hello! the pikmin 4 release date trailer just came out on the nintendo direct. i'm sure you've seen it. generally, i think it looks awesome, but i have some concerns. as someone who is known to think and write a lot about pikmin, i felt it would be proper for me to make a blog post about it.

uhhh right off the bat i'm just gonna say that i'm not really gonna talk about colonialism in the games. i don't wanna talk about it because it is complicated and this post is already too long and windy. maybe that's a post for another day :-)

background

for if you haven't played the game: the pikmin are fucking adorable, there's a bunch of like cute bugs and shit that you kill, and there's stuff you collect. the rest is commentary.

real quick: the plot of each pikmin game.
in pikmin 1 you play as olimar, a space trucker/amateur scientist from the planet hocotate who crash landed on a "distant planet" (earth) later named "pnf-404." you have to use the pikmin to recover the parts of olimar's ship before the toxic atmosphere kills him. you have 30 days, and then he dies.
in pikmin 2, olimar returns to pnf-404 with louie. olimar and louie are tasked with finding treasures on pnf-404 to repay the debt the company they work for has accrued. after the debt is repaid, olimar goes home, but leaves louie behind. he and the president of his company return to find louie and make more $$$.
in pikmin 3, you play as alph, brittany, and charlie, an explorer trio from planet koppai. koppai has run out of food, so they sent these explorers to pnf-404 to collect the various alien fruits and feed their hungry planet.

the scope of the series expands over time, starting with an individual, then a company, then a whole planet.

two tones

the identity of the pikmin series is perpetually at odds with itself. there are two distinct tones at play. the first is the harrowing sci-fi adventure part of the games. olimar, marooned on a planet, left to die; olimar and the president searching desperately for louie; the koppalites with the fate of their world on their shoulders. feelings of otherworldliness, isolation, and wonder.

the second is the cute, gardening aesthetic of the game. you're in a pretty little garden with petals falling from the sky and flower pots and the beauty of lightly eroded civilization reclaimed by nature. the pikmin themselves are also a major contributor to the cute aesthetic. 

this duality is most apparent in pikmin 3, which narratively has the widest scope and the highest stakes. at this point in the series, nintendo started to understand how cute and marketable the pikmin are. there are several ways this impacted the tone of the game. pikmin 3 came with the release of three animated shorts a year later. these shorts were mostly about the pikmin, with no trace of a global starvation event. olimar does appear in two of the shorts, though it's not made clear what circumstance he is in. pikmin 3 deluxe, the switch port of the game, also included a camera mode, so you can get right down there with alph and the others to take photos of the pikmin. the dialogue, which is largely light and humorous (but not quite funny), undercuts the literal events of the narrative.

perhaps the deepest and most central source of this dissonance is the mechanical objective of the game. to save their planet, they must collect the fruits of pnf-404. fruits, famously, are the cutest foods! when the player collects a fruit, they're not thinking "wow, i hope the seeds of this cantaloupe will feed the citizens of koppai for years to come. surely, this society on the brink of starvation and collapse will flourish as a result of the hard work i've put into this expedition." instead, they're thinking, "wow look it's a melon! it's got the cute stem thing like in the emoji! hehehe they're calling it a 'wayward moon,' how strange and delightful!"

this is all not to say that pikmin 3 is not an intense game. it has very intense mechanical moments, specifically the boss fights, which are all huge, over the top, and strange, even from the get-go. the quaggled mireclops, just in terms of scale alone, is absolutely fucking terrifying. the difficult to understand strategy required to defeat it coupled with its devastating attacks makes for an unforgettable, intense experience. the plasm wraith, the final boss, which requires the player to use their pikmin to navigate a cramped cave full of traps while the gooey golden creature slowly chases them, is stressful in a way that the rest of the boss encounters in the series cannot live up to. (EXCEPT for one example from pikmin 2. i will get there later. oh my god will i get there.) my point is not that pikmin 3 is not a difficult or intense game, but rather that its largely cute atmosphere does not jibe with the intensity of its narrative.

despite these problems i have with the game, i think the dissonance in the tone of pikmin 3 makes a lot of sense. they needed a compelling story to give the player a reason to collect stuff, but they didn't want to alienate their audience by making something cold or too serious.

