Here we come to
the final entree into this blog (for now), the third, and most recent game,
Pikmin 3.
Before we start,
I’ll tell you a little story. I bought Pikmin 2 from my brother, and that was
fine, but since then I waited for the next games to come, I constantly would check
for the news on Pikmin 3 and none ever came, just people saying it got delayed
to the next year and the next year, and so on. During my wait I would look at
fan theory and speculation video to get some hype up. For a DECADE I had to
wait for the game, so you could imagine how exited I was to finally get my
hands on this game and to see what fan theories would end up becoming true and
what ones would fade away. To this day, the wait for Pikmin 3 has been the
longest time I’ve ever waited for a game.
So now, let’s
dive into Pikmin 3.
The game starts
out with a narrator telling us about the planet Koppai, and how due to poor
planning the planet is facing a world-wide food shortage, so they sent out scout
ships to search for life on other planets, but sadly none of the ships had
found edible matter. finally, there was one ships the came back with reports of
massive amounts of food. So Koppai sent three explorers; Alph the ship’s
engineer, Brittany the ship’s botanist/scientist, and Charlie the captain.
The three
explores leave on a ship called the S.S. Drake, and upon entering the Planet
PNF-404’s (which I should now mention was named in this game and is a pun on
the error 404 “page not found”) atmosphere, the ship mysteriously crashed. You
wake up in the perspective of Charlie, as the tutorial begins. Through a series
of yellow Pikmin encounters, you learn the basic controls for the game. The
tutorial ends when Charlie is ambushed by a mysterious entity not yet revealed.
The next perspective we get is that of Alph. Soon Alph discovers a strange
fruit like object that a small group of red Pikmin is trying to get. After throwing the Pikmin at it, it falls to
the ground, we of course know this to be the Pikmin mother ship -the onion- but
it’s later revealed the different onions now fuse together to create a bigger
onion.
Taking a bit of a
detour, I have a theory about why the onions fuse. If you don’t want to hear
it, then skip this. I believe after the first Pikmin game, Olimar had brought Pikmin
together, and once he left, the planet went under change (both geographically
and bio-diversely, as shown by the difference in Pikmin 2 maps from the ones in
Pikmin 1) and the Pikmin began to form a symbiotic relationships with each
other, thus after generation, gaining the ability to genetically fuse the
onions into one big one for more efficient work. Anyways, that’s just a theory,
a Pikmin theo—
Alph continues on
the path with the group of red Pikmin, and eventually finds the Drake. With
night time coming, and the nocturnal creatures on the prowl, Alph decided to
fly into the atmosphere for the night, but he discovers that he’s lost the
cosmic drive key.
The next day, Alph
goes to find Brittany. The Drake detects her signal and he flies to the general
area. After a bit of searching, Alph comes across a new type of Pikmin: rock Pikmin.
Their bodies are pebbles and they have the ability to smash glass walls, which
is one thing that separates Brittany and Alph. After saving Brittany, the two
finish the day and go back to the ship for the night. The next day, they find a
large arthropod creature called the Armored Mawdad living in a hollowed out
stump. They promptly kill the beast, and
it drops the next tool in helping you find Charlie.
After that, is
the real introduction to the yellow Pikmin, where in Brittany gets lost once
again and has to use yellow Pikmin to build a bridge to the other side of a steam.
Since explaining
the entire story would take much too long, I’m going to shorten it by going
into a lightning round.
They find Charlie
in the same area and defeated the thing that ambushed him.
They discover
flying pink Pikmin, and notes that were left from a mysterious person by the
name of captain Olimar, who recorded a key he found in a misplaced video file.
They battle a
boss and find who they think is Olimar, but we actually know to be Louie from
the second game.
Louie escapes
with all of the food the explorers collected, and makes off into the
wilderness.
They find blue Pikmin
and defeated a boss, thus finding Louie again.
After they have
all the Pikmin, they continue to search for captain Olimar and the cosmic drive
key, as well as fruit along the way.
