Review: Pikmin
Pikmin provides existential proof that there are still grand new ideas out there in the gaming universe?it just takes a tiny little bulbous spaceman and his sentient vegetable friends to find them.
Pikmin provides existential proof that there are still grand new ideas out there in the gaming universe?it just takes a tiny little spaceman, his sentient vegetable friends, and a guy like Shigeru Miyamoto to dig them out.
A Planet Where Your Vegetables Eat You
In Pikmin, you, the ubiquitous player, are placed in control of a bulbous little spaceman, stranded on a hostile alien planet with a mind-control whistle/raybeam and strange tasks to perform: nurture the native species of sentient flora, discover their strengths and weaknesses, and then harness them to tackle the world?s hazards and recover the 30 pieces of your shattered spaceship. The catch? You have only 30 15-minute ?days? in which to accomplish your goal, a great little twist that adds an urgent incentive to do things right and the weird, unsettling sensation that you could potentially play through the entire game and lose.
Pikmin unfolds like a grand experiment as you hurl the different types of Pikmin into the landscape and find out (usually the hard way) that Red Pikmin are the only ones resistant to fire, that Yellow Pikmin can pick up bombs, and that if your favorite Pikmin is kidnapped by an ornery mosquito, chances are you?ll find him carefully replanted in the soil a couple miles away near a giant blue inflatable Airfish. Every minute that you play, you constantly feel as if you?re discovering something new and different, and the game?s puzzles feel very organic, intelligent, and open-ended, forcing you to think and rethink your strategy as you make new realizations about your place in the world. For example: After losing half your adorable plantlings to a family of carnivorous ladybugs, you?ll realize that if you?d just unfurled that busted bridge and hurled 20 Yellows on top of the cliff to distract the hoverfrogs, you could have cut your losses by 10. Pikmin manages to tap into that Zen gameplay/reward balance that so many games strive for, but so few games ever manage to achieve.
Garden Variety
Even if head games aren?t your thing, you can?t avert your attention from Pikmin?s charm. The sight of 100 individually animated Pikmin?some carrying the corpse of a felled Muppety oddball, some tearing up a field of grass just for the heck of it, some just sorta staring in wide-eyed awe at their glorious spaceman avatar?is a truly magical thing. Each little Pikmin seems to have a mini-life of his/her own, and the GameCube handles the horde (not to mention a plethora of flowers, insects, and tiny blades of grass) smoothly, up close or from far away, with no frame-rate hiccups whatsoever. The graphic detail is paired off perfectly with whimsical sound effects?like your spaceman?s irresistible ?call-to-arms? trumpet or your Pikmin?s tiny, high-pitched bloodthirsty battle cry?and an animated, memorable musical score.
If harnessing all this horticulture sounds like it could be a potentially ponderous task, don?t worry your pretty little head: The GameCube controller has been perfectly designed for your Pikmin-wrangling needs. Sorting your throng by color?or even by what they?re carrying?can be done with the single touch of a button, and ordering them to keep close to a wall as they cross a narrow cliff is as simple as pulling to the right on the C-Stick. If there?s one problem, it?s that in order to make room for such refined Pikmin control, the camera has been limited?you?re allowed only three zoom levels and two angles at which to view the world, and the only rotation adjustment you can make is to align the camera where you?re facing. While the scheme works fine for most situations, you?ll occasionally find yourself wishing you could peek behind some bushes at that sleeping froggish thing without having to actually reposition your spaceman.
Day of the Triffids
Pikmin?s only major disappointment is that it comes to an end?and kinda quickly, at that. The 30 pieces of your spaceship are spread through only five maps, and the wonders of arithmetic yield that a game with 30 ?days? and 15 minutes per ?day? would last 7.5 hours if played through all at once. Most players, however, will be able to beat the game in 25 game days (6.75 hours), so even the most anal-retentive, reset-button-lovin,? ?I could have handled that day sooo much better? players are looking at a 10- to 12-hour experience. Actually, since some researcher somewhere recently declared 10 to 12 hours as the ?perfect? console game length, it?s a testament to Pikmin?s splendor that it leaves you wanting more more more.
In the end, though, it all boils down to this: If every game ever made was about cultivating and controlling a horde of alien plants in a concerted effort to reassemble the bulk of an alien spacepod, Pikmin would still be one hell of a game.
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