pikmin 1 is stressful, lonely, and strangely beautiful. this cute factor of the game is offset by its strange beauty, which makes it more cohesive than the other games. in pikmin 1, the player needs to collect about one ship part every day in order to not lose. there is little leeway, especially if they are playing for the first time. this gameplay is literaly what is happening to olimar narratively, unlike how the gameplay of pikmin 3 doesn't represent starvation and the gameplay of pikmin 2 doesn't represent debt.

as a character, olimar is alone and without answers. he has to discover everything on pnf-404 and figure it out himself. this reflects the way the player has to learn how to play the game themself. this might sound like a given, but that's not always true. in pikmin 2, for example, olimar has much more experience managing the pikmin than louie does, even though the way the characters play is identical, matching the skill level of the player more than the skill levels of the characters.

the environment of pikmin 1 isn't as cute as the later games. the player can see obvious traces of humanity, like rusty cans and a single empty codd-neck bottle. for the most part, they can't interact with these objects, so they appear as huge, inviolable monoliths to an absent humanity. this creates a sense of austerity in the world. there are things larger than olimar that he can't do anything about, things he can't understand.

the soundtrack also has an important role in the tone. the music in the series is always strange and wondrous. the overworld themes in the later two games, the ones that play in the main areas of the game rather than those that play in the caves or other interiors, are far more upbeat and exploratory than in pikmin 1. the general vibe of pikmin 2 and 3 are uplifted by these tracks, even though there lurks beneath them a more mysterious and harrowing core. the first game also, overall, has a greater sense of lonliness in its soundtrack. it sounds almost like the game is languishing as you play it, as if you can hear olimar being poisoned by the atmosphere in pnf-404 in real time.

pikmin 1 has the greatest sense of purpose in terms of its tone and narrative because of the way that it's joined with the gameplay, level design, and soundtrack.

in contrast to the other games, the narrative of pikmin 2 is almost trite. the live-or-die intensity of the first game is replaced by debt of hocotate freight, the company olimar and louie work for. personally, i don't give a shit about hocotate freight. sure like, obviously the topic of debt isn't "trite," but, similar to pikmin 3, the distance between the debt and the present moment of the game nullifies the intensity of it.

the pivot in the middle of the story is where it truly becomes interesting. in fact, i wrote a whole zine about this before! olimar leaving louie on the planet and subsequently returning with the president to save him reintroduces the kind of direct mortal danger present in in the first game. even so, the gameplay doesn't really change, after this shift outside of louie being replaced by the president (who, again, has the same skill set as olimar and louie) and the ship being given a set of shiny golden armor.

the treasures, the human elements of the game, are discrete, identifiable, and collectable, unlike in pikmin 1. there's also a degree of humor here, in the way the ship names the treasures, like the rubber duck that it calls"rubber ugly." the treasures are charming and strange. you can see how the developers value this charm because of the way they reuse this bit in the names of the fruits in the third game, sometimes even borrowing the names directly from pikmin 2.

the caves are perhaps the most important part of the game. pikmin 2 has 14 caves, which make up the vast majority of the game world. the caves are abstract spaces, with seven visual styles. "concrete," "snow," "tile," and "soil" floors are what you would expect. they're enclosed areas with different features. "garden" and "toybox" style floors are flat, endless planes. the bounds are marked off by small fences that olimar can't get over, either pebbles or blocks. the metal style of cave is unique. the metal floors also have smaller walls resembling fences, but beyond those walls is the void. these floors are suspended in the air by supports that seem to extend impossibly far down.

the caves, in short, are freaky. some of them are cramped, some of them are sprawling, some of them  are abstract, impossible spaces. to some degree the caves restore the sense of strange wonder from the first game. on the other hand, they have a way of blending in with each other, as the modular, procedural nature of them makes them somewhat predictable. this makes the game less about exploring and more about doing. this is not to say that the caves aren't each unique. they really do make a good use of different combinations of bugs and layouts. rather, my point is that the modularity of the caves undercuts their the surrealism and wonder.

