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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.
I generally think time limits are bad in games, with a few exceptions. The fundamental problem is that it's a threat. It's a threat that, if you do poorly, you're going to have to restart the entire game from scratch. Like a final boss that, if it kills you, deletes your save file (though less volatile). I don't want to get 90% of the way through a 20 hour game only to have to start over from scratch. I rarely play games a second time unless they are exceptionally good, I'm not replaying the entirety of your game over again just because I wasn't quite good enough the first time.
The main exception I have to this is if there's meta-progression, like in Roguelites, or like Dead Rising. If you've got a 1-2 hour turn around, and I unlock new stuff every time, and the entire game is built around randomized content so it's not just the same thing again, then we're good. Or like in Dead Rising if I get stronger and it's basically a new game plus where I can solve all the problems that happened the first time around there's wayyy less risk of failing the second time around, I can take that. What I don't want is the game to tell me that the last 20 hours of play time were pointless and none of it counts for anything.
That said, I didn't have to replay Pikmin 1, because I didn't fail. If the time limit is generous enough then the majority of players don't run afoul of it. The threat looms in the background, but isn't implemented. If it's set just right then it creates stakes and pressure: the player has to act strategically and not mess up and get their party slaughtered too many times or it'll take too long to repopulate, so it feels more important to perform well. But if it's too generous then players don't feel this pressure and the time limit might as well not even exist. But Pikmin 2 was able to have a lot more content in part because of the lack of a time limit: you can keep playing the game after you "beat" it and go explore and get every last piece of treasure because there's nothing stopping you from continuing to play.
I have not yet played Pikmin 3 or 4, so I can't comment on it there, though I intend to eventually. I anticipate that the time limit in 3 will either be obnoxious if its strict, or superfluous if it's easy. There's very rarely middle ground.
Did you ever play Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter? That had a really cool meta progression system tied to it, but the gameplay didn't really get fun until you got dragon powers - like 15 hours in. I wish more games did stuff like that though, Dead Rising lost so much charm when it dropped the time limit (although I still enjoyed the fourth game in a mindless way.)
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