Pikmin 3 Review

by SaikyoBro on Aug 5th, 2013

After a nine year hiatus, the Pikmin series is back. Notable for being the first important Wii U game since it came out last November, longtime fans and first-time players alike were all looking forward to taking control of massive armies of the adorable little creatures. Given the number of delays this game suffered, expectations were certainly high. Did it deliver? For the most part, absolutely!

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.

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.

However, the puzzles are also probably one of my biggest problems with the game. While they were common in the first game, Pikmin 2 kind of shifted the balance to strategy more than puzzle solving. Which Pikmin you take into battle, which Pikmin you assign to carry back treasure, etc. It still had its fair share of puzzles, but strategy was the more important aspect. In this sense, Pikmin 3 is more like the first game. You aren’t going into caves, taking all their treasure, and killing bosses, you’re just going around finding fruit and killing enemies. You still need to use your brain when deciding which Pikmin to use and such, but reaching the objects you’re after is a lot more about problem solving than thinking on your feet and taking action as quickly as you can. Some people may prefer this, and while a lot of the puzzles are fun and well-designed, some of them just drag on and on. I can think of at least 2 or 3 instances where trying to get to a single piece of fruit involves going through a HUGE puzzle that takes up most of your day. The day ending is another problem. While I wouldn’t expect a Pikmin game NOT to use days ending, things work differently than they did in the second game. In Pikmin 2, if you’re in the middle of an intense boss fight, time doesn’t run out. You either run away or fight him in one sitting. In Pikmin 3 however, time still runs out during boss fights, which can actually be really, really lame. Getting him down to a pixel of health left then suddenly being forced to stop playing for a few minutes then go back and finish it can be annoying and kill the excitement you get from them, during the final boss especially.

But ignoring the obnoxious time limit, fighting bosses in this game becomes one of the highlights. They were in Pikmin and Pikmin 2, but not the way they are here. In the older games, most boss fights are pretty quick. Either you know what they’re doing, target their weak point, and take them down quickly, or your army gets slaughtered and you lose. They were fun for sure, but quick and not always memorable. In Pikmin 3, the boss fights have been revamped to be lengthier, harder, and more exciting in general. You’re fighting MUCH bigger creatures, many of them popping out randomly and being very surprising; you’ll walk into a room, go 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 the first 2 games. By moving the C stick, all your pikmin would move in the direction you tell them to without leaving your squad, and attack/pick up anything they pass. This made things quick and convenient, but it’s not in this game, meaning you have to mostly throw your Pikmin at whatever you want them to attack or carry. What gives? There are a lot of cool new mechanics as well though: you have a spindash-err, dodge roll that quickly makes your characters and your whole army quickly roll out of the way of an attack. It works really well and looks hilarious. There’s also a lock-on feature that’s really useful when it works, but sometimes has trouble targeting exactly what you want. Regardless, the controls are simple and intuitive and easy to adjust to whether you’ve played the previous games or not.

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.

4/5

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