The Pikmin Trilogy: Game 1

The Pikmin Trilogy: Game 1

     Hello and welcome to my blog! In this blog, I will be going over one of my favorite franchise from Nintendo, the Pikmin franchise, I’ll be going into history, the story, reviewing the game, and sharing some of my own experiences throughout the trilogy. So without further ado, let’s start with some history.

     Back in 2001, GameCube was still in its first years, and had yet to prove its ability, but about a month after the system’s release, the game titled “Pikmin” was given to the world, and by the world I mean Japan of course! Its North American release was December 2^nd 2001, and its European release was June 14 of the next year.

     The original mechanic that inspired Pikmin came about when testing the capabilities of the GameCube’s multiple AI limitations, which Nintendo showed off by creating one hundred little Mario and made them run around, doing different things separate from the other Mario. In Pikmin, you control a squad of one hundred Pikmin, who all act as either a separate unit, or work together to do tasks far bigger than themselves. This was the basis of the Pikmin mechanics; truly, these games demonstrated the AI capability of the early GameCube. 

      After showing off the capabilities of the GameCube, the director Shigefumi Hino, Masamichi Abe, and the other developers had no idea of what the game was going to be. After seeing a small bit of the game (a group of Pikmin carrying a creature) they began to get an idea for what the game would be about. 

     The first two games follow the 2 centimeter tall protagonist, Captain Olimar, an employee of the long haul space freight company by the name of “Hocotate Freight”. On one of his vacation, Olimar ran into an asteroid and plummeted into an uncharted planet. (This in later games was named “PNF-404”) during his plummet into the planet, the atmosphere tore his ship to bit, spreading ship parts far across the land, finally ending in the crash. Olimar awoke to find his beloved ship –the Dolphin- in ruins, and his life support systems was to fail in approximately thirty days. After walking about, Olimar stumbles across a strange object, upon coming close to it, sprung out of the ground and produced a small seed, the seed grew into a Pikmin (named after Olimar’s favorite brand of pikpik-carrots) the orb shaped object that produced the Pikmin was named the Onion (again, named after a food from Olimar’s home planet)

     Olimar grew a small squadron of Pikmin, and luck would have it, found the engine to his ship on the first day. With new hope, Olimar flies into the atmosphere of the planet (to keep away from the nasty nocturnal creatures) and is astonished to find that the onion had followed him, and returned to the surface with him the next day.

     Fast forward, Olimar has found 29 ship parts, two new types of Pikmin: yellow and blue Pikmin, and four new areas he’s explored… but wait, he lost thirty ship parts, not 29. There was still one more ship part Olimar needed to find, and that last ship part happened to be inside a colossal monster (colossal compared to Olimar and the Pikmin that is) so Olimar bravely took his quadrant of Pikmin and slew the beast, and upon its demise, spat out Olimar’s last ship part, his treasured piggy bank. Triumphantly, Olimar returns to his home planet, leaving the Pikmin behind, and credits begin by leaving you on a hopeful and successful, yet somewhat sad note.

     The story may be a simple one, but I love it just the same. The second and third games have a different story, but still among the same simplicity of the first one, but we’ll get to that next time, it’s time for the review.

     When Pikmin came to the game market, no one had really seen something like this before, reviews seemed to be somewhat mixed, with people saying the game was too simple, and was littered with glitch, while other said it was fun, gave a challenge and had smooth controls. Ultimately, the reviews were more for the game than against it, but that doesn’t mean the people who didn’t really like it didn’t have good points. 

     First of all the premise of the game may be simple: a collecting game with minimal story, but that doesn’t mean that people who like story heavy games can’t enjoy this. The glitches in the game may turn some people off, for example, the game has a LOT of sequence breaking in it, making the intended 30 days to finish collecting all the parts seem overly generous as you only need maybe nineteen days at max, other glitches include Pikmin dying for absolutely no reason, Pikmin being crushed by seemingly nothing, ship parts being uncollectable thanks to certain mechanics and Olimar being able to go out of bounds in the map (arguable one of the more fun glitches to perform). Believe me, I’ve played this game many time, so I’ve seen a lot of glitches. The game is also very short, clocking in at about 4-5 hours with no post game, aside from a small “challenge mode” where you have to breed as many Pikmin as you can in a day, but it doesn’t really have a lot of meat to it and you’re better off playing the main story again.

     Some arguments the people who like the game make are: it’s just fun! Gong around collecting unique ship parts from the 5 unique maps has a certain charm, similar to that of an upgrading game. A lot of the parts have small puzzles that require you to use multiple Pikmin at once. There’s a certain satisfaction about getting a ship part to the ship and most of the time seeing the ship part actually appear on the ship, slowly but surely returning the dolphin back to its sleek working self. Another fun part about the game is the mini-bosses: the Mamuta, a mammalian like creature that enjoys pounding Pikmin into the ground, the Goolix, a cell-like creature that you use blue Pikmin to defeat, Beady long-legs, a tall spider creature that stops around, the Toxic toadstool, a walking toadstool that can turn your Pikmin against you, and of course the most infamous of the bosses, the Smoky Progg, who will kill your Pikmin just by touching them, think about that. The controls to Pikmin are fairly simple, you have control stick to move Olimar, tap ‘A’ to throw Pikmin, ‘X’ to disband them, ‘Y’ to check the map/end the day early, ‘B’ to whistle your Pikmin, ‘C’ stick to move them about in a line, and L/R/Z for camera controls, so overall very easy to remember controls.

     I never had never truly owned the game, with the occasional borrowing it form a friend here and there, until a few months ago when I ordered a copy from online, but before then I hadn’t owned the game, if fact, I wasn’t even old enough to play the game when I came out, but that doesn’t mean I’ve not had experience. The first time I played the game was when I borrowed it from a friend, and I had made it to the thirtieth day, yet still not get all the parts, and this is when I should mention that if you don’t get all the parts in time, you get a special cut scene, but I won’t spoil it if you haven’t seen it. Even though I’ve not had the game for that long, I still know it inside and out.

     Overall I enjoyed the game fairly well, some parts were tedious, like the lack of response of the whistle, the Pikmin being lazy and being left overnight for the monsters, the random Pikmin deaths and all the times something dumb happened, but the good parts were a blast, and are the reason I keep playing this game over and over when I have four hours to kill. On the whole I would recommend this game; it’s a very good intro to the Pikmin series and is probably the most dealing with Time-managing of the trio.

     On a side note, some of the glitches can result in amazing hilarity, and this came out when the GameCube was really young, so you’ll have to understand if there are a few glitches here and there (and believe me, there will be).