Eventually they
come across the place known as the formidable oak, where they discover captain Olimar,
unconscious on the ground, being guarded by a strange gold, gelatinous, humanoid
creature. The goal is to take Olimar through the Formidable Oak without the
monster getting him. You need to use all types of Pikmin to guide them to the
ship. Although, the strange creature turns into a slug-like amorphous being
that chases you. If you fail to bring Olimar back to the ship before the day
runs out, you will have to start over again. However, when you do succeed, you
battle off against whom else? The thing that’s been chasing you all day; the
Plasma wraith (theories state that it’s the relative, if not the same creature
as the water wraith that attacked Olimar and Louie in the second game. Here’s a
link to the theory: <will add link later~>)
It grows to an
enormous size, of course take it’s original humanoid figure, and uses all of
the elements to try and kill your Pikmin, the goal is to beat him enough that
he grows smaller and smaller until he’s defeated.
Once defeated, Olimar
regains consciousness, and intrudes himself to the three adventures that saved
him. He thanks them and apologizes about Louie giving them so much trouble. This
was a great moment for Pikmin fans, as we finally got to hear Olimar actually
talk, and it was glorious. Olimar gives them back their Cosmic Drive Key, and
since they pass Hocotate on their way to Koppai, they give Olimar and Louie a
lift. They go off back to their planet, deemed heroes for ending the famine.
The game leaves of us on a shot of something that looks reminiscent of Olimar’s
first crash in the first game… possible the hint to Pikmin 4?
The game also has
a challenge mode, similar to that of the first games, almost like a fusion
between the two, and can keep you occupied after the game for a while.
And so that concluded
the third Pikmin game, my thoughts?
Well I loved it,
I can’t say it was my favorite of the games (that title goes to the second game),
but I did deliver, to me at least. The graphics are phenomenal, but nothing I
wouldn’t expect from the photorealism style of Pikmin. The story was easily the
biggest of the games. It was great to
see the old captains again, when asked if Olimar would be in the new games, Miyamoto
said that it was a secret, which got me a bit worried, but it turned out to be
fined.
I think my
favorite part about the game is the locations, I’m a person who loves adventure
and map/world design, I like to see how you interact with the environment in a
game, and being such a small character you can really get a sense of scale in
the Pikmin game. One reason that I like the first two games so much is because of
how the maps changed from the first game to the second game. Another thing
about the world of Pikmin I found interesting was that in this game, the area
selection map is seen to be the continents, in fact, the first few areas you go
to are actually Australia and Antarctica that had combined to make a new
continent. Other things to love about this game include but are not limited to,
new Pikmin types, amazing graphics, user friendly controls, the ‘go here’
command, which makes things infinitely easier (and should have been in the
second game), and the overall sense of adventure the game brings.
However, nothing
is without its faults, and such is true with this game. For one, the purple a
white Pikmin are only available in the challenge mode, which seemed to bother a
lot of older Pikmin fans, although I didn’t mind it as much, I still was a tiny
bit disappointed by it. A second thing that might bother people is before the
final boss, where in you have to take Olimar around the formable oak as I explain
earlier, to someone who’s not very skilled at the game, this might come as too
much of a challenge and they might leave the game, even to me- a seasoned Pikmin
expert- I still find that part very tedious. Thirdly, and maybe this is a bit more
of a nit-pick, or a nostalgic fan’s warped perspective, but I found that the
game left me wanting more, for example, the second game easily had the longest
gameplay, and the most stuff to do, so many bosses, treasures, and areas to
explore. When I finished it, I felt satisfied, and I feel that Pikmin 3 doesn’t
have as much as Pikmin 2. Graphically, mechanically, and controlling wise, Pikmin
3 is superior, but content wise Pikmin two towers over head, but as a
standalone game, it still works.
So that concludes
my review of the Pikmin franchise, and it remains to be one of the best one’s I’ve
ever been involved it. If I ever choose to continue blogging, the next thing
will be “Chibi-Robo blug into adventure” but only that one because I didn’t
finish “park patrol” and “photo finder” is lame.
In the news, it’s
been confirmed that there will be new Pikmin games, as said by Miyamoto himself
in a Smosh games episode. I was ecstatic to her about it and it can’t wait to
see what the next installment has to offer.
