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[captaincake]

Just watched the Channel 4 Charlie Brooker video game documentary

Overall it was really good! If you haven't already, I'd certainly recommend watching it. The video on the channel 4 website is apparently region locked if you're outside the UK (which is dumb), though, so you may have to find it elsewhere on the internet.

The only real complaint I have with it (spoilers, I guess?)...

I don't really feel like doing a big thing on that right now (though now that I think about it, that might not be a bad idea...), but suffice to say I thought it was kind of a lame entry to end on.

Again, though, it was still good overall, and I'd certainly recommend it if you've got a spare 100 minutes available.

[captaincake]

The Punchline: Streamlining versus 'dumbing down' - or Complexity versus Simplicity

The concept of ‘streamlining’ a game is, appropriately, a simple one. It simply involves removing or changing aspects of a game – often when making a sequel but potentially in things like updates and expansions too - which might be seen as pointless, time wasting or otherwise, so that the player can spend more time doing the parts which are considered fun (or enjoyable in another way (like horror games), but usually the kinds of games where this would apply aren’t ones that tend to have things that need streamlining). Defined that way, it would appear there isn’t much to talk about – if streamlining improves the game on a borderline objective (in as much as games in general can be ‘objective’) scale, it should always be good, right?

The problem is that what actually qualifies as ‘unnecessary’ (again, in the context of the game) is hugely subjective. What to one person may be a boring, time wasting detail might to another be just the opposite. Whilst simplifying things certainly has advantages, it also runs the risk of making the game too simple and therefore boring. Hence the term ‘dumbing down’ – when parts of a game are cut out or changed somehow such that the result is a lack of depth. Again, this goes back to the issue of subjectivity, as people have a lot of variance in their ‘complexity thresholds’, which is a term I made up just now.

(The ‘read more’ button in this case could be considered a ‘complexity threshold’ itself, when you think about it. I mean, not really, but I can’t think of a good way to make the transition beyond it, so just pretend.)

Actually, a good example of this would in fact lie outside of video games, and in the realm of ‘regular’ tabletop games, such as Dungeons and Dragons or Warhammer. Games of this sort are known for being pretty complex and having lots of rules (despite having what are essentially pretty simple premises), and both attract and deter many potential players as a result. Many people simply may not want to invest the time required to learn the things necessary to even begin playing, or may otherwise just prefer simpler things. Of course, these aren’t the only issues – the fact that these are ‘real’ games as opposed to virtual ones means there are also the practical elements such as getting all the equipment required and having other people to actually play with, but ignoring that, their complexity can be too big of a barrier for some.

On the other side of the scale are the really simple games – and I mean the really simple games. Stuff like those one button running games could be a member of this category, as well as a host of really outright bad games (which some might even say don’t qualify as games at all – I wouldn’t necessarily disagree) such as the ones often found on phones and stuff along the lines of Farmville and the like. Plenty of people who play games that aren’t these on a regular basis would say that these games are too simple and boring – but many play them anyway. While some of the really extreme examples aren’t really helpful here, games that are simple but just complex enough to qualify as games, again including one button running games as well as match-3 puzzle games are fun to many people because they’re simple enough to play easily in many situations and for short periods of time. This is obviously a case where simplicity is a good thing (in theory, anyway, since of course there are other factors).

The extremely simple side of this (obviously still arbitrary) scale isn’t as useful to look at as the extremely complex side, however. It’s hardly surprising that such games can be just fine – but what about simple games which aren’t that simple, but aren’t complex either? That’s pretty vague sounding, so here are two examples (take these with a fair helping of subjectivity, of course):

It’s been a long time since I’ve actually played World of Warcraft, and the fact that it’s an MMO makes this example a little odd, but that’s why I’m focusing on a very specific part of it – and even more specifically, from when it was still Wrath of the Lich King. While I don’t know exactly how everything is now, if you played the game during that time period, you probably remember how easy the dungeons were. Crowd control (polymorphs and so on) was hardly every necessary against trash mobs, and even bosses were rarely hard if your party wasn’t terrible. Even before the introduction of the dungeon finder, and even going through ‘heroic’ versions of dungeons (which were supposed to be the hard modes), everything was pretty easy. Bearing in mind that, before this expansion, dungeons were pretty hard, this to many people is a clear case of ‘dumbing down’ – the game being made simpler in a bad way. Given that a fair chunk of time still has to be put in, and that the actual fun of doing these dungeons (especially repeatedly) was not a lot, I’d agree – granted that’s pretty meaningless two expansions later, but this is still a good example of not being complex enough to be interesting.

This second example is cheating a little, since obviously NES games were pretty limited in terms of their complexity and this game in particular was probably among the most complex you could get, but by today’s standards it’s still pretty simple so I’m using it anyway.  It’s true, though – the original Legend of Zelda was a pretty simple game. All you could do was move around, stab things, and use items (which themselves were pretty basic) in terms of controls, which is already a lot simpler than the previous example – and yet, I’d easily rank it above the dungeons of WotLK.

Why? Well, this is an example of a ‘simple-but-not-too-simple’ game done right. Of course there are several pretty big differences in terms of the types of games they are, but even aside from those differences, LoZ takes the simplicity it has and makes a fun game regardless. This is perhaps in part because it gains a sort of ‘complexity’ through context – the enemies you face and, more importantly, places you explore. In fact, the simplicity in your capabilities actually help in this department – by being limited in what you can do, the game is a lot harder and that in combination with the options you do have can make things a lot more interesting. By contrast, in WoW you have a pretty large amount of options for what you can do, but in terms the actual dungeons, you’re pretty limited. There’s usually a linear, set pathway which in combination with the lack of challenge makes things pretty boring.

I should make it clear at this point that linearity is not the same as simplicity. In a lot of cases (such as the one above), it can be, but it doesn’t have to be. Plenty of games (a large portion of single player RPGs, for example) can be linear to some degree and yet still very complex indeed, and vice versa. It’s certainly true that not being linear can make things more complex, but not necessarily by a lot.

AAA(UUUGGGHHH) Games

A special mention goes to many (but not, I should stress, all) ‘AAA’ games, which have a long and not at all appreciated history of pulling all sorts of nonsense. While I have no intention of going into the majority of that nonsense (thankfully), I am obviously going to bring up the nonsense pulled in terms of ‘dumbing things down’.

Something that is heard far, far too often from AAA game publishers is that with a given game in a series, they are trying to ‘appeal to a wider audience’. What this usually means is that they’re removing, simplifying or otherwise a particular feature(s) that was in previous games, annoying the people who enjoyed that part of the game, specifically so that they can make a desperate attempt to get more people to buy their game. While this certainly isn’t the only way companies try to make things more ‘appealing’ to a wider audience (other ways include making things more generic in general), it’s the relevant one here and certainly still a significant one.

