successfully returning home only to immediately be hit with a string of unfortunate news; his employer, Hocotate Freight, has had to take out a large loan to cover a missing expensive shipment that was trusted to his incompetent coworker and noted worst person alive, Louie, and is at risk of going under. They have had to sell off almost all their assets, including the ship we spent so much time trying to repair in the first game, in an attempt to stave off financial ruin, seemingly to no avail. The company has been reduced to a singular ship and three employees, the President of the company, Olimar, and the aforementioned Louie who remains at the company despite getting them in this mess in the first place.

While the President is explaining all this to Olimar, a souvenir he brought from the planet from the first game, what appears to be a bottle cap, rolls out from his stores and into scanning range of the one remaining Hocotate Freight ship, who scans the foreign item and discovers that it is worth a considerable amount of money. This exciting prospect gets the President's wheels turning, and he immediately orders Olimar and Louie to head back to the planet Olimar had just returned from, scouting out more treasures hidden on the surface to save the company from financial ruin. The duo must go to new areas, battle new foes, recruit new species of Pikmin, and explore the newly discovered underground cave system in order to work up enough cash to pay off the loan and return home to their families.

Pikmin 2 is, in many ways, a massive improvement on the formula established in Pikmin 1. For starters, it gives the player a second captain to work with. This addition, just out the gate, gives you so much depth to the gameplay. The area design can get more complex and the puzzles more intricate because of your ability to work with multiple captains now. It's not quite where Pikmin 3 is where you can very easily control Captains to do certain tasks while you're off doing things, but it still lets you split up the captains at any point and walk them and a squad of Pikmin to wherever the work needs to be done. It's honestly kind of crazy how big of a leap in complexity this is on rip, you'd really expect them to play around with enhancing the single captain gameplay for an entry before doing multi captain gameplay.

Pikmin 2 also sees the introduction of dungeons to the series. These multifloor underground structures are where most of the game takes place. Time freezes while you are in a dungeon, removing much of the urgency present in the previous game, but exchanging it for this claustrophobic feeling of being trapped. Dungeons are home to all sorts of powerful enemies, including the games' numerous boss arenas, and contain many of the treasures needed to accomplish your goal, buried artifacts of whatever civilization used to call this place home. They are also something of an evolution of Pikmin 1's brutality, Pikmin 2 in general makes several moves to be more difficult than the first game as its balancing around the overpowered new Pikmin types, but dungeons especially are very difficult sections, including one dungeon that almost functions as a horror game as you are stalked through its halls by an invincible enemy seeking to murder all your Pikmin. The two new Pikmin types, for the record are Purple and White Pikmin, Purples contain the strength of 10 Pikmin and are able to stun most enemies due to their increased weight, making them your new go-to combat units, while White Pikmin are small, fast, and poisonous, making them efficient workers but also a good nuclear option against many foes as enemies take serious damage and/or get instakilled by eating white Pikmin.

I mentioned time and time is, in general, something Pikmin 2 gives you in spades. The first game notably had a strict time limit, Olimar had a month to accomplish his goal or he dies. Pikmin 2 has no such time limit. You can spend as much time on the game as you need or want and the developers take advantage of this. Pikmin 2 not only contains more to do than the first game, it contains so much more that Pikmin 2 is 4x the size of Pikmin 1. This includes something the first game was genuinely kind of lacking: a post game. A considerable amount of the content in the game, about 60% is only accessible in the post game. There's an entire area to explore with a bunch of dungeons but also due to the fact that the game ends after you reach a certain dollar amount, you have a lot to still do in the areas previously unlocked. Pikmin 2 does all of this, and so much more, for a singular goal: to make sure that the experience of playing Pikmin is way more fun for the player.

