Completion Time: 7h:06m:00s
Rating: 9/10

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Olimar's Folly

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Captain Olimar has made a grave mistake, crash-landing on planet PNF-404 and destroying his only means of escape. He finds solace in the Pikmin, a small collection of imps that do his bidding and are more than willing to complete tasks ranging from menial labor to overthrowing the behemoth bugs attacking you. But you only have enough resources to survive on the planet 30 days, and your ship is missing a total of 30 pieces. How will you manage? By manipulating the wildlife, of course!

A real image of me as a kid looking quizzically at puzzles

Pikmin is a game that I played a bit of as a kid, but the time constraint and heavy puzzle aspect of the game always stressed me out, so I never got very far. Very similar story to my Luigi's Mansion blog post, I know. But when I mean I didn't get far in this one, I mean it. I barely reached the cave area, and I never even fought any of the boss characters present in the game. Not the beetle, not the burrowing heron, let alone the final bulborb. But with this blog series I'm doing, I figured it was finally time that I found out what all the fuss was about by diving back into the weeds of Pikmin!

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Amassing an Army

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The main mechanic of Pikmin is entirely based around puzzle solving, which may not be the takeaway of some viewing it from the outside. Seems to be pretty combat focused, no? Well, yes and no, but even the fights that you have to engage in are more about thinking through your options rather than just piling Pikmin on top of an enemy. You'll certainly be doing that too, but without a good gameplan you're just sending the little critters straight to the slaughter. Take the Puffstool boss, for instance. This giant walking shroom will occasionally trip over itself if you can get it charging, at which point you should swarm its underbelly for maximum damage. The moment it gets up, call everyone back, because it'll start sending out poison clouds that your buddies are NOT ready to inhale. This goes for all of the bosses, they have specific strategies that you should probably adhere to if you want to minimize casualties. The name of the game is swarming your enemies, but they still die extremely easily, and you can only have 100 Pikmin out at a time. So think your strategy through first.

What a fun guy. Get it, like fungi? Not really sure how to make that work in writing...

Aside from the bosses, there are a number of environmental puzzles to worry about as well, and solving these will be key to obtaining the pieces of your ship. Some of these are simple and will lead to important bits like your engine or the guidance system. Others are a bit more troubling and take some time and sacrifice to figure out. These will usually give you an inflatable raft or a UV lamp or something else stupid that benefits Olimar in no way whatsoever. But he seems pretty greedy, and will accidentally drown tons of yellow Pikmin trying to toss them onto a shore because you can lob them higher onto a ledge so they can pick up a pair of fuzzy dice or whatever the hell suits Captain Olimar's fancy.

Alright men, ready for the most dangerous mission of your career?

I had a great deal of fun trying to maximize my gremlin army here, and I felt like at any given time I had the tiny goobers carrying off the corpses of my enemies, flower seeds, and some reactor that I picked up out of nowhere. In the meantime, I'm guiding another army of red Pikmin through a maze of flames (red are impervious to fire damage), only to reach the end and come across a giant pool of water housing the next piece. For this, I need blue Pikmin (blue can swim without drowning), so I have to march all the way back and pick up blue because all the blue I DID have I told to hoist some dead frog into their ship (which are called Onions). See why I was digging this so much? There's an intense management behind the strategy here that isn't relegated to just some turn-based combat, which I found fascinating and engaging.

And yellow Pikmin, who can carry bombs, are the only Pikmin that can be traitorous turncoats that explode your whole team

All of this is leading up to Olimar getting back home, and once you have 29 of the 30 missing parts, it's time to get to the final trial area, which encompasses a small obstacle course utilizing the unique abilities of each of the Pikmin. Once you make it to the end, you fight the Queen Bulborb for the final piece of the ship. This is a tough battle, as the two attacks the queen has are to lick up all of your Pikmin in one gulp, and then to pounce on them from above, which can devastatingly wipe out your entire armada (and you if you aren't careful)! I was very methodical with this fight, only engaging with the few hits I knew I could get in and then backing off and fleeing until I felt I had an opening. And finally, the queen was felled and I received... the piggy bank. Well, at least the fight was challengingly fun.

Death to the Queen Bulborb! Liberty for PNF-404!

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Completing the Game

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To reiterate on an earlier statement, I had a similar worry going into this that I had for Luigi's Mansion. I was certain I'd be able to beat the game and do much better than I had as a kid. But the completing of the game, I had no idea how many times I'd have to go through this one. Would I need to create specific saves after good days so that I could reload without worrying about complete loss of Pikmin? I mean, the time constraint aspect of the game is enough to put me on edge the entire time I'm playing, even if the ideal ratio of ship parts to days is 1:1 and I can surely do better than that, right? Well, surprisingly, yes I not only was able to do better than that, but got to the end with all ship pieces and days to spare. I did so well early on, even grabbing 3 pieces in a day once, that I spent some days merely growing Pikmin numbers and not worrying about anything else. Seemed to work out well for me! Sure I lost tons of numbers of lives on my quest to get home, but it was all worth it I assume!

Olimar has doomed the entire universe to total Pikmin conquest

I should also note that there's a Challenge Mode that you can play from the main menu, though there isn't really a completion alongside this. The basic idea is that for each map, you grow as many Pikmin in a single day as possible. No worrying about other tasks like getting home, you've got Onions to fill! Even so, I went ahead and played one of these and got what I thought was a stellar score, until I realized that it isn't the total number you grow within the day, but rather your number at the end of the day. So it wasn't very smart of me to march so many of them off to their deaths in the name of progress I suppose.

You can see the exact moment I sacrificed so many blues just to get reds

Pikmin is a great one, and I can only wonder why it took so long for it to become a franchise in it's own right. Is Pikmin 2 a black sheep or something? Well, I'll find out soon enough when I complete that one, which may be sooner rather than later since as soon as I was done with this one, I ordered a physical Pikmin 2 copy.

This is another entry in a series where I go through and complete every GameCube game, as it is the largest part of my video game collection. GameCube Games: 15/652