Firstly, it’s blatantly moronic to design games for ‘wider appeal’ to make more money. Going into the games industry of all things to make lots of money is like going into McDonalds to make your diet plan – technically possible, yes, but in practice it’s probably not going to work out so well, and certainly not as well as doing it by other methods. Secondly, it won’t even result in ‘wider appeal’ anyway. When a company says that that’s what they’re doing, there’s a decent chance that they want to emulate an extremely popular game or franchise (*cough*cod*cough*) – despite the fact that all the games that are the level of popular they want to emulate didn’t get there by trying to be that way, but by trying to be good games themselves, which a lot of people bought as a result (for example – Minecraft, WoW).

 I don’t want to go off on too big a tangent here because you’ve probably heard it all already anyway, but the point is that not only is the way that many publishers (and I should point out that a lot, if not nearly all, of these awful decisions are results of businessmen and not actual developers) aim for ‘wider appeal’ in the first place a stupid aim, they try and achieve it in stupid ways. And while even that point is both pretty obvious and not that helpful anyway to most people, it is still worth examining and learning from.

Expectation and Subjectivity

Something I mentioned in that last section was existing series and franchises. Obviously, those make up a pretty large portion of the games that are out there, and are worth examining separately because on top of that, complexity is even more relevant to them. For a standalone game, or even just the first in a series, the level of complexity it chooses is somewhat incomparable – if a game is aiming to be a certain type of game, there’s nothing wrong with that so long as it doesn’t mess anything else up too badly. However, when it comes to game number X in a series, it’s a lot harder.

This is especially true if the game in question is still early in the series. The balance has to be made between something new and something which isn’t too different from the original so it can qualify as a sequel – which is relevant because obviously the people who enjoyed the original will want to play and enjoy the sequel. And this becomes relevant to the issue of complexity when it comes to the issue of ‘streamlining’ and ‘dumbing down’. Usually, there will be some feature or features in the original which in retrospect weren’t so good, or could have been better somehow. Obviously, a sequel is a great opportunity to try and fix these flaws – however, whilst in a lot of cases these flaws can be fixed in a way that almost everyone will agree is for the better (especially if the issue is a technical one), others (ironically enough) aren’t so simple.

Where is the line between making something less time wasting and making something too simple? It’s impossible to say. Of course a part of the problem will always be people (because no matter the solution, someone will complain), and subjectivity issues are obviously pretty major, but a decision of some kind has to be made and not doing anything at all is rarely a good idea either. Even parts of a game that seem completely boring and unsalvageable in their current state can be enjoyed by some – for example, while I (and most other people) find ‘grinding’ for things atrociously boring, there are a minority who actually enjoy it.

Time is another important factor. Often, simplification is used to make things more time efficient, and while this is obviously important, it’s just as important to realize that things shouldn’t be time efficient to the detriment of other things. After all, games aren’t meant to be played through as fast as possible – well, unless they’re a racing game of some kind – they’re meant to be enjoyed. Sometimes keeping things complex requires more time, and that’s okay – so long as time isn’t being wasted unnecessarily.

…And speaking of wasting time unnecessarily, I think we’re done here.

[captaincake]

Thoughts on the Pokémon Series - Part 3

In parts one and two, I’ve looked at a bunch of reasons that have made the Pokémon series loved by so many people (and obviously if you haven’t already read those, you should probably go and do that). Obviously, that’s what I’m going to continue doing in this last part as well, and in fact, finish doing, because this is the last part of this series (of articles) about a series (of games).

Okay look let’s just cut to the chase here before I type any more stupid stuff.

One of the most common messages the Pokémon series shoves down our throats tells us is that of friendship and teamwork and all that other generic sort of stuff. Now obviously, this isn’t what makes the series good on its own, but when you think about it, it’s probably still the most important part of it, in a sense. For one thing, there are the mechanical aspects (in that your team of Pokémon should work well together) which reflect it, but in fact it literally is the case – battling is the core part of the game, and that requires multiple people. Although the AI can mean that there’s only one ‘person’ involved in battle, it’s no secret that there’s a limit to what it can do, and that’s where real people come in.

Even from the start of the series, playing with others was emphasised (bearing in mind this was still the time when awkward link cables had to be used) due to the multiple versions which required you to trade to get certain Pokémon, and of course at that point, you might as well battle them too, right? Since then of course, a heck of a lot of improvements have been made and doing all of that stuff is incredibly easy using the PSS in X and Y, which makes it even more encouraged for you to play with other people. And, barring all the people who battle you with their team of legendaries, many of the battles you have with others are much more interesting than the ones you can encounter in game, even if you’re not at a particularly high skill level of playing. The Battle Tower equivalent in each game (in this case, the Battle Maison) can have some tough battles in it too as you get a higher win streak, but nothing really compares to playing against other people.

That’s not to mention the competitions either – there have been actual championships in battles for a while now, but since the fifth generation there have been online tournaments too (which is a trend set to continue) which obviously leads to even more emphasis on this type of thing. This is where the level of depth of the battle system really becomes relevant – moves that you might not have considered using previously in the main game can suddenly become incredibly useful in competitive play, and you have to think a lot more about what kind of stats you want with your Pokémon(s)’s natures and so on, as that can decide critical things like whether you can out-speed your opponent, whether you can kill them in one hit, two hits, or whether they can do the same to you.

Competitive battling is one of Pokémon’s greatest strengths as a series, because although it’s complicated, it’s also quite simple at the same time when it comes to actually making decisions in a battle. It’s probably fair to say that it competition is one of the key components to its wild success with older people as well as children.

However, it is also one of Pokémon greatest weaknesses, because it’s one of its greatest strengths. By virtue of the competitive side of the series being so popular, that style of battling is essentially ‘locked in’. While certain aspects can be (and often are with each generation) changed, like type chart changes, move changes or even new mechanics like Mega Evolutions, the actual core of the system needs to remain the same from generation to generation. There can’t ever really be a massive overhaul of the system, and although that’s fine in the sense that the battle system generally works very nicely, it causes the problem of each new Pokémon game feeling like ‘more of the same’.

Now granted, it’s certainly not the only component of that (the general structure of the games being very similar is also a major part), but it’s certainly one of the largest. The problem is, almost all of the things that do get changed aren’t as noticeable playing through the story. While things like the physical and special splitting of moves in the fourth generation (instead of that being determined by type) were tremendous in their impacts on competitive play, the difference is not so noticeable if you’re just playing up to beating the champion, and this applies for many other things as well. X and Y’s Mega Evolutions are among the few things that are obvious changes, but unfortunately in the main game it only really serves to make everything easier (and the game isn’t too hard anyway), as only you and a few other people can actually use them and almost all other trainers you face have less than six Pokémon, with the few exceptions I can think of being the champion (a.k.a. the final boss) and that one guy in every game who has six Magikarp just to annoy you.

