(Originally published to Glitchwave on 6/7/2024)
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[Image from glitchwave.com]
Pikmin
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Genre(s): Real-Time Strategy
Platforms: GCN
Release Date: October 26, 2001
Contrary to when I described Pikmin as “adorably on-brand” for Nintendo standards, all of the context underneath the game’s charming surface subjects the player to constant, torturous tension. A cartoonish-looking spaceship fitting for a child’s toy box is blasted out of the starry darkness of space by a meteor, and the collision halts the ship off course as it plummets into the gravitational pull of the nearest planet. Captain Olimar, the pilot of this ship, miraculously exits his vessel unscathed. However, his precious spacecraft has been fractured and is unfit to carry its captain through the hostile depths of the outer limits to reach his home planet. Also, in a damning twist of fate, overexposure to the planet’s abundant oxygen emissions will kill the lungless Olimar in thirty days. This amount is also the number of ship pieces missing in the crash landing scattered around the planet that Olimar needs to retrieve to soar off into space once again. No pressure, eh? To everyone’s surprise, Pikmin is an anxiety-inducing game about ensuring the survival of its protagonist, and I can’t recall any other Nintendo IP that establishes this sense of dread from the first cutscene. Fellow Nintendo space traveler Samus Aran always hikes deeper into the overwhelming rabbit hole of space’s grim possibilities eventually, but every circumstance of Olimar’s person versus nature conflict leads the player to believe that he might be totally fucked from the get-go.
Before Olimar accepts that his situation is impossible to overcome and lets the planet’s oxygen suffocate him, he stumbles upon an intriguing discovery. In the nearby area of his ship’s wreckage, a strange contraption lifts and props itself on three legs and ejects what looks like a leaf with a red root that sinks into the ground upon landing. Olimar’s curiosity leads him to pluck the tripod’s offspring out of the earth, and it’s revealed to be a small, bipedal creature that resembles a hybrid between an insect and a plant. Thinking that he’s the first hyper-intelligent being to witness this, Olimar patents this creature as a “pikmin,” the namesake of the series title. Through a string of Darwinian discoveries, Olimar’s scientific intuition leads him to hypothesize that the pikmin can be manipulated into doing his bidding. Namely, retrieving the misplaced ship parts. This process, in a nutshell, is the name of the game in Pikmin. Olimar will gather up to a maximum of one hundred of these queer little sprouts and lead them towards one of the S.S. Dolphin’s various pieces of engineering anatomy as they all collectively lift it and book it towards Olimar’s ship to absorb it as a part of the total reconstruction. Many of these pieces will be located in spots inconvenient for Olimar, so he’ll also have to factor in the specific properties of the three species of pikmin that he encounters. Firstly, the red pikmin are immune to fire and tend to be the scrappiest fighters. The yellow pikmin are the lightest and therefore can be flung at the highest angle to reach loftier positions. They are also the only type of pikmin that have an affinity for the explosive rocks gathered in the shady corners of the map, which will be used to raze the stony walls that obstruct some select pathways. Lastly, the blue ones are the only submersible pikmin that remain unbothered when exposed to water, so using them to collect machinery sitting in a pond or a lake is a no-brainer.
Anyone can now see Pikmin’s RTS dynamic between the player and their underlings, and who can deny the beguiling presence of these little guys? However, the cuteness factor tends to wane on the player because…how do I put this delicately? The pikmin are not very bright. One could chalk their lack of personal safety and inability to follow directions to having the proportionally-sized brain of an ant, or perhaps the fact that most of them are freshly hatched and are therefore immature newborns. Either or, playing Pikmin can sometimes feel like Olimar is Werner Herzog directing the Peruvian natives to pull that steamboat up a mountain while filming Fitzcarraldo. The non-blue pikmin will not avoid the bodies of water knowing full well they cannot swim, they will diverge from following Olimar whenever a patch of grass or a rocky mound of dirt is on the path, and they will continue to attack enemies even when Olimar blows his command whistle to direct them towards him. I get particularly frustrated with the yellow pikmin, for the special bomb handling they do is rather precarious when their placements involve the particular Pikmin’s choosing. A maddening instance of this involved one changing the direction of throwing a bomb towards Olimar and the other pikmin instead of a wall as intended because one of the flying, translucent creatures that drop that sweet nectar they crave flew overhead. I flung that treacherous fucker into the nearest drink and gleefully watched him struggle for air until he exhausted himself and drowned. Then again, I suppose if the team shows a lack of resolve, it’s entirely the coach’s responsibility. Olimar is physically frail and probably crippled a bit from the impact, so he cannot fend for himself in the slightest. However, he is a man of science who can resort to using his superior intellect to brave the harsh elements. He uses words such as “odiferous” and “gaunt” in his daily journal logs, so the player must match his sharp cognitive capabilities by becoming an efficient pikmin tactician. The trick to keeping any and all pikmin in line is separating the colors like laundry, blowing the command whistle to summon them back, and controlling the direction in which the pikmin follow Olimar in a coordinated march. It seems simple, but not knowing when to utilize these tactics is the difference between Olimar seeing his family again and meeting a horrible fate. His committed, fun-sized followers are still a blessing for his situation, but Olimar’s still got his work cut out for him.