Oh look we're back to Pikmin 3

Before we finish off here, I would like to circle back around to Pikmin 3. Despite Pikmin 2's numerous gameplay upgrades on the original game, it was not without its controversy. There were always fans who found the second Pikmin game's far less compelling story and lack of any real survival elements to be a step back despite all its numerous steps forward, an opinion which only grew in the long gap between the second and third Pikmin game; largely due to the rerelease of the first Pikmin game making it more accessible and defining more to people what Pikmin is. And so we have Pikmin 3, something of a compromise between the two styles, an attempt at making "the ultimate Pikmin game".
Pikmin 3 is noteworthy for moving the story away from Captain Olimar and instead introducing not only new captains but an entire new planet to the Pikmin universe: Koppai. The planet Koppai is facing something of a crisis at the moment, the citizens of Koppai are, exclusively, fruit eaters and the planet's supply of fruit is running dangerously low. In an attempt to stave off their own extinction, they send out probes out into space to find a planet with the precious fruit they need to survive, eventually discovering a planet they name PNF-404 which not only has fruit, but has so much fruit that, should they cultivate it properly, could support the species indefinitely. An exploratory squad consisting of three people, Captain Charlie, botanist Brittney, and engineer Alph, is sent out to the planet and after crashing onto the planet's surface and getting separated, find Pikmin.

As you could've probably guessed, PNF-404 is the planet from the previous Pikmin games. The trio must find enough fruit to survive as they work to reunite themselves and find their missing Cosmic-Drive Key, which was lost in the crash and is a necessary component to being able to return home. But something also doesn't feel quite right to the trio. Why did their ship, which was functioning perfectly, suddenly crash onto this alien planet with no warning? Who is leaving all these memos they're finding all over the planet's surface? And who, or what, is behind this mysterious SOS they keep being led to?

You may have gathered from the synopsis, but Pikmin 3 is the most narrative driven of the Pikmin games thus far. Not only does it have the highest stakes seen from the series thus far and genuine mysteries for the player to unravel as they proceed through the game, but it also has a very traditional narrative structure to it. Whereas previous games opted for a very nonlinear style of "find things in whatever order you come to them and once you get x amount of things, you can unlock a new area to find more things in", each area in Pikmin 3 has a specific arc with very noticeable and satisfying plot beats and a specific, unique boss enemy at the end to let you know that you're done with the area's story. These individual arcs culminate in a pretty defined three act structure; Alph awakens on the planet and has to overcome obstacles to reunite himself with his missing crewmates Brittney and Charlie; the crew is reunited but receives a distress signal from another astronaut lost on the planet, who they believe to be the mysterious "Captain Olimar" whose logs they keep finding, and mount a rescue mission; the crew rescues "Olimar" but he absconds with their stuff, including their entire fruit reserve, forcing the crew to chase him down, only to find out it is not Olimar but worst person alive Louie, who informs them of where the real Olimar and their Cosmic Drive key is, leading the crew to mount another rescue mission. This very traditional story structure not only makes it a good jumping on point for new players, but also clearly shows that the Pikmin team wants Pikmin to be something more, a universe to tell stories in with its own history and lore.

Speaking of lore, Pikmin 3's more narrative focus allows it to finally answer some questions that have been hanging over the series for a while. As you'll recall, the major theme of Pikmin 2 is unearthing treasures, you find weird, lost artifacts of a civilization that occupied PNF-404 once upon a time. These treasures are, largely, real world items, often being name brands like Duracell batteries. This implies PNF-404 is our world, but it's our world far enough into the future that any recognizable creatures have gone extinct and our civilization has been reclaimed by the elements. Pikmin 3 effectively confirms this, its world map showing the areas from orbit and revealing they exist on what are clearly our continents, but far enough into the future that they have drifted, adopting new ecosystems and being almost unrecognizable. Australia and Antarctica are now one continent and are equatorial, Southern Asia is now near the pole and is a tundra, South America is a fair climate akin to the Mediterranean. It's a wild world. The other big question it answers is why all these astronauts are drawn to this planet and, more importantly, why they seem to crash land on it. These are major spoilers for Pikmin 3 so I won't get into it but it's a fascinating answer and one I would like to see explored in more detail in a future entry.

Besides the deep and more complex strategy gameplay mentioned earlier, the biggest thing Pikmin 3 does to evolve the Pikmin formula is the introduction of major boss fights. Previous Pikmin games have had boss fights, of course, but whenever you encounter a boss in those games it is not treated with the grandeur of a video game boss fight. They're treated more as bigger, stronger, deadlier regular enemies that require a bit more strategy than your average foe. Pikmin 3 though has some real boss fights, entirely unique enemies fought in giant arenas that drastically play around with the mechanics and scale of the game prior. These larger than life boss fights also serve as the end point for each individual area's storyline, with each area containing at least one major boss to defeat. This all serves to create a Pikmin game that's more decidedly game-y, Pikmin 3, in keeping step with Pikmin 2, wants to create a more decidedly fun player experience, something that both new and returning fans can get on board with and have a decidedly fun time.