Other than that, there have been some other large additions in terms of battle types – double battles being the first of that sort (and with them, adding an entirely new layer of strategy), and later on triple and rotation battles as well. However, again, those don’t see much use in the main games – Pokémon Colosseum and XD did actually play in doubles for almost their entirety, but those aren’t technically part of the main series anyway.

Essentially, the issue is that although competitive battling is a large part of the series and one of the best parts of it as well, it also somewhat limits the series. Actually, this is what makes it so great that there are a lot of spin-off titles – they allow for applying the general theme of Pokémon to many other game types, and whilst I don’t think anyone cares (or even remembers) the likes of Pokémon Dash on the DS, there’s a lot of variety with the likes of the Ranger subseries, the Mystery Dungeon Subseries, and more recently Conquest. All of those things obviously don’t really solve the issue that the main games face (though to be fair, as I covered in the last parts, for some people this isn’t necessarily an issue in the first place), and I’ve already covered variety in the series as a whole anyway, but it’s still worth bringing up how these things relate.

-

That pretty much does it for this series of articles. I haven’t really gone over everything, as there are still parts of the series like the collection aspect which I could have gone into in more depth, but equally some of those things don’t really have a lot to discuss, especially as completing the Pokédex is something that even less people do now than they used to with sheer number of Pokémon available. And really, I’ve covered all the main parts of the games that I wanted to, so we’re pretty much done here.

I’ll probably do more things like this for other games too when I feel like it’s a good time to do so and/or I feel like it, and I’ll probably revisit things from time to time too. For now though, it’ll probably be back to the usual stuff I do for… some amount of time in the future. 

[captaincake]

Thoughts on the Pokémon Series - Part 2

Last time, I considered some of the things which have made the Pokémon series as successful (both monetarily and in terms of its reception among players – the latter being a cause for the former) as they are, through the lens of a lot of personal waffle which shouldn’t come up as much for this part.  I’m going to limit the pre-read more waffle as well, so let’s get right into things.

One of the other most important things that makes Pokémon so successful is in the way that it provides a large range of experiences. Now obviously, there are a lot of spin-offs in the series – some which aren’t that far off the main series, like the GameCube titles Colosseum and XD, and to a lesser extent the Mystery Dungeon sub-series, but others which are completely different – and whilst that in itself obviously means there’s a lot of different ways people can enjoy Pokémon, it’s also not really what I’m talking about, which is specifically just the main series.

Pokémon games are very linear when it comes to the main story. That isn’t unique among RPGs of course, as most games with a story of some kind tend to be linear (and it makes sense to do so with a level progression system), but in this case the story is also extremely predictable – travel between towns, get gym badges, fight your rival a few times, foil some evil team with ridiculous fashion sense’s evil plot some time between the seventh gym badge and elite four, and then beat them too. Some of the games (well, Black and White) have tried to mix things up a little, but overall, in terms of where you’re actually going, the path you take is pretty linear. And yet, at the same time – it isn’t.

Obviously for one thing, there are various side quests and optional parts of routes with items and other things you can get, as well as more in depth stuff like the Pokémon contests in Gen III and IV, but even if we disregard those, the games still don’t feel especially linear – if you were to play a particular version through twice, you could have completely (well okay, not completely) different experiences each time.

Pokémon games are among a smaller subset of RPGs that, instead of providing the player with a relatively fixed character group to play as, allows the player to catch their own teams of monsters to battle with and forms teams out of – they certainly aren’t the only games of this type that are popular either, with the Dragon Quest Monsters and Shin Megami Tensei series also being good examples of this, but they’re probably one of (if not the) most popular and successful among them. The sheer number of available Pokémon to catch is a great help in this, which is where the idea of there being a wide range of experiences comes in.

Essentially, being able to catch your own team offers non-linearity in that it means that, although the ‘what’ of the content being progressed through may be the same each time, the ‘how’ of that content is very different. On one run through, you could choose the water starter and have no problems with the rock gym (and there’s a 50% chance it’s a rock gym), but another time you might choose the fire starter and want to catch another Pokémon that can more easily deal with rock types. That’s a very simplified example, of course – seeing as full teams consist of six Pokémon, and also considering things like the moves those Pokémon learn as well, there’s a huge amount of variation available. Heck, thanks to the new way the experience share works in Gen VI, you can even do crazy stuff like catching 15 different Pokémon and continuously switching between which ones are in storage and which ones are in your team. When you also consider how every game’s Pokédex has anywhere between 150 and 450 total Pokémon in it depending on which game you’re playing, the sheer level of choice on offer is huge. Granted, some of those choices are Pokémon like Weedle and Dunsparce, but a lot of them are usually at least viable.

This doesn’t even take into account things like Nuzlocke runs, monotype runs and really any other kind of playthrough meant to result in a different sort of experience to the norm, and at the end of it is why despite being ‘the same game’ over and over, new Pokémon games are so exciting – because they are new. While they may be almost identical mechanically, the way the content of the game is structured (and especially when a new generation comes with a whole new region to explore along with a new bunch of Pokémon) makes a tremendous difference.

Of course, these kinds of differences (evidently) aren’t going to be enough for a lot of people, which is why there are plenty of people who would consider each game to just be the same with slight differences – reasonably so, of course. However, for the people (like me) who do find these differences significant, the result is that new Pokémon games do feel new – different enough to be sequels (including the genuinely new or otherwise different parts) that aren’t just there pointlessly.

…Or maybe I’m just biased. Then again, how could I not be biased? Opinions are biases in the first place, after all. In any case, I’m just rambling at this point, so I’ll end this thing here, on a relatively short note for once.

[captaincake]

Thoughts on the Pokémon Series - Part 1

(Since Pokémon X and Y have released recently and I’ve been playing both them (well, X specifically) and the series in general a lot, I thought I’d write some thoughts about the series as a whole and other stuff to do with game design. This is a pretty lazy intro to that, but I needed something to put before the read more and I didn’t have any other good spots for one, so here we are. And this isn’t really a part of the actual article anyway, so… yeah.)

(It’s probably also noteworthy that some of this is more personal than the typical game design stuff I write is, so expect some differences there as well – especially for this first part.)

It’s probably fair to say that the Pokémon series is one of the most successful video game franchises ever created. The games themselves are always incredibly popular, of course, as are the multitude of spin-offs, but on top of that are the TCG game (which is incredibly successful by itself), the anime (which has got to be one of the longest series around, if nothing else, though I’m no expert admittedly), and the tremendous amount of miscellaneous merchandise. Heck, there was a Pokémon typing game, for crying out loud. If that isn’t the sign of a successful series, I don’t know what is.