Given the dire scenario for our protagonist, one would probably think that the pikmin’s home world is a hellish nightmare filled with fire and brimstone. However, one of the greatest ironies of Pikmin is that its “toxic” world that will kill Olimar in a month’s time is gorgeous. At the start of each day when Olimar and his pikmin troops flutter on the ground to dock their S.S. Dolphin and onion ships respectively, the panoramic view the player sees of the environment is breathtaking. If I had to guess, Olimar is the first visitor from outside the ecosystem because the setting feels so pristine. The tutorial level of Olimar’s initial landing site and the Forest of Hope are naturalistic, arboreous wildernesses where rays of sunlight always gleam off of the emerald green foliage. The pikmin’s habitat is where Henry David Thoreau would’ve loved to have spent the remainder of his days, building a log cabin on this territory and writing about the enchanting discoveries as Olimar is doing, but purely for enjoyment. As surprisingly divine as this environment is, it still exudes a rather disquieting aura. Olimar’s presence along with the mechanical wonder that is the S.S. Dolphin and its misplaced components are the only source of technological adulteration this world has experienced, so the pikmin are basically the most advanced resource aiding his escape and ensuring Olimar’s survival. All the while, one will notice that Olimar fits comfortably in the trunks of trees and through the apertures in the dirt fit for a bug, so the scope of the setting is overwhelmingly large whether or not Olimar is usually this minuscule in his normal perspective. The wet grove of the Distant Spring is equally as striking as the previously mentioned destinations, but the vapor that emanates off the bodies of water that surround it shrouds it in an ethereal haze. If the lack of communication and familiarity is a consistent theme of Pikmin’s general feelings of isolation, this area’s atmosphere makes the player wonder if Olimar still exists in reality. The Forest Navel is too dim to really comment on its topography, but spelunking in this underground cavern is still a marvel of interplanetary exploration. It’s a shame that this world is too pernicious for our protagonist because its naturalistic beauty is both literally and figuratively out of this world.
But as any environmentalist will tell you, nature is a cruel mistress that includes instances of brutal ecology at work that are simultaneously vile as they are fascinating. The pikmin are not the only organic lifeforms that inhabit this alien planet and considering how tiny they are, one can dreadfully assume that they’re not at the apex of the food chain around here. While Olimar is scoping out his missing ship parts for his minions to deliver back to their original source, he also must navigate through the plethora of predators found aplenty on the field. The Pikmin’s most common enemy is the spotted, bug-eyed, and fittingly-named bulbous bulborbs, who’ll snatch a pikmin in its mouth and eat it whole, bones and all. The bigger variant of these beasts is not to be approached lightly, for they’ll shovel droves of pikmin into its gaping mouth like cereal. Their beastly appetite is not satiated after consuming a dozen of Olimar’s minuscule men: they’ll only stop their pikmin feast when Olimar is completely alone, almost just to spite his efforts to escape. Traveling outside of the arboreal areas will see Olimar encountering even more bullies such as the fire-spewing blowhog and the hopping, amphibious wollyhops who smash pikmin with the sheer force of their weight with a body slam. The biggest dickheads are swooping snitchbugs, whose motive to hover over Olimar, snatch up his pikmin, and place them in an inconvenient place across the map couldn’t be something other than to cause him grief. As intimidating and damaging as the enemies are, the player still has to consistently engage with them because they are giant impediments to Olimar’s goals. Some of the imposing creatures even possess some of the S.S. Dolphin's parts and will not part with them under any sort of peaceful negotiations. This includes the oddly grounded Burrowing Snagret bird who hides beneath the dirt, the impenetrable Armored Cannon Beetle, and the tall, gangly Beady Long Legs. While Olimar can utilize methods to trounce the pikmin’s many assailants, every player needs to come to terms with and find coping mechanisms to the fact that each one of their pikmin will eventually die a grizzly death at the hands of their natural-born predators. Just because these soldiers are cuter than your average RTS squadron doesn’t mean that they are precious. The pikmin are still a means to an end and should be treated as statistics, as callous as that sounds.
