Review: Pikmin

Pikmin (Nintendo, 2001) is a real time strategy / puzzle game for the Nintendo GameCube.

The premise is fairly simple. There's a little space man. He can control little plant guys. He must collect space ship parts while overcoming various obstacles. And he must do it fast. There are 30 ship parts to collect in 30 days and each day is fairly short. Well, technically not every piece is required, but you know me. I needed them all.

For me the meat of the game was discovery. The game has a lot of tricks to it both in how to fight enemies (mostly bugs) and how to overcome obstacles. The in game text gives the basics, but there's still a lot to learn. I often decided to play a given day over (sometimes many times) so that I could do things better and faster.

I've never been fond of trial and error as a gameplay mechanic (except for Blood and King Kong, where dying can be a good scare), but it didn't bother me in Pikmin. That was partly because a "day" isn't very long (13 minutes according to Wikipedia), so I didn't feel like I'd lost much progress, and partly because I always felt like I was learning something. Of course, I was often learning it at the expense of my Pikmin. Against the more dangerous foes, they would die by the score.

This raises a moral question. Just because I could control the Pikmin and send them off to their demise, should I have? The game says yes. I got the happy ending and lost over 800 Pikmin along the way. I didn't really think about it at the time. It was how the game was designed to be played. But it nags at me (partly because I believe Christal may have done it without killing any). Between missions the main character worries about his life support running out, pines for his loved ones, and feels bad about the losses the Pikmin suffer, but that doesn't justify his actions. It only explains them.

Graphically the game is fine for its time. The textures are flat. There's not much in the way of lighting (although the color does change with the time of day). Running around with 100 Pikmin trailing behind is pretty impressive. And when I was fighting a large enemy with dozens of Pikmin attacking its feet as I threw more Pikmin who clung and attacked the top, occasionally getting shook off and hurled in all directions... well, I was too busy to care, but that might have looked cool to an observer.

Final Score
4 of 5