Given that the series is very marketable to children, it obviously isn’t a surprise that this is the case. But what’s always been a theme with Pokémon is its underlying complexity, and as the years have gone on the competitive part of it has become more and more relevant. This is especially the case as both the people who played the originals have grown up and as the internet has become more and more prominent – as of X and Y, connection to the internet has become an integral part of the experience beyond the ‘main game’ thanks to the PSS and global link (and the fact that using the internet isn’t as annoying on the 3DS as it was on the DS), and even the main game is more clearly designed around introducing those kinds of elements to players. Not just the Super Training thing which makes previously ‘hidden’ values more obvious, but even the smaller things like the references to the change in the type chart and types in general, the larger presence of moves with unique effects (ones that change a Pokémon’s type for example) place a clear emphasis on introducing newer or less experienced players into the deeper parts of the game, whereas previously the major changes (such as the physical and special split of moves in Generation IV) wouldn’t really be touched upon by anything in the game.

This underlying complexity is essentially the key to Pokémon’s success, I’d argue. Not completely, of course, as I’m sure that it would still have been printing money without it to some extent, but it would lack a lot of retention – there’d be no reason for older people to play the game bar nostalgia, and certainly no reason to play a lot. And whilst simplicity can undoubtedly be a good thing in a game (consider Mario, for instance), in an RPG like Pokémon you need complexity. Simplicity works when the fun of the game is in something more visceral, but when the gameplay consists primarily of primarily selecting one move from a set of four and one Pokémon from a set of six (to simplify a little), the underlying systems need to make it more complex than that. This, combined with a large variety of potential selections (specifically, Pokémon and moves) as well as other variables – abilities, items and so on – provide depth of experience, and at the same time, a wide range of those experiences.

I’ve touched on a lot of different areas in those last two paragraphs, and they could do with being explored in detail, which I intend to do. Before that though, I’d like to talk a bit about my own experiences and thoughts – as much as I like going on about game design stuff, a key reason I started writing this was as some kind of way of expressing (and understanding!) my own opinions. Not that the rest of this isn’t to some extent essentially my opinion, but what I’m about to get into is more personal than that.

Like many people, Pokémon was among the first games I played as a child. Not the first, certainly, but I started at a young age – specifically, with Ruby. And of course, as a child, I was awful at it – not just skill wise (A move set of all water moves? Genius, past me.), but in playing in what I would consider now a ‘boring’ way – the only actual Pokémon I would use throughout the game was my starter, with the rest of the team being low levelled ‘mons caught only to use HMs and eventually Groudon, because of course I was going to use the free overpowered Pokémon the game gave me. While I don’t mean to say this was the ‘wrong’ way to play, when I finally switched playstyles in Platinum (or thereabouts) to actually catching and using a proper team, I know I enjoyed the experience a lot more – and after all, catching different Pokémon is what the game is all about. (Again, this is something that I will be going into more detail later, which is why I’m bringing this up now, but there’s a broader point I’m getting to here.)

Anyway, to fast forward a bit, I’ve since experienced several generations worth of getting incredibly excited over the upcoming generations and the new Pokémon brought with them, finally playing the games relentlessly for a while, and then maybe going back to play the games again when I felt like that. For Gen IV, that was the first wait of that kind I had experienced, and it was incredibly exciting (again, I was about 8 or so at the time). By Gen V (only three or so years ago), I had become much more experienced with the series and games in general, but was still really excited about it.

I would spend hours reading forums about what other people thought about the Pokémon that were gradually revealed, being too shy to try posting myself, and noticing a disparity between people commenting on how the designs were awful and my own opinions (that they were usually either ‘okay, but not my thing’ or ‘awesome’). Being younger and therefore more stupid (this applies moreso to the wait for the fourth generation than the fifth, as I was somewhat more self aware for the latter), I naturally felt a little antagonistic in my head towards those people, mainly because a lot of the complaints I saw was – to use a more “modern” term – very ‘genwunner’-ish, a lot of them being along the lines of ‘the originals are better’ or ‘they don’t look like Pokémon anymore’. As I became older and less of an idiot, I obviously realised that, even if these kinds of criticisms weren’t always phrased very well, they were still valid opinions. If that seems blindingly obvious to you, well, for one thing I should very much hope so, but I bring all this up to show how I began looking at Pokémon more critically.

Obviously I had noticed flaws in the games – parts that were annoying or time wasting, or otherwise bad, but it was all relative in the sense that I was only comparing the flaws to the game as whole – that it was a given that the game was good, and not something that had to be demonstrated from the start. That’s not to say I don’t think the games are good (I wouldn’t be writing all this if I didn’t), but I didn’t really start to think more critically about the games until Gen V or so.

The thing is – examined on its own, any individual main series Pokémon game is fantastic, among the best in the RPG genre for gameplay. (Story is another matter entirely and I’ll get to that later.) But, as a series? They don’t change much. The Pokémon series is well known for each new game being a case of ‘best in the series’ (in the sense that each new one tends to have all of the last games… and more), but not actually a huge leap forwards from the last one – the general sort of gameplay experienced in X and Y is the same as Red and Blue – with a huge amount of ‘quality of life’ changes, various structural changes and nearly five times the actual Pokémon, but broadly speaking the games are very much the same. While game series in general are obviously supposed to carry over aspects of previous titles, when they’re ‘the same game’, whether a new instalment is actually a good game relative to the rest of the series is debatable, because what does the new one do that the old one didn’t?

This is the question that I have wrestled with for a long time now. Personally speaking, I know that I can buy every new main series Pokémon game when they come out, be very excited beforehand, enjoy the game immensely when I play out, and be no less excited for the next one. I’m even willing to pre-order the games well in advance of their release (though in practice I usually don’t until I have a better idea of the version exclusives), something I try to avoid for other games, because I can practically guarantee that I will love the game, because each new entry in the series is so similar. And while I would have no problem with this as a young child (who was essentially just a Nintendo fanboy, though thankfully not a vocal one), as I’ve thought increasingly about game design and games in general, it’s given me a lot of unease.  

An easy way around this issue is simply to accept that brains are irrational (which they are, to be fair), and to say that it doesn’t matter how I get enjoyment so long as enjoyment is what I’m getting – and after all, if the games are among the games which I’ve played the most (my collective play time for the series is probably only rivalled by my time on WoW), that simply means they are the most value for money. But this is clearly a pretty unsatisfying justification born more out of a desperate attempt not to feel like, well, a ‘fanboy’, mindless in devotion to a particular game series. It is not only dismissive of the importance (in my view) of striving for betterment as irrelevant so long as something is gained, but it is simply an admission of failure, in a sense. It is an argument that isn’t really an argument so much as a way to avoid the conversation, which is both boring and clearly not something you would expect from someone with a large interest in the subject matter – it would be like a Priest not wanting to consider the moral debate of abortion, for example. Or to put it more simply, it is just saying that any opinion for something subjective needs no justification, no explanation, no reasoning behind it – and I have simply never run into an opinion (again, for something subjective – opinions over whether the sky is blue or whatever obviously  have to be verifiable and therefore justifiable, but that’s not relevant here) that has not come with a justification, whether it be explicit or implicit.

