I picked up Pikmin 4 on a whim. When I was buying The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, I realized I could scoop up one additional game for only 30 bucks thanks to Nintendo’s 2-for-1 voucher which lets you get two full price titles for only $100. Given that TOTK is Nintendo’s first and (for now, at least) only $70 game, it was an easy decision to make and Pikmin 4 being the only other unreleased game on the list made it an easy choice for content purposes. People like to read about new games and this deal guaranteed I’d have a new game to write about.
But, truth be told, I wasn’t really expecting to like it. I’ve always heard the Pikmin series compared to real-time strategy games and that’s a genre I really struggle to click with. I didn’t grow up with Age of Empires or Warcraft, so the level of multitasking required to manage all the aspects of a bustling battlefield has never come naturally. Doing all of that with a controller seemed especially difficult.
What has really surprised me about Pikmin 4 is that while it is an RTS, it's also something entirely different. It has a lot of the same elements as those games, to be sure, but the big surprise is that the game asks you to marshal your forces, not for war, but for exploration. This had been lost on me in my years of hearing about Pikmin secondhand. It’s more Metroidvania than military simulation; equal parts StarCraft and Symphony of the Night.
Early on in the game, you encounter electrified walls that you can’t pass through. Attempting to hit them will leave your Red Pikmin stunned. So, you learn that you need to come back later on once you get the right tool. Turns out that the tool you need is Yellow Pikmin, which a seasoned series fan would know in the same way I know Samus needs the Morph Ball for all those waist high tunnels Swiss cheesing through Tallon IV.
Today I ran into a creek that I needed to freeze in order for my Pikmin to cross. But to freeze it, I needed 20 Ice Pikmin, so I needed to come back to it once I had collected more. Another time, I saw a valuable treasure, but it was under the spray of a sprinkler that I needed Blue Pikmin to infiltrate.
This is the ingenious mix that I hadn’t expected. It’s part Metroidvania, in that you need to unlock certain Pikmin to access certain areas. But, the Metroidvania side is enriched by the RTS-like need to acquire a certain amount of resources. Once Link unlocks the Hookshot, she has the Hookshot. But, in Pikmin 4, your stores can be depleted if you’re not careful. Resource management is just as critical as resource discovery.
This is all so exciting because I thought I knew what Pikmin was and had just assumed it wasn’t something I would like all that much. Now that Pikmin 4 has revealed its fun to me, there's a whole new series I can get into. And, it's the rare Nintendo series where every mainline entry is available on Switch. I can roll right into Pikmin 1, 2, and 3 if I want to. The only resource I need is Green Pikmin. That's what I've been calling money since I started playing, and I don't intend to stop.