Fun

E3 2009, Nintendo ended their show with an absolute showstopping game, Super Mario Galaxy 2 for the Nintendo Wii. Released the following year Mario Galaxy 2 was, obviously, the sequel to Super Mario Galaxy, one of the most critically acclaimed of all time. Mario Galaxy 2 went on to be as critically acclaimed as its predecessor, with both games remaining on Metacritic's "best games of all time" list literally in back to back places at #4 (Mario Galaxy) and #5 (Galaxy 2). This sentiment was echoed by the general populace, Mario Galaxy 2 was incredibly beloved by the Wii's audience and especially fans of Mario Galaxy 1 who saw the game as more Mario Galaxy and, moreover, more fun Mario Galaxy.

While the original always had its advantages, it seemed pretty clear to most that Galaxy 2 was the better game, it took the strengths of Mario Galaxy and made a whole batch of new, more fun levels. It included new powerups, new minigames, new iconic levels. It's such an upgrade in seemingly every way that if you liked Galaxy 1 more, it was just because it hit at a point where it was more impactful to you. Or you're one of those weirdos who cares about story in a Mario game, but that'd be ridiculous right, who goes to Mario for the story(hi, it's me). But, as you probably know, this opinion did not hold.

In fact, Mario Galaxy 2's reception would be less positive upon re-evaluation. Basically everyone acknowledges it's a fantastic game, mind, but the idea that it is just a better Mario Galaxy 1 became more and more questionable as time went on. Mario Galaxy 2 is indeed a more fun game, but it almost sacrifices much of the magic Mario Galaxy 1 has in order to be that. Mario Galaxy has a stronger story, arguably it is still the perfect Mario story, it has a more cohesive theming as it almost never drops its space opera roots, it has this sweeping, beautiful orchestral score that makes it feel like an epic, something far more grand than we've ever experienced from Nintendo before. Mario Galaxy 2, meanwhile, feels more like a Mario game, it kind of adopts the obstacle courses in the sky level design that Mario would go on to be criticized for in the coming years, the theme becoming incoherent, the design streamlined to a fault and the story, famously, absent. In Nintendo's quest to make a more fun game, they scrubbed Mario Galaxy of the things that made it an impactful piece of art.

Pikmin 1 is undeniably the worst Pikmin game. It even says so in the title and it's something I have made clear throughout this piece. It's clunky and basic and buggy. Pikmin die for no reason, they get caught under things they are actively building, they're dumb as rocks with AI you would expect from an early era GameCube game and at times it ruins the experience. The time limit forces the game to be small and forces the player to feel rushed, barely being able to take in the scenery of this weird alien planet and punishing them for not being good enough at a game that does not adequately teach you how to be good at it. It often feels like it's from a bygone era where it expects you to buy it and just be your life for a summer, which is insane when it has such limited content and is also in a very new player unfriendly genre, the real time strategy game. Pikmin 1 is a product that needs to be improved on.

However, much like the earlier example of Mario Galaxy, I feel as though Pikmin loses something in its "improvements". As noted previously, Pikmin 1 feels like a very real environment, something that could exist when the player isn't there to experience it. Unfortunately I feel as though the later games really fail to capture this aspect of the game. Pikmin 1 certainly has its out there enemy concepts and encounters, late in the game there's literally a pig that has evolved to be a balloon for no discernable advantage as all it seems to do is float above water and push things in to drown them, but as the series goes on, this element becomes more and more lost.

Pikmin 2 makes a number of interesting decisions with regards to new enemies. Some of them are very fascinating plays on the enemies already seen in the first game, such as a variant of the series' staple, the Bulborb, who has evolved a hair-like adaptation to aid it in cold weather. Some of them are a little out there and don't make a ton of sense, like the Antenna Beetle, a bug evolved to replicate the distinct whistling noise that attracts Pikmin despite the fact that, as far as we knew, the entire Pikmin whistle thing is a recent development brought about the crash landing of Olimar. Strange, but I guess you can suspend your disbelief there. But some enemies are the Man-At-Legs.