While a lot of the more detailed reasons for why I have actually justified this to myself (well, not entirely – but to a decent extent, at least) will be coming when I get onto actual game design parts in later parts, there are a few things that I have since come to realise that I will share now. First of all, the level of complexity of the games, as I mentioned right at the start, is undoubtedly one of the most important factors. Contrasting with the New Super Mario Bros series for instance can make it clear that this isn’t just an issue of being invested in a particular series, as for that particular series, as more of the same has come out, while I enjoy playing the games, each time it is not with any thoughts about how wonderful the game is, but simply that they are enjoyable enough to spend some time with. Pokémon games however have gone on for a lot longer than that particular mini-series, with each game having even more content in it than a NSMB game, and still each time I love it. As someone who (as you have probably noticed) heavily favours and pays special attention to complexity and the smaller details of games, I have found that a series where it is these things that are changed and improved upon the most is one that I can appreciate seemingly very similar sequels to a lot.

The other thing (and final thing for this part) is that of the nature of the games in general. A lot of gamers – and more generally speaking, consumers of all kinds of entertainment – will have an ‘itch’ (or several) for a specific form of game. Some people really like extremely hard platformers (Super Meat Boy or Cloudberry Kingdom for example), others may prefer ultra-realistic racing games, others might just like simple puzzle games. That isn’t to say that they will only like these games – far from it. It’s just that, when presented with such a game, most people will obviously prefer a game that ‘scratches’ that ‘itch’. I don’t mean genres here, necessarily, because they can be more specific than that – and for my case at least, that ‘itch’ would be RPGs which are extremely complex and have lots of depth to them. Whilst Pokémon isn’t exactly the Platonic ideal of that or anything, it’s still among the closest to that sort of thing I’ve played, and as a result it makes sense that I would continue to enjoy different installations of it in a similar way, especially as the nature of that sort of thing is to make those smaller details seem more significant.

These aren’t the only reasons, and nor is this the only thing generally speaking I’d like to cover in future parts to this series of articles, but I’ve gone on long enough, so I’ll put a stop to things here.

[captaincake]

A Change in Approach

So, over the last few weeks, I've pretty much disappeared from this blog. This was due to several reasons - continued adjustment to a different kind of school life than I was used to, having less time generally, and in no small part to laziness (especially in the form of Pokemon).

In that time, I've been considering different ways of going about what I try to do here. Sticking to a schedule has been my typical way of trying to be consistent, but in practice trying to consistently put out a pretty long article every week (which take 3 hours minimum if I'm not too distracted - and I usually am) isn't very practical, psychologically or actually, especially as these next two school years will get increasingly busy for me. At the same time, I don't want to completely shut things down over here, so I'm going to try and do things differently.

'The Punchline' articles will not be going anyway, however, they will not be on a schedule, and nor will anything in general. Instead, I'm essentially just going to post things at whatever times works out. I'm also going to be a little more varied in terms of what I actually put out (and the the thing I'm about to put out is one example of this) and how long those things are.

I'm hoping that putting less pressure on myself as a result will help things to come out more regularly, even if the time intervals between things are longer (or if the things are shorter). And relatedly, I'm also hoping that this will actually result in more (and more varied to an extent) content for the few people who actually read my stuff.

On a related note to that... thank you to those that do read this. I haven't ever said so before, because it sort of strikes me as 'presumptuous' in a way to presume that people actually do read this stuff (especially when tumblr's display of followers is pretty buggy), but I do appreciate knowing that at least some people think what I do is actually decent. Though, I guess if nobody did read what I write, they wouldn't be reading this either? Look, the point is - thanks.

There should be actual content appearing right after this.

[captaincake]

Quick update: Probably won't be an article today. Kinda busy, but next week should be normal.

I also updated the archive after months of ignoring it, if you care (which you probably don't). I'll probably do a separate one for Aesthetics in Theoretics at some point.

[captaincake]

Aesthetics in Theoretics: Keys

I've talked about 'keys' before, in terms of game structure and as a sort of analogy, but in terms of their actual aesthetic significance, not so much. Obviously, their actual purposes in a game are pretty much always the same (opening things), but this is what can make their differences in other areas so interesting.

Of course, a lot of games will simply opt for a very simple idea of what a key looks like, with maybe some flair depending on graphical style. As you might expect, the doors (and/or whatever else the keys can open) usually also have fairly simple locks, although extremely obvious ones to make clear that yes, it's locked, though obviously exactly how this is done depends on the game. A 3D game is more likely to have a bunch of chains and stuff that are more easily visible from a distance, whereas 2D games often have much simpler door designs, because  they'll always look the same anyway. 

This simplicity is obviously pretty logical - getting keys and opening things is often a very 'mundane' task in a game, so it makes sense for them to have 'mundane' (though not necessarily boring) designs. However, not all occasions of door-opening are like this - doors leading to a boss, for example, often have much fancier locks and similarly fancy (or at least larger) keys. Again, this makes sense, because you want to distinguish something important from something not so important, as well as from the fairly simple perspective that you wouldn't want the player getting to the boss without going through some serious trouble to do so - having a more complicated design for the key means that, once you get it, it's obvious how important it is before you even know for sure what it does. Some games will do some even more fancy stuff, like Skyward Sword's fancy puzzle keys that you have to twist into the right position.

There's one more type of key that can work a little differently - a plot key. I know I just covered those in a sense, but even boss keys (or whatever equivalent) are very much tied to a specific game element. Plot keys, on the other hand, are more arbitrary in that they're simply an item necessary for plot advancement of some kind, and are usually one-offs. As a result, they can take on a much greater variety of forms than other keys do. In fact, they don't even have to be a key - a lot of them come in all kinds of forms, including magic artifacts, books, and even sillier stuff like chickens. To examine the exact significance of any of these forms would obviously take too long and be pointless anyway, but the fact that these take so many different forms is an interesting contrast to the consistency of the other kinds of keys.

Though it may seem that it is the latter which hold the majority in games, it's actually context sensitive 'keys' - of which 'plot keys' are a subset of - which hold the majority. To go much further would be encroaching on the subject of the article I linked to above, but it's certainly interesting to consider how significant keys are, as a literal concept, for them to appear in so many games in so many forms.

[captaincake]

The Punchline: Level Ups (2 of 2) - Abilities

In the first part of this topic, I went over how the stat area of levelling up can affect a game, both for the better and worse. In the second part, it’s the abilities, or spells, or moves or whatever you want to call them that are the focus – which, frankly, is the much more interesting part of levelling up. Since there isn't really a single term that gets used a lot for these (it depends a lot on the kind of game), I’ll just say right now that I will use ‘abilities’ when referencing them not within a specific example, because that’s a general enough term to satisfy my pedantry. Well, not for one example we’ll get to later, but that’s not the point.

