The Biggest Game Project on this Planet

Pikmin

Woohoo! Lots of short games coming up! I'm gonna blaze through my collection like this, so expect plenty updates this week.

Today is Pikmin! TOTALLY unrelated to the Namco character with an affection for pills and blue ghosts, Pikmin are small plantlike creatures which are totally stupid and helpless on their own, but can destroy entire ecosystems when in groups and with proper guidance.
The guidance comes in the form of Captain Olimar (orima- in Japanese, which is a "clever" anagram of Mario), who crash-lands on this strange new planet with his spaceship. 30 Parts of his ship are scattered all over the planet, and so it is up to you to retrieve all of them (or at least all the vital ones) with the help of those lovely Pikmin.
Olimar finds one red Pikmin on his exploration of the crash-site, which immediately acknowledges him as its parent, and all the others will follow. New Pikmin can be created by having your Pikmin carry pellets with numbers on them or killed monsters to their mothership (which is called an Onion, because it looks like one) and soon you can have your own tiny army of vicious little shits, armed to the teeth with cuteness.

You start out with only Red Pikmin, which are strong and resilient against fire, but soon you will find Yellow Pikmin, which can carry Bomb Rocks and can be tossed further and higher, and finally Blue Pikmin, which are weaker, but can survive in water.
All of this leads to strategic gameplay, involving lots of puzzles requiring clever use of each Pikmin's abilities to retrieve all of Olimar's lost space ship parts.
It's kind of a mixture between a Real Time Strategy game, without building bases and waging war, and a kind of 3D Lemmings, only not quite as crappy as the game of the same name.
Best of both worlds really.

To add some much-needed difficulty to this game, you get a rather strict time limit.
Pikmin can only work during day time, because at night, monsters will run amock and eat everything on sight, so you have to make sure you get everything done when the sun is still out. I'm not sure how much time that is exactly, but I had the feeling it was about 15 minutes or so, which is pretty strict, but should be enough to gather about 2 pieces of aircraft every time.
Which is why you get ANOTHER restriction: you have to do it in 30 days. This strange new planet contains a kind of poisonous oxigen and Olimar only has enough energy left in his Air cleaning device to survive for 30 days, so you have to finish the game in 30 times 15 minutes, approximately.
And this is really the only difficulty factor in the entire game. The puzzles are rather easy, enemies don't put up much of a fight, except for the final boss, so the ONLY trouble lies in the fact that the entire game is under time pressure, and I HATE that.
Remember Breath of Fire V? No? That's because you've never played it because it SUCKED for exactly the same reason.
To be honest though, like I said, this game is much much easier than Capcom's instrument of torture, so even the strict time limit won't form much of a problem, but it's still a cheap way of adding difficulty to a game.

And you know what's fun? When you're dragging the FINAL piece of your starship to its rightful place, only to have the timer reach Zero literally one FUCKING MILLIMETER before the finish line. That happened to me, and I was less than amused.
On the other hand, this is Nintendo, and they're nice enough to make sure that, even if you come back the next day, everything is exactly where you left it, so you never have to redo something, and it was only a matter of dragging that piece the last bit anyway, but it still annoyed me that I had to use an extra day for it.

Other than that, there's very little to say about this game. It's very straightforward, and it's pure Nintendo, which means extremely cute characters, great and intuitive controls and just a very enjoyable game experience overall.
Nintendo STILL needs to learn how to reward gamers who go 'all the way' though.
They usually give you a lot of things to do, in this case you don't have to find all 30 parts, but if you do, you do not get much of a reward, which I'm afraid is examplary of most Nintendo games. Great fun, with plenty of added challenge, but no reward other than the fact that you can boast you pulled it off.
Anyway, it's not so difficult in any case, which means that it's more than likely that you'll find everything on your first playthrough, which immediately forms the biggest problem of this game: no replay value.
Once you finish there's nothing to come back to. There's a challenge mode where the goal is to create as many Pikmin as possible in the span of one day, but it's a rather useless playmode, since it doesn't add anything except for some simple score-breaking incentive, which hasn't been fun since the middle ages.

But I bitch and I bitch, yet the fact of the matter is that it's really enjoyable to play through one time. It's a very original concept and it's very well executed, be it with a cheaply implemented difficulty and no replay value.
It's cute as hell though, you can make of that what you will.

I give it a nice 8.4, and now I'm off to crush some snails in the backyard.

posted by Ingen! @ 1:09 PM