Resembling a giant "daddy long legs" spider, the Man-At-Legs is a boss seen in Pikmin 2, appearing in one of the final dungeons of the game. The Man-At-Legs is noteworthy for its striking appearance, having a seemingly robotic body with four long spider-like legs coming out of it, three organic and one robotic. The creature constantly emits steam and other mechanical noises, and it attacks by locking onto an enemy at which point a gun comes out of its mechanical body and fires onto the creature it is locked onto. The Man-at-Legs is, as you could gather, a cyborg, a creature that has evolved a symbiotic relationship with the leftover technology of the planet that came before. There are a few other such creatures in Pikmin, the Groinks are notably fish that have evolved to hunt on land using mechanical components, but the Man-At-Legs I think is the most egregious of these examples. The idea of an animal naturally evolving a symbiotic relationship with technology is a neat idea, don't get me wrong. I don't know how feasible it is, but it's something that if handled well I could suspend my disbelief. Unfortunately the way they handled it is "a spider with a gatling gun".

The Man-At-Legs is an absolutely jarring enemy to throw at the player in what is otherwise a pretty grounded universe. Pikmin 2 has other eccentric enemies, as previously mentioned, but the enemies that have technological components are the breaking point to me. What once felt like a real planet now feels like a video game world. These enemies don't feel like they were designed with the idea that they are natural parts of the world, they feel like the designers wanted enemies that have guns and worked backwards from there. They sacrificed the world that had so elegantly been created for the sake of making a more challenging boss fight. They sacrificed their personality for the sake of making it more fun for the player.

Speaking of boss fights, I feel the way later Pikmin games handle their bosses also makes this world feel less tangible. Pikmin 1, of course, had its fair share of boss fights, with each main area having at least two to its name. However, in Pikmin 1 bosses didn't really feel like bosses in the same way that they would in the later games. Bosses felt like part of the ecosystem, the geography of the areas communicating to you "this is definitely a boss" but also making it feel very natural, as if these were simply more animals you were naturally stumbling across on your quest for survival. The sole exception to this being the final boss, the Emperor Bulblax, which takes place in an area dedicated to it. I'm not the most fond of this decision either, the Final Trial I feel misses the mark with what makes the rest of the game so great, but I can appreciate it on a certain level as sort of a test of the player's knowledge and resourcefulness.

Starting with Pikmin 2 though, basically every boss encounter is a final trial. The introduction of dungeons to the game also saw the introduction of more dedicated boss areas. Most dungeons end with this large room that exists only to contain a boss fight, as you would likely expect dungeons to. There is also a clear lack of bosses that naturally occur in the overworld on top of this. I feel this ultimately makes the bosses in Pikmin 2 feel less substantial. Despite the fact that sometimes they would be fascinating looks into the creatures that exist in the Pikmin world, like the Empress Bulblax which is a giant matronly Grub Dog who is constantly giving birth to young Bulborbs, it becomes difficult to see them as anything other than video game boss fights. This disconnect only becomes greater as the game progresses, dungeons may have multiple boss encounters which all choreograph that they are boss fights, the realism slowly vanishes as bosses become more eccentric, culminating in the games' final boss which is a giant insect that uses a sink and a vacuum tube to fight you.

Pikmin 3 is somehow worse about this fact, though. Despite Pikmin 3 in many ways being a return to form of Pikmin 1, including having many of the games' bosses just naturally appear in the overworld as if they're normal creatures inhabiting this planet, it makes a much bigger blunder by introducing major area bosses to the formula. The six major bosses of Pikmin 3 are not only entirely unique enemies unseen anywhere else in the game, but they all have incredibly specific battle arenas that all have little build up sections, have little intro cutscenes to show off the boss in all its splendor, and have entirely unique fights with specific mechanics and, usually, some sort of puzzle to be solved to gain the ability to attack them. They are very literally Zelda bosses in the middle of this Pikmin game, bosses designed to be more fun and more interesting than all that came before. Bosses are designed to have this feeling of grandeur to them, for the player to look at and feel like they've accomplished something, like they've defeated a real, honest to god video game boss. And they are fun, they are unique, interesting battles to both flex the designer's creativity and the players' understanding of the mechanics. But they also feel like they once again are sacrificing what made Pikmin so special in the first place for the sake of fun.