Practicality against Frequency

So, yes, as I just said, learning new abilities is the best part of gaining a level. It’s not even a contest – what’s more interesting, slightly higher numbers (which as I said last time, often provide hardly any noticeable differences), or the ability to do something new and crazy and exciting? Obviously, the latter. Well, most of the time. Some of the time? Look, just so long as we’re not talking about something that isn't completely useless and/or just a higher damage and cost version of something you already have, learning something new is exciting. It’s like real life, actually – although you may gradually change as you grow older, the more interesting parts of life are when you learn how to do new things.

In any case, the thing that makes learning a new ability exciting is because they have a more direct, obvious, and to some extent visceral impact on the game. Whilst gaining some more stats can feel arbitrary and unnoticeable, having a new ability can change the way you battle. It’s rather like coming across a new type of enemy that does something different to what you’re used to which you have to take into account when battling them, only this time the difference is from you. The exact type and extent of these differences varies hugely from game to game depending on how abilities are handled in them, but you can usually expect there to be some clear difference in how you fight before and after learning a given ability. Certainly, if a new ability hasn't made much impact on the game, something has gone pretty badly wrong at the design level.

So, considering we've established abilities as being good things when implemented well (implemented well in terms of each individual ability’s impact on the game), it seems pretty logical to think that they should be obtained as much as possible – after all, why would you want to level up and get ‘nothing’ (i.e. just stats) when you could get something new? Obviously there may be some exceptions for certain games (the Paper Mario example from last time being one, since you gain new abilities through badge points which you get by levelling up, as well as for more action oriented games where you wouldn't want too many abilities or you would get confused), but for the most part, you’d want to be getting as many abilities as possible.

You can probably see where I'm going with this, though – simply put, it’s just not feasible to have a new ability gained for every single level up. Well, okay, that’s not entirely true – if you designed the abilities first, and then imposed a level cap based on how many of them there were, or something else like that, you could certainly have it so that a new ability is gained for every level up, but that would cause its own problems – spiky difficulty progression (since levelling up would have more of an impact), as well as it taking longer to level up in the first place, which defeats the point somewhat. However, assuming a more ‘standard’ level curve with the addition of abilities every level as opposed to only some levels, there would be a huge amount of abilities, and that’s not even accounting for games where you have multiple party members. This is obviously a problem in that designing and animating such a huge amount of abilities would take up far too much time.

(Actually, despite what I just said, games with multiple party members can potentially have one of the best workarounds for this – if each character learns things at different rates, then on a level up where one character learns nothing, another might learn something new. This still isn't perfect, and relies somewhat on the assumption that the party members all remain around a similar level, and still means a lot of different abilities in the game, but them being split at the very least makes it easier to design a wider variety of abilities due to different sorts of classes they might be learnt by.)

This issue of practicality isn't the only one to consider, however. One of the things that can make learning a new ability isn't just the ability itself – it’s the fact that it’s something ‘special’. When level ups are normally ‘boring’, something like a new ability can seem a lot more important when it’s relative to level ups that are usually boring. An argument could therefore be made that by making learning new abilities more common, they would feel less important and hence not as interesting – in other words, that normally by having them gained only sometimes is what helps them be as interesting as they are.

I'm not convinced by this, though. If an ability seems boring, that’s because it probably is boring, but the way you got it shouldn't have much bearing on this – it’s down to the nature of the ability itself. It’s true that something becoming too common can make something seem less special, but not necessarily. Take chocolate as a real life example – it’s delicious, but eating it a lot over a longer period of time (as opposed to a lot at once, which in this analogy is the equivalent to gaining multiple abilities at once and being overwhelmed) won’t necessarily make you bored of it. Furthermore, if there’s a significant enough gap between level ups anyway, this should hardly be an issue anyway. Not to mention that designing a part of a game to be more boring just to make another part of it seem more interesting than it really is strikes me as being lazy at best, if not outright bad design at worst.

  Choice and Talent Trees

One element tied heavily into abilities is an element of choice. I mentioned a few games last time that, upon level up, allowed you to choose what stat gains you got, and around the same time, the idea of a talent tree. Whilst it’s pretty rare for a game to just outright ask you whether you want to learn ability X or ability Y on a level up, it’s not uncommon for it to have a talent tree system that gives you talent points to spend when you level up, which usually have a combination of different passives and a few abilities in each tree than you can get, depending on playstyle. The extent of these choices can obviously vary a lot from game to game (though MMOs usually have the most complex ones), but this is another area that can make levelling up more interesting, due to the obvious advantages giving the player a choice has – assuming the choice is actually a meaningful one, anyway.

That said, it can still be hard to make these systems particularly interesting. Again, it would be practically impossible to make a talent tree entirely out of abilities (unless it was a really small talent tree… a talent shrub?), so a lot of the actual choices are between passives, which… aren't that interesting. There can be a few interesting ones here and there, especially the ones that add bonus effects to existing abilities, but for the most part it can still feel a bit like the issue with stats but in a slightly different format.

Progression

Now that we've looked at both the stats and abilities part of levelling up, there’s one more loose end I want to look at, and that (in case you can’t read bold text) is progression. Specifically, progression in games where you only play as a single character, and MMOs especially. Aside from all the issues I've already gone over, levelling up has a very important bearing on progression, in terms of what areas are available to the player at what point.

In most single player games, controlling progression isn't hard – it’s just a matter of coming up with the suitable road block, and to some extent by controlling the levels of enemies in areas that are technically ‘open’ but will probably lead to the player dying if they try to go there. Not only that, but because there’s generally some sort of path (to varying degrees of linearity), it’s easy for the developer to know roughly what sort of level the player will be at a given point in the game.

In an MMO, though, it gets more complicated – levelling up can actually become more of a useful tool for controlling progression. Obviously, things like holding the player back by plot doesn't work due to the very nature of a game with lots of other people running around, so to keep people from going to areas that they’re not ‘supposed to’ go, the levels are just made high enough to kill someone low level easily.

This makes sense to some extent, certainly within an area (or else someone could do what chronologically comes ‘last’ in the area out of order), and maybe even in general if there are storylines that take place over multiple different areas. However, a lot of the time this is just holding the player back for, well… just the sake of it, really. There’s not really a lot of reason that players should be held back from going wherever they want arbitrarily, and all it really seems to do is solidify the idea of an MMO ‘endgame’ bigger than the rest of the game, because only at maximum level can someone actually go and do whatever they like. It’s a little hard not to think of it as, to some extent, a way of keeping people play the game longer so that they pay more money – not entirely, since a lot of people like the idea of progressing as a character, and MMOs are pretty hard to design around in general anyway, but it would still be nice for there to be more freedom in some of these respects.

One Last Example

So, at the beginning of this part of the topic, I mentioned that I had a particular example in mind which made the use of the term ‘ability’ a little awkward – and that’s Pokémon, because abilities are actual, specific terms that have nothing to do with levelling up, with the exception of a few, weird cases which themselves are less to do with levelling up so much as evolution. But in any case, the point is that Pokémon does levelling up pretty well.

