Pikmin was one of the best and most loved games to grace Nintendo’s Gamecube and you now have the opportunity to enjoy it on your Wii. You should be made aware that it is very much the original game. It comes with new Wii controls, a new way to load save games and widescreen support, but apart from that it is the same game. This review will be aimed at those of you that never played the original Pikmin.
Pikin is one of those games that is hard to put into a category. There have been very few games of its ilk, and the only one that even approximates what it is would be Overlord. Its not really a “God game”, not fully an RTS and not really an action game. While most games require but a sentence to describe them, Pikmin takes at the very least a paragraph, so keep reading if you have never played the GameCube version.
You play as a little spaceman called Captain Olimar who was taking a space holiday when his spaceship hit a meteor and crashed on a mysterious planet. In the process the ship broke into pieces and was scattered across the planet. When he got out of his crashed ship he encountered the near extinct Pikmin. Pikmin turn out to be a willing army of tiny, coloured plant-men who live in onion-shaped buildings. Olimar can grow them, pluck them from the ground, throw them about and get them to do his dirty work. This includes combat with other creatures, harvesting, construction and demolition work and of course salvaging his ship. Olimar decides to get the Pikmin to help him gather the thirty pieces of his ship. In exchange he helps them increase their population (not in a dirty way) and teaches them to defend themselves against all manner of dangerous cute creatures that exist on the planet.
You start with only a few red Pikmin in your command. The Pikmin are fairly useless in small numbers, especially when trying to defend themselves against enemies. If you only have a couple of them, they would be hard pressed to do anything but carry small objects. Some if the small object in this world are red pellets. By carrying these red pellets to their onion looking base (bear with me), these pellets are converted to red Pikmin. This enables you to quickly gather a small army of Pikmin, which greatly increases their usefulness. In Pikmin (much like Overlord) you rely on strength in numbers. You can have up to a hundred Pikmin in your control at a time, and the greater the number you have, the better their chances are of defeating enemies and carrying larger objects (like the thirty pieces of your ship).
As you play through you will have three types of Pikmin under your control – red, yellow, and blue. The different coloured Pikmin have different abilities and attributes, and in simple terms the reds are strong, blues survive in water, and yellows can use bombs and be thrown higher. “Puzzle” elements become more prominant and challenging as you get further into the game. One type specialises in carrying explosives whereas another is resistant to fire. You might have to knock a wall down with the help of the explosive friendly Pikmin and then storm a field of fire with heat-resistant Pikmin. Manage your Pikmin incorrectly and you will quickly find yourself in a dire situation. The only way to remedy a big loss is, of course, to breed more Pikmin, and that takes time. And time is your biggest enemy (as will be discussed later).
The biggest edition in the Wii version is the “New Play Controls”. Pikmin is quite suited for Wiimote/nunchuck controls, so it’s no real surprise that the new control scheme works really well. It is a breeze to control Olimar and his Pikmin and to me it seems much more intuitive than the GameCube controller. Seeing as Pikmin is an RTS of sorts, using the Wii’s pointer makes perfect sense to control an arrow on screen. It doesn’t get much simpler then pointing at an enemy and clicking the A button. The more times you click A, the more Pikmin will join in the fray. Likewise, holding B will gather them back and you can sweep it across the naughty stray Pikin. The intuitive controls mean that its easy to get the job done quickly.
Which is just as well, because you are on a time limit. The atmosphere in the new planet Olimar finds himself on means that he can’t breathe (as oxygen is poisonous to his kind) and has to rely on his air supply. He only has thirty days worth, so you have to get all the ships pieces back together before the thirty days run out. Each of these days takes about 15 minutes in real time, so you have about seven and a half hours to get through the game before you die. While death does have certain negative implications, having a time limit gives the game a bit of tension and in my opinion gives it a little more structure than it might have otherwise had.
This time limit was a bit controversial when it originally came out. It means that you could fail the game and have start from scratch. In the Wii version you can now restart from an earlier day if a careless puddle-drowning incident (turns out not all of them can swim too well) drastically reduced your Pikmin population, or if you didn’t make the progress you wanted on that specific day. In reality, that makes it highly unlikely that you’ll need to restart from the very beginning.
From a visual standpoint Pikmin has a aged a bit. It was released in 2001 after all. However it still looks pretty decent when compared to many of the current Wii games. The environments were always a bit plain, and nothing has really changed there. However, it is the charming design of the characters in Pikmin that gives it its visual appeal. They are quirky, strange and freaking adorable. The “crowd behaviour” of the Pikmin in particular is awesome.
The only annoying aspect in the Wii version of Pikmin is the camera controls. It not even that its broken, but more that it takes a lof of getting used to and is not particularly intuitive. Pressing left and right on the D-pad toggles between three different levels of zoom, while pressing Up toggles different camera heights. Holding the Z button rotates the camera until you let go of it again. If they swapped these functions around it would have been a lot more intuitive.
Pikmin is an awesome game, even more so if you never played the GameCube version. If you never had a GameCube, this is a must buy for any Wii owner. Those who played it already will still have a blast going through it again.
