Pikmin: More Fun Than Watching Grass Grow

When Shigeru Miyamoto announces that he’s creating a brand-new game, that tends to get the gaming world’s attention. After all, the man is responsible for some of the most venerated series in gaming history. He’s responsible for the Donkey Kong, Mario, and Legend of Zelda series, just to name a few. So, naturally, when it was announced that he would be bringing Pikmin to the GameCube shortly after the system’s launch, a few eyebrows were raised.

Pikmin, for months prior to its release, was described as a genre-spanning game that was beyond classification. That does remain true even after its release, as it is one of those rare games that borrows from aspects of several kinds of genres, but belongs to none itself. At its core, Pikmin is an adventure game, but it employs conventions found in puzzle games as well as real-time strategy games at times as well.

The basic premise of the game is that you control Captain Olimar, a spaceman who crash-lands on an alien planet, leaving him stranded. The spaceship (interestingly enough named the Dolphin, which was also the codename of the GameCube before it was officially announced) has shattered into 30 pieces that were scattered about the planet upon impact. To make matters worse, Olimar only has 30 days before the life-support functions in his space suit shut down, presumably with unpleasant results. Just when he thinks all is lost, Olimar stumbles upon a plant which sprouts from the ground to reveal a creature, which Olimar dubs a Pikmin. This creature comes from a strange structure called an Onion, which is used to produce even more of the Pikmin. The Pikmin follow Olimar around unquestioningly, and, in groups, they can accomplish things that Olimar himself cannot. So, with the aid of the Pikmin, Olimar ventures off into the alien world to reclaim the pieces of his spacecraft and return home to his family.

So, Olimar assembles groups of the Pikmin to create paths to the pieces of his spaceship that are scattered, and the Pikmin return them to his ship. The Pikmin themselves come in red, blue, and yellow varieties. The red Pikmin are strong fighters and resistant to fire; yellow Pikmin can be thrown farther and can carry bomb-rocks to demolish walls; and blue Pikmin are able to go underwater without drowning. It is the player’s job to exploit the skills of each type of Pikmin in order to attain the ultimate goal of reassembling the spaceship.

Standing in the player’s way are various obstacles, including unfriendly creatures, which generally are beaten down in a giant Pikmin mosh pit, walls which block Olimar’s way, and natural barriers like lakes and high cliffs. Thus, some puzzle-solving skills are in order, in order to get the spaceship part across the lake and past the fire that shoots out of the ground without losing too many Pikmin. To add to the player’s troubles, a “day” in Pikmin time amounts to around 15 to 20 minutes of real time, so some multitasking is in order if the player wants to accomplish everything necessary in a given time frame, which is where the real-time strategy element comes in. All in all, Pikmin is nothing if not original, and it does a good job of differentiating itself from the rest of the games out there by drawing on a diverse set of skills the player will need in order to play through the game.

Despite how complex the game seems from the description, playing Pikmin is actually quite simple to get into. One of Miyamoto’s strengths as a game designer is developing control schemes that are simple enough to become invisible to the player despite the complexity of the game, and this strength shines in Pikmin. The control stick moves Olimar around, as one would expect. The big A button plucks Pikmin out of the ground, and throws them at targets (which is how one most often gets the Pikmin to interact with the environment). B whistles for stray Pikmin who are not traveling with Olimar to join his group, and one can generally get Pikmin to come from a decent distance away, and X, conversely, dismisses the Pikmin following Olimar and sorts them by color, which makes it much easier to pick certain Pikmin out of a crowd. The C-stick can be used to move the whole crowd of Pikmin at once, which can be useful when you need to bum-rush an unfriendly creature. Y brings up your computer, which eventually expands to include a map of the area once you obtain a particular spaceship part. Finally, the shoulder buttons are used for camera control; R adjusts the level of zoom, L swings the camera behind Olimar (think Jet Grind Radio) and Z changes the angle of view from top-down to behind Olimar and vice versa.

In general, the control scheme is fairly intuitive and easy to pick up, especially given that the first day is essentially a big tutorial, and the game will also remind you of certain control options in between days. I do have two major complaints about the control, though. First is that Pikmin tend to get separated from the group way too easily, especially when going around corners or through tight spaces; in a timed game, it really is not fun to have to double back repeatedly to pick up stray Pikmin. Second, the camera control is severely limited. I’ve never been a fan of the “swing behind the character” camera control scheme, and in a game where you really need to be able to see things in order to plan your next move, the provided camera controls are rarely enough; you often want to be able to see more than the game will let you. In general, though, the control is quite well done and easy to pick up, despite its quirks.

Graphically, Pikmin is extremely impressive, and does a good job of exercising the GameCube’s ample hardware. Basically, Pikmin takes cartoony characters and places them in a realistic background, and both aspects are done extremely round. There are few jagged edges in the mostly rounded characters, even down to Olimar’s round nose and the Pikmin’s bean-shaped heads. The water effects, in particular, are breathtaking when viewed up close; the water ripples beautifully, and light sparkles off of it realistically. All in all, a top-notch job graphically.

Sound is also good, but not as impressive as the graphics. There are a few forgettable background music tracks; none are horrible, but there are few enough of them that they tend to get repetitive, especially since there are only one or two per area, and there are only four main areas. Sound effects are very cartoony, to be in line with the graphics, and can even be cute at times; the Pikmin do a little “hut-hut” marching grunts when you move them with the C-stick, and there’s a satisfying “boing” when you pluck a Pikmin from the ground. My only big complaint with the sound effects is that there’s a terrible clicking noise that comes out whenever your Pikmin get anywhere near water (which is, sadly, fairly often) and it really makes my ears hurt, bad. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was a rarity, but it happens often enough to be problematic.

So, in general, Pikmin is a technical wonder, much like the rest of Nintendo’s first-pary GameCube games, but is it worth buying? Well, yes and no. Truth be told, while I appreciate the genius that went into the game, I found myself putting it down and rarely picking it up again after only a couple of days.

My first big problem is the timed nature of the game. The game is obviously designed to have the player explore, yet the time limit forces the player to rush through said exploration in order to rescue all the spaceship parts in time. I constantly feel too rushed when playing Pikmin, and that detracts from the fun factor. Further, given that the game has a hard end at 30 game days, that severely limits the length of the game to somewhere around ten hours, which is not all that great.

The other big problem with the game is the lack of replay value. There are only four main areas (plus a fifth where you only fight the end boss) to explore, and the areas, while they have quite a bit to find, are not all that large. The puzzle aspect of the game also works against it here; once you figure out how to get a given piece, all the fun of getting that piece has been used up. There is a Challenge Mode, where you try to raise as many Pikmin as possible in a given amount of time, but this is a pretty shallow mode and doesn’t really add to the replay value. A multiplayer mode, perhaps where you raised Pikmin to destroy the opposing spaceman or spaceship, could have been interesting, but is nowhere to be found.

All in all, Pikmin is a game worth playing, but probably as a rental first to ensure that it’s got $50 worth of value to you. It’s a great game, at first, but the lack of replay value really doesn’t make it worth a $50 purchase; perhaps at half that, it would be a must-buy, but at it’s current price, Pikmin is strictly rental-first.