The thing with Pokémon is that it’s pretty unique (not completely, since there are other games like Dragon Quest Monsters that are in the same genre, but Pokémon is obviously one of the most well-known, and one of the better executed ones thanks to how many iterations that it has had over time) in terms of the way you collect a team of different monsters, and anything that you can battle, you can use yourself if you catch one. This makes the way level ups work very different, because there’s no longer any asymmetry going on – a boss isn’t hard because they have loads of  health and crazy moves or whatever, they’re hard because they’re a trainer with a tough selection of Pokémon and some half-decent AI.

Pokémon has several immediate advantages in that you have teams of six, who learn things at different rates (which helps the issue of learning moves frequently), but most of all, it has evolution. Other games can have things similar-ish to this, like advanced classes in Fire Emblem, but evolution is such a pervasive thing in Pokémon and it helps tremendously the issue of making levelling up interesting. While it doesn't apply for some Pokémon who don’t evolve or evolve not by levelling up, in most cases Pokémon evolve through level up, which is significant due to all the changes that can come from it.

For one thing, the stat boosts gained through evolution are actually really noticeable, because compared to a standard level up, the stat boosts gained are huge. That’s not all, though – evolving can also often mean a change or addition in type, which can have a potentially even greater impact because of the way it affects the weaknesses and strengths of a Pokémon. In addition, again because of having six different party members (and more in storage), different members can evolve at different times, so you’re never far away from getting something cool out of a level up.

The final thing noteworthy about levelling up in Pokémon games is the implications in the competitive scene. For most RPGs, this wouldn't be even remotely relevant, but competitive battling is actually a really big deal for the series, and as a result, making the absolute most out of each Pokémon’s stats is obviously pretty important. What this means is that, for once, even the tiniest of stat gains can have a big impact – it might mean, for instance, the difference between a one-hit-kill and a two-hit-kill of an opponent’s Pokémon, which obviously is a pretty big deal. To be fair, this isn't really all that relevant while playing through the main game, and a lot of people play competitive Pokémon using online simulators anyway. However, even the fact that the potential is there for such seemingly small stat differences to make… well, differences, is a lot better than many other games.

-

That pretty much covers levelling up in general, though. It’s pretty interesting how such a small system can have such a huge impact on the way a game is played – in a way, level ups are like the physics engines of platforming games. There isn't much for me to add, so let’s just pretend I made a typical joke about my writing skills not levelling up, and move on.

(I got +2 to ‘writing bad outros’ and nothing to anything else, in case you were wondering.)

[captaincake]

Aesthetics in Theoretics: Breaking the Fourth Wall

The idea of a fourth wall between a piece of media and its audience is not one that is likely to be unfamiliar to anyone who has played a decent amount of games. Well, maybe not the wall specifically, since that technically exists in all media anyway, but the act of breaking it specifically. It's easy to think of an 'obvious' example of this happening - a character directly addressing the audience (often to the confusion of other characters), like in the image above - and they're certainly pretty fun to have, but what's more applicable in a broader sense are the more subtle occasions of fourth wall breaking.

Every video game that has been created has controls. Even the absolute worst, boring, non-game games have controls, because without controls, well... you wouldn't have control over anything, and at that point we wouldn't be discussing a game. Of course, given that they have controls, they need explanations, or else the player won't know what they're doing - trial and error can work (to a questionable extent) for simple games, especially since a lot of them have common control schemes (WASD movement, etc.), but specifics require some degree of explanation from the game. These explanations can be done subtly, or they can be done a lot less subtly, and it's the latter which are the relevant case here.

While the specific approach to explaining controls to players obviously varies a lot even within this category, one of the more common approaches (especially for single player games) is simply for the characters who explain the controls to... well, explain the controls. By saying what they are. It's sort of stupid sounding when you put it into words like that, but to be fair, it's probably even more stupid sounding from the perspective of the character being told that to jump, all they have to do is just press this mysterious 'A' button.

This kind of approach to fourth wall breaking in video games is a somewhat mundane one, and certainly there are a lot more ways of doing so that could be examined in detail if this was meant to be a long post. However, this is still an interesting way of breaking the fourth wall because of just how closely tied it is to gaming as a medium in general, in that it's not something that can be done in any other medium except games. This in itself isn't necessarily a huge deal, but where it gets really interesting is with some of the weirder stuff that can be done with it. There's that one boss (Psycho Mantis) from the Metal Gear Solid games that requires you to put your controller in the second player port, for example, and although some of these kinds of things can be kind of 'gimmicky' (certainly if they're overdone), they're still something that when used occasionally can make for some really cool moments that serve to show some of gaming as a medium's most interesting aspects.

(There's still a lot to say on this topic (obviously), so this will likely not be the last post I make on it, but I'll probably leave any such instance to a later date - doing the same topic in small bits week after week could get pretty boring.)

[captaincake]

The Punchline: Level Ups (1 of 2) - Stats

‘Levelling up’ is such a common term in games that explaining it would not be pointless merely in the sense of being unnecessary, but in the sense that the way level ups are handled from game to game varies hugely. Although they originated pretty simply and mainly applied to RPGs, now they can be find in almost any genre you can think of – sometimes, it’s not even you that levels up, but your weapon or something else.

Despite being a seemingly pretty simple thing (and often, their actual implementation is pretty simple – it’s really just a collection of numbers for the most part), the way a game handles levelling up can have a huge impact on how the rest of it works, in terms of difficulty curves, what the player is actually capable of doing – and for that matter, what they’re encouraged to do – as well as providing goals for the player to reach. Heck, even the psychological impacts of levelling up can be big – all those visual and sound effects aren't for nothing, after all.

There are two general areas that levelling up can change – the stats of a character, and abilities (or spells or techniques or whatever you want to call them). These two things on a broader level contribute to a sense of progression for the player – they can look at their stats and abilities and remember how when they first started, they didn't have these, and as a result fell like they have achieved something.

Each of these two areas can have very different impacts, advantages and disadvantages, and are therefore worth exploring separately in detail before examining how they work when in use together. I’ll be looking at how the stats affect the game first, as they are simpler conceptually.

Stats

While it’s true that stats are simpler in terms of… well, actual simplicity, it is hardly ever true that they are simple in their impact on the game as a whole. Despite – indeed, because of – them being just numbers, they determine almost everything about how battles proceed (especially in non-action RPGs). This is, from the game designer’s perspective, a great thing. Difficulty can very easily be fine-tuned simply by tweaking some numbers, which is not hard to do. Of course, it shouldn't be controlled by stats exclusively, as the general design of enemies (or in other words, their abilities – this will be covered in more detail later) should control that, but when it comes to the smaller things as well as general progression of the game in terms of the damage the payer gives and receives, it is very easy to change the numbers around to get the desired results.

And that is the problem.