The dungeons introduced in Pikmin 2 are the biggest example of this idea, however. Dungeons are the most contentious mechanic in the Pikmin series to me. So much so that their reintroduction turned me off of Pikmin 4 almost entirely. I think if you have read this far, you can imagine why. Pikmin originally operated under this idea that it was a race against the clock, you only had so much time to accomplish goals for the day before the night comes and you have to leave the planet due to hostile nocturnal predators. While I find this element extremely compelling as it adds to the survival nature of the story, admittedly a lot of people find time limits like this anxiety-inducing. I have had plenty of trouble getting people into one of my favorite games of all time, Majora's Mask, due to the time limit at the core of its gameplay. So Pikmin 2 effectively removes it with the introduction of dungeons.

Dungeons are by far the mechanic that robs Pikmin 2 of the thing that made Pikmin 1 so special. I've talked a lot about Pikmin 1 feeling so real, like a functioning world that Olimar is a trespasser on. And dungeons, wholesale, undo this idea more than any other. Not only does time freeze in them, making the entire day restriction pretty superfluous all told, but dungeons make Pikmin's world feel like a video game the most. You'll enter one and it'll have this absolutely unhinged scenery ranging from "an actual cave system" to "what appears to be leftover plumbing from the world before" to "an illogically hollow space that looks like a classroom". I'm pretty sure at least one dungeon takes on the appearance of being in the sky despite all of them being entirely underground. These are not lost places, buried ruins of a forgotten civilization that Olimar and Louie are uncovering, these are meaningless backdrops, designed to be visually stimulating without any care for what they mean to the atmosphere.

Not only that but they completely ruin the whole idea of this being a functional ecosystem in the first place. You are bombarded with loads of rooms of just enemies hanging out together with no rhyme or reason. The idea these were all real animals was always limited by the game's AI, mind, which is why in all Pikmin games you rarely see enemies interact with each other. But due to dungeons' tight, enclosed areas, it can't help but draw attention to how much the creatures of the Pikmin world are just video game enemies. They are there to serve a specific purpose, to be a problem for the player, and have no greater context beyond that. What was once a world full of such potential, such promise, such ecological value now feels like nothing more than it is, a video game. A good video game, mind. But a video game.

Pikmin 1 is not a great video game. It's arguably not even a good one anymore; over two decades have passed since it came out and it has aged considerably. It's mechanically lacking, so much so that an entire type of Pikmin is relegated to doing an incredibly specific job because the intended mechanic for it couldn't be implemented. The AI is terrible, Pikmin are incredibly dumb, putting themselves in danger constantly just from losing track of the player or their pathing back to base being terrible. I think I have genuinely had more Pikmin die falling through a bridge they're building than to any of the numerous non-boss enemies in the game. The game can be almost entirely solved on your second playthrough, making almost all of the core points to its favor seem kind of trivial. Honestly, I feel like it can be solved pretty easily on your first playthrough, I only didn't get to the optimal number of days on the first try because of a bad run in with a Wollywog or two. It is a rough experience, especially with all the later Pikmin games that just improve the gameplay a hundred fold. Pikmin 4 even contains something of a better remake of Pikmin 1, with an even tighter time limit to battle against. Literally I have had multiple friends attempt to sell me on the fourth game entirely on this mode, saying I have to play it if Pikmin 1 is my favorite (this mode is locked behind a game I'm unsure if I would otherwise enjoy). As a game Pikmin 1 is the worst entry in this series.

But Pikmin 1 is also a totally unique work of art, doing so much right that its successors fail to capture. It's something that can only be created by someone who has an entirely out there idea with no clue if it's going to work and the wherewithal to push forward regardless. And I feel as though Nintendo did to Pikmin what it always does, smooth out its edges when its edges are the things about it that make it brilliant. Pikmin is now a better video game, there is no argument to be had there. For all my talk about what does and doesn't work about Pikmin 3, I had more actual fun playing it than I ever had Pikmin 1, despite my clear bias towards the latter game. But, I feel as though in making Pikmin a better game, they made it a worse piece of art. It has lost something in its numerous iterations, something that was seen as a problem to be solved by a company that puts fun over art.

I cannot in good conscience say we would be better off with a world where Pikmin prioritized the things I loved about the first game. The public has certainly spoken on that fact, Pikmin continues to sell more and be enjoyed by new players with each entry. And I cannot bring myself to mourn the fact that all those people are choosing a more fun game. That's the medium, fun should be paramount, I recognize the artistic significance of Soulsbornes and yet I don't play any of them because I don't think they're very fun! But, to me, Pikmin 1 will likely remain the best Pikmin game for many of the reasons people would cite it as the worst one.