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PaperclipPerfector  21hr ago (text post)   688 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 27, 2025

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So I got Pikmin 4 for Christmas from my wife, and finally started playing it. Parenthood can be like that sometimes.

I've loved Pikmin since I played the first one on my secondhand Gamecube in college. It has subtly evolved over time, and while I'm going through the motions on this 4th one, something of the spark from the first one seems missing.

The time limit is gone. This is controversial, and the series seems to alternate between having one or not. Despite the time limit putting me off from even trying the first game until I'd played virtually every other Gamecube game worth playing... I think I really like having it. The second game got rid of it, the third game brought it back, now the fourth game has gotten rid of it again. Definitely takes some of the pep out of your step, knowing you have as long as you want.

The game also feels enormously easier? I think I went almost 10 days before I lost a single Pikmin. I don't know when this change happened. Maybe I'm just that good at Pikmin these days, but I recall Pikmin 1 was a constant war of attrition the Pikmin were so oblivious and easily killed by everything. Pikmin 2 even more so. There was a constant need to grow your Pikmin population to cope with this. I actually don't remember how hard Pikmin 3 was in this regard, but Pikmin 4 is effortless so far. I think I still have a lot left though, more than half, so I suppose I'll see how that keeps up.

I keep going back and forth about what I think about the controls. The Gamecube title's used the C-Stick to send your hoard of Pikmin at enemies and around obstacles. Outside of that Pikmin were dumb as a rock and would happily kill themselves all sorts of creative ways. Now you can have all your Pikmin ride on a dog with you, and even outside of that they seem to have pretty good pathfinding? On the one hand, probably solid quality of life features. On the other hand, they trivialize or completely remove types of puzzles to solve from previous games. And I'm not sure the loss of these aspects is replaced by anything enabled by this QOL features.

I'll probably post again after I beat it, but my feelings about it now are that it's not bad, but it's pretty mid for a Pikmin game.

Pikmin 4 was definitely a major disappointment. I did complete it, although in my defense I was sick at the time and didn't have the energy to do anything but sit on the couch and play video games. Especially after Pikmin 3 Deluxe (the Switch release) having full 2-player co-op support, the "little brother" mode in Pikmin 4 manages to even further trivialize the difficulty.

I feel like it had a ridiculous amount of hand-holding and railroading. I understand having a little of that for a tutorial section at the start, but it never felt like there was a lot in the way of choices to make, which is especially weird for a game series where one of the main interesting mechanics is splitting your party and exploring.

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