For those unfamiliar, the premise of the Pikmin series is that you’re in control of a group of astronauts who are on a strange new planet filled with small, alien plant things called Pikmin. They come in different types that all have different advantages and disadvantages over each other; Red Pikmin are immune to fire, but Blue Pikmin can swim. You control a huge army of these creatures to collect items and kill giant predators. It may sound kind of crazy, but it all begins to make sense once you play it. The controls are usually surprisingly straightforward considering everything happening on the screen and your goals are usually made clear, but you’ll need to use your Pikmin’s types to your advantage to effectively fight the monsters and bring the object you’re after back to your ship. You play the game in increments of “days”; 15 minute periods to do everything you need to do. At sundown, all of the Pikmin not with you or in their ships will be killed and eaten.
The new characters are all funny and likable. |
This game goes about things a little differently. Instead of playing as the protagonists of the first two games, Captain Olimar and Louie, there are three new playable characters you control; Alph the engineer, Brittany the botanist, and Captain Charlie. And instead of looking for parts of a crashed spaceship or valuable treasure, you’re looking for…fruit. It’s kind of lame actually, but I’ll get to that later. The characters all control pretty much identically and don’t have any clear strengths over each other, but you control all 3 of them at once, leading to some fun puzzles and multi-tasking. One thing that makes the multi-tasking easier is that you can assign your character and their Pikmin to go somewhere on their own without controlling them. So if I want to get Charlie and his 50 Pikmin and Brittany and her 50 to the same place, I can assign Brittany to go there while controlling Charlie, and we arrive at the same time. This makes things a lot faster and smoother than in Pikmin 2. The captains can also throw each other to get to higher places, which results in a lot of clever puzzles.
The epic and memorable boss fights are a huge plus. |
to get an object, and suddenly something huge will pop up from underground and attack you. They all go on for quite some time and have the ability to take out your pikmin in droves, so they’re as much about endurance as they are strategy and skill. They’re all cool looking and fun to fight, and reward you with giant fruit and very helpful new objects upon beating them.
The pikmin themselves are cool too. You have the classic red, blue, and yellow types, but two new ones as well; rock type and flying type. I’ll run down what they all do; red pikmin are the best fighters and are immune to fire, blue pikmin are the only ones who can survive water and attack while swimming, yellow pikmin conduct electricity and go the farthest when thrown, rock pikmin are do lots of damage when they land on enemies and can shatter glass, and flying pikmin are the worst fighters but can carry things back to your ship by air instead of on land, making them ideal. You also have the super-strong purple pikmin and the poisonous white pikmin from Pikmin 2, but they’re only available in the mission mode. This is actually kind of a letdown for me, as I would’ve loved to see some cool puzzles and enemies built around using these 2 in the story mode. You unlock the pikmin you can use one at a time, starting with red and ending with blue. However, unlike the other games where you get them all in the first several days, there’s a lot of space between getting the new types in this game. There are 5 major bosses in this game, and you get the blue type between the 4th and 5th one. This means anything involving water for about 4/5ths of the game is completely inaccessible. Once you get every type of pikmin things become really fun, but for a long part of the game you’re stuck with just red, rock, and yellow. Nothing terrible, but I would’ve preferred having the flying and blue types a little bit earlier since they’re so helpful.
Another problem I have with the game is some issues with the controls. They’re not impossible to work with like in some other games, but let me explain; you have a super useful map on your GamePad that displays at all times. You can’t get it to show up on your TV in any way, so you’re forced to be looking up and down from your TV to your map quite often. If you play with the gamepad that’s not so bad, but if you use the Wii Remote and Nunchuck or the Pro Controller, it can be kind of confusing and frustrating at times. That said, all 3 of these control types work well and are fun to use. One annoying omission is the swarm feature from
Just seeing some of the enemies in motion is a delight itself. |
Lastly, I mentioned earlier that collecting fruit is kind of lame. And it is! While getting every ship part or every piece of treasure in Pikmin or Pikmin 2 would give you a cool, all-new ending, getting all the fruit in Pikmin 3 only gives you a slightly different one. While you can revisit the story mode after beating Pikmin 2 to collect every treasure you left behind, Pikmin 3′s post-game story mode is different. It’s sort of weird to explain but basically, you can revisit the story mode, just not to any point after the final boss. Not really a problem, just weird. The other post-game content is the mission mode, which not only allows you to do all kinds of fun new puzzles, take on rooms full of enemies, and fight all of the game’s bosses again, but also supports co-op! This is a welcome addition and gives a fun way to let multiple people play, and I can see it adding tons of play-time. There’s also a competitive multiplayer mode called “Bingo Battle” which seems fun and addicting if not ridiculously chaotic. Between these 2 modes and the 10+ hour story mode, I can see this game lasting a long time.
In the end it actually kind of looks like I complained about this game a lot, but that’s just because I played the other 2 games so much back in the day that it’s hard not to compare them. One thing’s for sure though; this game does a lot more right than it does wrong. It looks awesome in HD, the bosses are all amazing, the pikmin types are all diverse and fun to work with, the music is all fitting, it’s just wonderful to play. It’s happy atmosphere will put a smile on your face, but suddenly a huge monster will pop out and remind you that beneath the adorable and happy surface lies a deep and addicting strategy game.
8/10
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