The hostile creatures that reside on this planet are just one obstacle for Olimar to contend with on his mission to restore his spaceship. Attempting to squash enemies by bum-rushing them is liable to deplete the pikmin population, and the amount of them that Olimar has at his disposal can decline so dramatically that he’ll be forced to spend valuable time replenishing his losses by having the remaining pikmin drag the fresh corpses of enemies to their ship and the pellets with numbers of differing numerical quantities to the onions. Areas also do not provide a perfectly smooth trek to each piece, as rock walls and neck-deep pools are littered around as segments of the natural topography. For instance, there are a series of stony blockades right outside the entrance of the Forest Navel that need a suicide vest’s amount of bombs to blow past, and the ratio of water versus land in the Distant Spring is weighted heavily in the former’s favor, so blue pikmin are the only variant who can traverse the majority of this place without much difficulty. All of these variables are especially relevant to Pikmin’s gameplay because the thirty-day deadline is not something that Olimar is concerned within a narrative sense: it's a factor interwoven into the gameplay that is constantly looming over the player’s heads at every waking moment. Due to the lack of illumination and the apparent hunting hour of each enemy, Olimar only has the period of daylight in the twenty-four-hour cycle to actively search for the ship parts with the pikmin. Actually, the period between dawn and dusk in Pikmin is only approximately twelve minutes for the player, with a reference of an incremental reference bar at the top of the screen. At the end of the day, the game will stress Olimar to halt whatever activity his pikmin are performing and gather them to their onion homes, for any unaccompanied pikmin will be decimated by One might assume that the time limit is to be taken lightly. The amount of ship parts is equal to the number of days before Olimar succumbs to “oxygen poisoning,” so this connotes that the player should ideally collect one piece per day, no? Well, all the supplementary objectives I’ve mentioned before have a habit of stacking onto the player to the point where that’s all the player can manage in one day. Everyone will experience a day in Pikmin where they’ll be kicking themselves for their unproductivity, but it's only inevitable because of how staggering all of the various obstructions can be to Olimar reaching his goal. If the player sincerely feels as if they’ve wasted a day, the game, fortunately, gives them the option to revert back to the previous save point to correct their mistakes. However, skilled players are able to collect every last piece per area in one sitting once they learn to efficiently double-task, and the gratification one feels making Olimar as adept a leader as General Patton is utterly joyous.
As the game progresses, Olimar alleviates the stressful anguish of failing to collect one piece per day when he disclaims that not every ship part is integral to rebuffing his ship to return home. A modest twenty-five is all that is needed to rocket Olimar back into the stars safely, but the game never really highlights which ones are essential and which ones can pile onto the scrapyard. Olimar will comment on the functionality of every part once they are in his grasp, and he’ll even disparage some parts as worthless junk as a hint. Unfortunately, Olimar doesn’t seem to know the finer details of his spacecraft as he ideally should, for my skimping over the few parts for the sake of time resulted in Olimar’s demise by the final day. Yes, I gathered twenty-six ship pieces, a single part more than the requisite number, but Olimar’s ship still fumbled upon liftoff and slammed back onto the planet’s dirt once again. This time, it was fatal for our little spaceman. As crestfallen as I was and frustrated at what I believed to be an instance of miscommunication, the game’s “bad ending” is the more substantial. One subtle aspect of Pikmin is the level of veneration the multi-colored creatures express for Olimar. Before his arrival, these pathetic, bite-sized imps were like the plankton of their ecosystem: fodder food for even the weakest of animals to feast upon. Once Olimar’s self-preserving drive organized them like an army, the pikmin population grew exponentially. Now, every other organism in their vicinity knows to tread a little lighter with them, and it’s all thanks to Olimar’s example. As a sign of their gratitude for their fallen leader, the incomplete ending sees the pikmin carry Olimar’s lifeless body to the onion, and out pops a reborn Olimar as a pikmin complete with that leaf on his head. While I failed to complete the overarching mission, this ending conveys that earning the respect and loyalty of the pikmin is its own reward, and I’m touched. However, if this reincarnation of Olimar has the brain of a pikmin, he’s suffered a fate I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.
Admittedly, I do not have much experience with the real-time strategy genre of video games, for they tend to exist on a platform that I did not grow up with and does not gel with my preferred gaming tendencies. Still, I can confidently state that Pikmin is not an example of a baby’s first RTS game because it's exclusive to a “lowbrow” console and also because Nintendo developed it. It’s just as challenging as any of its peers due to the strict margin of error and the masterful level of skill needed to accomplish the task at hand. In fact, what the player has to withstand in Pikmin is immense, for all of the lush and visually inviting aspects that would presumably make Pikmin a more accessible game have made the factor of copious death typical for an RTS game all the more traumatizing. Pikmin made me fret, made me awestruck, and made me emotionally invested in the protagonist's plight and his relationship with the fragile little lifeforms who were helping him relieve it. I'll assume that the RTS mechanics improved significantly with subsequent entries for now, but the first Pikmin will still resonate with me regardless of its early-on hiccups because of its surprising substance.
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