Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Innovative"

Nintendo often get wrongly criticised by apparent gamers for relying too much on the likes of Super Mario, Metroid and The Legend of Zelda games selling their consoles. In hindsight these criticisms are wrong because other franchises such as F-Zero, Kirby and Star Fox have proved to be popular with Nintendo's faithful followers. But back in 2001, the genius that is Shigeru Miyamoto put his creative mind in to good use yet again when he invented Pikmin – arguably one of the most inventive, creative and innovative games the mastermind has ever conjured up.

Throughout the course of Pikmin you'll play the role of Captain Olimar, a small alien astronaut whose spaceship crash lands on Earth after a collision with an asteroid. When his ship crashes parts of it rip off and fly across the world, and to escape Olimar must find the missing parts and repair his ship. But there's a problem he must overcome – Olimar can't breathe oxygen because it's poisonous for him, and his space suit's life support system will only last for thirty days, so Olimar only has only thirty days to retrieve his ship parts.
Pikmin plays like an RTS, but it's different to all other real-time strategy games you'll play. Throughout the course of Olimar's quest for freedom he'll encounter things on Earth that he'll not know, and to overcome obstacles he enlists the help of the Pikmin. Pikmin are cute, weird little creatures. They sprout from the ground like plants, but live like animals. Because Olimar isn't familiar with Earth you use the Pikmin to aide him. The whole idea is that Olimar's ship parts are too big for him to carry and reassemble by himself, so he gets control of Pikmin which he'll order to carry his ship parts back to his ship for him.

You don't start the game with all the Pikmin available, but as you get further you gain new types represented by different colours. The way you get new Pikmin is by finding things called Onions. Once you find a new coloured Onion you'll be able to acquire a new type of Pikmin. The red Onion is the first you find, and it gives you red Pikmin. The Yellow Onion gives you yellow Pikmin and the Blue Onion gives you blue Pikmin, and these ones become available the further you get in to the game and explore new areas of Earth.
Each type of Pikmin is vastly important at different things. Red Pikmin are resistant to fire, so if you're trying to get past a part of the world where there's fire red Pikmin are the choice. Also they are physically the strongest, so they come in handy against enemies. Yellow Pikmin are physically the weakest of the lot, but are really useful in the way that they can carry bombs. Bombs will be needed a lot to destroy walls blocking your access to new areas of the world. Blue Pikmin are the ones I found most useful. They aren't necessarily that strong, but they have the god-sent ability to traverse watery areas, something the other two types of Pikmin lack. This comes in handy the most as you get further in to the game as there'll be more water in each new area as you progress.

Mastering the use of Pikmin is essential to your progression through the game. Although the Onions give you Pikmin, you can't simply get new ones at will. When you have no Pikmin at all in a certain colour that Onion will dispense one Pikmin seed, and once you pick it from the ground you'll have to build an army of Pikmin just from that one. To get new Pikmin you need to either take dead enemy bodies to the Onions, or you need to take flower pellets to them. Certain things require different amounts of Pikmin to carry. Small pellets only require one Pikmin to carry, but small enemies need three. Also some of the larger enemies need ten Pikmin to carry them. When you've only got one Pikmin from a certain colour you'll be best off getting the small pellets. But because taking a pellet to an Onion only gives birth to small amounts of new Pikmin, fighting enemies and harvesting their bodies in the Onions is the best way to get new ones because you generally get more Pikmin seeds from dead enemies then you get from pellets (although there are some bigger pellets that give you anything between five and twenty new Pikmin).
The way you acquire more Pikmin of certain colours depends on what colour Pikmin are carrying the pellets or enemies when they are put in the Onions. For instance if you're carrying an enemy and all or most of the Pikmin carrying it are red then they'll take it to the red Onion to get more red Pikmin. This also works the other way too; if most of the Pikmin carrying the pellet or enemy are yellow they'll take it to your yellow Onion. So essentially you can only build up your Pikmin by having a certain colour carrying the enemies or pellets to their own Onions.

You can also upgrade individual Pikmin to make them stronger. The main food source of a Pikmin is nectar, and when the Pikmin eat some they grow stronger. Whenever a new Pikmin is born they're born with a leaf on their head, but as they eat nectar the leaf will change from a leaf to a bulb to eventually a flower. As the leaf evolves the Pikmin will become stronger and faster, meaning that they'll be able to fight better and carry items a lot faster. Feeding Pikmin nectar isn't necessary, but if you get stuck against a strong enemy, or can't get a ship part back to Olimar's ship then making them stronger with nectar can become very useful. Nectar is usually found in patched of grass, but some animals appear which carry it, so you can get it off them too by having Olimar throw the Pikmin at them.

Whenever the game comes to the end of the day Olimar will enter his ship, the S.S. Dolphin, and fly away. When this happens all loose Pikmin you have will be lost, so to stop losing them you need to need to put them inside their corresponding Onions. So if you put all your red Pikmin in their Onion, all the yellow in theirs and all the blue into theirs they'll survive the night and you can use them the next day. But if you don't manage to get them actually in the Onion but they are under the control of Olimar when the day ends they'll still survive the night.

Graphically Pikmin is a stunning GameCube title. The game is really nicely animated and coloured and this goes a real way to making the game feel alive. For its day Pikmin was really top of the range graphically and showed the gaming world that the GameCube was actually a really great, visually stunning console. Musically the game isn't spectacular, but the music serves its purpose well. There isn't really any loud music in Pikmin, it's mainly just slow, mellow background music, but this fits with the laid back nature and look of the game very well.

The only real criticism I have of Pikmin is the games length. The game is only about twelve hours long, and this is down to the thirty day cycle. Because the game needs to be finished in the thirty day you're constantly rushing to find new ship parts, and this results in the game having a maximum amount of playing time before forcing you to finish. I'd have preferred whole-heartedly it if the game scrapped the thirty day limit because then you'd have had more time to fully explore the games environments.

Pikmin is really another example of why Shigeru Miyamoto is generally regarded as the greatest game creator of all time. He uses experiences in his own life as inspiration for his games, and for that reason alone nobody could have come up with the idea of Pikmin except him. The game is inventive, quirky, strategic, ambient and really innovative. It's a shame it's rather on the short side, because if it wasn't it could have offered an even greater gaming experience then it already does.

Review by: James Widdowson
Score: 9/10