(what you've been waiting for)

the submerged castle is easily the most interesting part of pikmin 2. in fact, i would go so far to say that it is one of the best peices of game design in the whole series. it's unique in two ways. the first is that you can only take blue pikmin in, even though it has every type of hazard in it. the other major peice of design is the timer. after about five minutes spent on each floor, the waterwraith spawns, an invincible ghastly boss that chases you around, crushing your pikmin indiscriminately. i would argue that the time limit in the submerged castle is more impactful than the time limit in pikmin 1 on account of its uncertainty. in pikmin 1, you lose when the time limit is up. you can plan out each day to maximize your chances of success. in the submerged castle, the time limit creates something that will cause you to lose, if you give it enough time, rather than making you lose outright.

but what's really brilliant about the submerged castle is the humor of it all. the treasures in there aren't worth much. most of them are cookies or other sweets worth less than 100 pokos. you're risking it all in one of the scariest levels in the game, and you barely get anything for it!

when you do reach the final floor, you acquire purple pikmin, which let you take on the boss for real. once you use the impact of the purple pikmin to freeze the waterwraith in place and disarm it, it starts running around on its little water legs like a baby. if you attack it, it cowers, leaning close to the floor, covering its neck. its your greatest fear, but when you finally have the tools to fight it, you realize it's pathetic.

the submerged castle in and of itself has its own dual identity, but unlike pikmin 3 and the rest of pikmin 2, this isn't an identity crisis as much as it's a collaboration of these two extremes. the difference is the high-concept nature and the apparent intentionality of the cave. the humor supports the fear, whereas in pikmin 3, the wonder does not support the starvation.

pikmin 4 release date trailer

ok! here we are! these are my concerns with the pikmin 4 trailer.

clearly, nintendo is leaning more towards the cute gardening aesthetic. this first way we can see this is with oatchi, the dog, who, frankly, belongs in a pixar film. his design is so familiar as the annoying comic relief animal sidekick type present in every animated kids movie (and some of the live action ones). i think it's super cool that they give you a dog you can ride, but i just wish he didn't look quite like that! olimar's dog bulbie (who is where the name for the bulborbs comes from) is a hole in the series that needed to be filled since its release, but not like this.

the other big thing is the way they seem to be portraying humanity in this game. on the box art, there is a whole ass human house in the background. the overworld levels they showed off take place in a garden and a playground. the levels seem to more prominently feature human structures like a flower bed, a park bench, and a stack of tires. the presence of humanity in the structure of the levels is becoming recognizable on a macro scale, rather than something one has to make out on a smaller scale.

the new camera angle, close to the captain, facing mostly forward and a little bit down, looks like it has the effect of making the player empathize with the captains more. it also seems to stop distorting the scale of the game. in pikmin 1 and 2, the player has the option to view the game from a distant birds-eye view, which offset olimar's tiny stature. we can see in the trailer the effect of the camera angle on the boss encounters. this looks like a shift to create a more cohesive experience.

on one hand, the in tact human structures are less interesting and easier to understand. on the other hand, they are trying to get us to see these structures from a new perspective. it feels like a shift towards pikmin 3 in terms of aesthetic and marketability and a shift towards pikmin 1 and 2 in terms of discovery and otherworldliness. of course, this is all without any idea of what the actual plot of the game is. i guess there are at least four koppalite captains? and a dog? and "castaways," whatever that means? the plot of the game is what i am most worried about nintendo fucking up, but i am excited to find out what they do with it.

i'm conflicted. obviously watching a trailer cannot give you the same understanding of a game as actually, you know, playing it, so this is kind of just what i am thinking right now. this also gave me the impetus to actually understand and write down my thoughts about the tone of the pikmin series.

OH i forgot to mention the ice pikmin. yeah i think they look cool i guess. i don't quite understand the purpose of them yet, so i don't have much to say.

and of course this all just makes me more excited :-)

tell me what you think! :-) 🍂🍂🍃🍃🌼🌼

otherwise, i am excited to see the new bug designs! i feel as if they have only gotten better over time. the return of the empress bulblax makes me wanna see how they would remaster other boss designs. i think man at arms is specifically someone that would be interesting to adapt. maybe the ranging bloyster could return? i always feel as if there are not enough bloysters in the game.

 

check out these baby snagrets, or snaglets, if you will. beautiful little creatures.