Unexpectedly for a game about being a squat little extraterrestrial on an alien planet, Pikmin 3
evokes a subtle, sweet nostalgia for its foreign world. Exploring its
miniaturised woodlands and ponds recall childhood autumns spent kicking
through leaves, or summer afternoons digging through soil to examine the
bugs at the bottom of the garden. This beautifully organic planet is
home to wonderfully inventive creatures unlike anything we have on
Earth, but there’s still just enough familiarity to raise a smile when
the aliens rechristen things like plums, grapes, and lemons as Lesser
Mock Bottoms, Dawn Pustules, and Face Wrinklers.
It’s this familiarity that makes Pikmin 3 emotionally
relatable, and causes the ostensibly disposable pikmin themselves to
feel like more than just units on the field. Their little squeaks and
dying sighs made me feel guilty when I sent them to their demise by
literally throwing them into battle, like I’d let them down. If you fail
to round any of the wee guys up at the end of the day before the sun
sets, you have to watch them getting munched by nocturnal predators as
they make a desperate run for your departing ship, which made me feel
like the worst person in the world. Nostalgic, evocative, and clever,
Pikmin 3 is a delight while it lasts, blending strategic thinking,
exploration, and life-or-death struggles against alien creatures – but
it left me eager for more (and fearful of another nine-year wait between
games).
Your interdependency with these cheerfully subservient
little plant people is the emotional core of the series. Without food
your explorers can't survive the next day, so pikmin carry fruits that
you discover back to the craft for
analysis, where salivation-inducing waterfalls of juice are squeezed
from your spoils. When supplies are low there's a sense of urgency that
enlivens the day's exploration. It’s at once frenetic and strategic, a
second-to-second action game that demands foresight, caution, and a
certain spatial agility that develops as you play, keeping map layouts,
potential threats and different busy groups of pikmin in your head all
at once. These are the same principles that made the last two Pikmin
games so endearing.
But it's very easy to build up a huge juice stockpile, so
Pikmin 3 is only ever gently challenging in this sense. It also doesn't
have the original Pikmin's time limit or sense of danger, and that can
detract from the drama. The fiendish final world is much more difficult,
but it also works against the connection that you’ve established with
your minions, eventually throwing you into a battle in which hundreds of
them will die. It’s a saddening end to an otherwise cheerfully upbeat
relationship.
If they must be eaten, though, at least they're eaten by
something impressive. Creature design is extraordinary, blending the
recognisably natural with the creatively alien: bee-summoning
hummingbirds, bulbous Bulborbs with their greedy mouths and tiny little
legs, floating jellyfish, bellyflopping bug-eyed frogs, burrowing grubs
and bugs masquerading as leaves. Most are beautiful, but all are
dangerous. Only a well-balanced and sizeable group of pikmin will escape
these encounters unscathed.
It's only in battles against the biggest, most
extraordinary creatures that Pikmin 3's few control shortcomings become
obvious. There's a lock-on system, but it's unreliable. When strafing
around a creature, sometimes I'd find my little spaceman would throw
pikmin directly in front of him instead of at what the camera was locked
onto. Pikmin aren't enormously smart, and unless you aim them precisely
they'll often stand still and wait to be stamped upon or munched
instead of running for their lives or attacking.
Precise aiming is more difficult with the Wii U's control
stick than with the Wii Remote and nunchuck, which can also be used with
Pikmin 3 – but without the Gamepad map you're at a gigantic
disadvantage. This also unbalances the otherwise-excellent competitive
multiplayer. In a mode where you have to check fruit and objects off a
bingo card to win, whichever player has the GamePad has a massive
advantage because they can see exactly where all those fruits are
located.
I couldn't help but observe a not-entirely-subtle
environmental message as I explored Pikmin 3. Having burned through all
the natural resources on their home planet, the planet Koppai send out a
spacecraft to bring back food and save the population. The world they
find is irrepressibly verdant, rich with greenery and huge, plump fruits
that promise salvation for the homeworld. It's brimming with life of
all kinds – except, conspicuously, civilised life; the kind that would
probably destroy it.
I also appreciated the teasing cleverness in Pikmin 3’s
level design, which makes them consistently rewarding. You meet new
types of pikmin as you explore these little garden maps: Rock pikmin
smash through glass and crystal, yellow pikmin's invulnerability to
electricity lets you used them as tiny conductors to power machines,
blue pikmin can walk and fight underwater, and pink pikmin can fly. When
you first arrive on a crash site, it is cleverly sectioned off by
impassable rivulets of water or electrified gates; whenever you return
with a more varied team, these obstacles fall in your path, more fruits
and treasures come within your reach.
I've yet to discuss the most important difference between
Pikmin 3 and its forebears - that you’re actually three squat little
extraterrestrials, not one - but that's because it turns out to not be
as important a change as you'd expect. Split up after the crash, they
are reunited after the first few hours, allowing you to divide your
pikmin into three groups and explore different verdant corners of these
giant gardens at once. The Wii U gamepad displays an unusually useful
map, and scrolling across it, you can order different members of your
team to different places whilst you take direct control of another.
(Other than that the gamepad doesn't get much specific use, apart from
an unintentionally terrifying first-person view that lets you see a
crowd of pikmin staring at you eerily up-close.) Working together, these
three explorers can throw each other across gaps and up ledges to open
new pathways and avenues for the pikmin to use.
You’d think this would significantly change how Pikmin 3
plays... but it doesn’t, really. There are obvious three-person puzzles,
but most of the time I found myself wandering around in one giant group
rather than trying to take care of three squads at once; often I'd send
a group off somewhere on its own only to find that half my pikmin had
been eaten by an unexpected predator during the journey, so I quickly
learned the value of a safety-in-numbers approach. What the
three-character design does change is how you manage your time. With
three squads, you can get more accomplished before the shadows start to
lengthen and night calls you back to the spaceship.
Pikmin 3's gentle difficulty mitigates its frustrations for the great
majority of the time, but it ended long before I was ready to leave.
Its worlds are gorgeous and intriguing, but there are only four of them
before the dramatic final scenario intrudes upon your exploration, which
for me was after 10 hours. The real challenge lies in the missions,
little self-contained levels designed to really rest your capabilities
either alone or with a friend. They are strategic, frenetic and smart,
forcing you to make full use of all three space-people and even more
different types of pikmin than appear during the main adventure.
The Verdict
Pikmin 3 is a delight. There’s nothing else like
its gentle combination of exploration, strategy and discovery, and it
made me feel both empathy and responsibility for virtual creatures that
most games would treat as disposable fodder. It transported me like few
other games can, giving the feeling of being a stranger in a strange
(but oddly familiar) world. It's over too soon, but it leaves a lasting
impression.