The thing is, well… stats are boring. They’re numbers, and more importantly, arbitrary ones. (And zeroes. Get it? Because… you know what, I’ll just let myself out.) The thing is, whilst the player is getting stronger, so is the enemy. Obviously, you wouldn't want the game to get easier as it goes on, so at a minimum the player and enemies will get stronger at the same rate. But… in that case, what’s the point of changing the numbers to begin with? If you can accomplish the same thing without wasting so much time (both that of the developer and the player) changing what amounts to nothing, why do it at all?

The other possibility would be to improve the enemy’s stats at a faster rate than the player’s. However, this still essentially runs into the same problems – you could simply get rid of the stat changes for the player, and not increase the enemy’s stats at quite as high a rate, so that the ‘overall’ rate is the same. In practice, what a lot of RPGs do is this anyway (which is admittedly influenced somewhat by the abilities part of levelling up) – and it does actually work out more or less okay.

Proportions

The thing is, the proportions of stats in a lot of games are odd. Well, maybe not odd per se, but arbitrary. Whilst your attacks don’t do ‘random’ damage, they do variable damage, and the actual numbers themselves don’t seem to have any particular reason for them being that way. Obviously, they need to be some value and given that they change, it seems like it doesn't really matter, but it actually can.

 Consider the following – your attacks do ‘roughly’ 100 damage, in practice varying by about 10 damage each time, not accounting for critical hits or misses or things like that. Against an enemy with 1000 health, this means that it should die in about 10 turns. Sometimes it might take 9, and other times 11, depending on how lucky you get, but in general, not a lot of difference.

However, if you kept that same amount of damage variation (10) but your attacks only did around 20 damage, then you could do anywhere between half the expected damage to one and a half times the expected damage. Against an enemy with 50 health, you could finish the battle in anywhere between 2 turns and 5 turns.

This is admittedly not the greatest example, and is pretty exaggerated, but the point of it is to show how only a difference of a few points in a stat may not make a lot of difference. If in either of these examples, you were to level up and get about 3 more damage in an ‘expected’ attack, would you even notice the difference? Chances are, you’d probably see a much greater difference simply from getting new equipment, which tend to provide a larger jump in stats.

This sort of thing is actually something I've noticed while playing Earthbound recently. There were several enemies early in the game that when attacking, might do 1 damage on the first turn, but then 14 damage on the next – and not even because of a critical hit. This being early in the game, you obviously don’t have a whole lot of health, which means a single hit could do between negligible damage or something like a quarter. This makes it pretty annoying deciding what your next move should be, especially because it takes a while to get your second party member to back you up (and longer to level them up sufficiently to not be dead weight). As your stats improve though, the amount of damage you give and take increases so that the amount it varies doesn't really make a noticeable difference – in fact, in this sense the game actually gets easier because you no longer have to worry about being screwed over by random numbers. Of course, it gets harder in other ways (specifically, the ways that aren't obnoxious but actually good), but that first part of the game can be really annoying sometimes.

To take this back to the issue of difficulty curves though, this is why games can get away with simply having a faster rate of stat improvement for enemies: proportions. For one thing, enemies often start out weaker than the player anyway – in getting stronger at a faster rate, they eventually overtake the player in terms of pure stats. Again, this obviously doesn't take into account the actual abilities of the player and enemy, nor does it take into account the intelligences of the player and AI and the fact that in games with multiple party members – both single and multiplayer – the party members can cooperate with each other. However, the enemy being ahead in numbers (theoretically) makes the player feel that each victory is more earned by virtue of beating the ‘stronger’ enemy.

The other thing that can make the proportions of stats matter is in terms of how damage is actually calculated. As noted above, most games tend to have some sort of small variation that each attack does, as a sort of ‘realism’ factor, I guess. Other games don’t have this, such as if they’re more action oriented or if they have action commands like the Mario RPG games, but besides this variation, there’s always a damage calculation of some kind. Some games have very complex ones (with some less complex general rules), like Pokémon, whilst others have much simpler ones. Generally, the simpler the damage formula, the greater the impact each stat increase has on the game, because with a really simple formula it usually means that it’s just a matter of adding the offensive stats and subtracting the defensive ones, taking into account any weaknesses or whatever as well. Pokémon is a noteworthy exception to this, but I’ll get into exactly why in the second part of this series, after covering abilities (not the Pokémon kind of ability, of course). For now, I want to look at a game (series) which has a simple damage formula, to show what I mean – Fire Emblem.

Basically, the damage formula in a Fire Emblem game is as I said – add up the offensive stats of the attacker, subtract the defensive stats of the defender, take into account any weaknesses or other influences, and that’s it – no random variation besides missing, critical hits and other things triggering. The result of this is that (and especially because of the games being strategy games where you have to be very careful) each and every stat gained from a level up makes a lot of difference. Well, okay, not every stat up, since obviously getting more magic on a knight for example isn't very helpful, but beyond that, everything matters. You never know when just one extra point of a certain stat will mean the difference between life and death. This is also an issue of proportion, to an extent, because the way the numbers are in general means that a single gain is very helpful, as opposed to how in many other games a single stat up could be unnoticeable. And again, even with these proportions, a single stat up could still be unnoticeable if it weren't for the simple damage formula that ensures that a standard attack will always do the same damage with a given set of stats.

There is one other way of making stat gains from levelling up interesting, and that’s with choice. The most familiar way of doing this will most likely be with talent trees, but I'm going to go into them when dealing with abilities, since talent trees mostly deal with those anyway and less so the main stats of a character.

There aren't actually a whole lot of games which let you choose which stats you gain upon level up, which is unfortunate, because it’s one of the best ways of handling stats. Games like Torchlight and its sequel have this to some extent, as levelling up gives you 5 points to invest between stats, but these aren't the best examples because of proportion issues – those 5 points hardly make a noticeable difference at all, certainly not compared to the talent point gained. A much better example would actually be the first two Paper Mario games.

If you haven’t played the games, what happens when you level up (besides HP and FP (used for different abilities) being refilled) is that you get a choice between adding 5 to your HP, 5 to your FP, or 3 to your BP (badge points, which you can use to equip badges that range from passives to abilities). These amounts are always the same, which may sound a little odd, but it’s actually just because of the way stats are distributed, as the numbers you see are generally pretty low -  a basic attack can by the end of the game only do 6 damage maximum, and the highest a boss’ HP goes is 200.

As a result of having these kinds of numbers, this choice actually makes a pretty noticeable difference – 5 extra FP isn't that much for example, but because you don’t have a whole lot of it in general and abilities require a decent amount of it, getting whatever more you can still feels like a good improvement. BP is an especially good choice because of how much freedom there is in terms of badge choice, though that admittedly ties in a little with the abilities part of levelling up if you equip a badge that gives you a new ability. The point here, though, is what choice – and specifically, a meaningful choice – can do to make even just numbers have a much more positive impact on the game. This is also really good for letting the player play with their own style – some people might want to go for a roughly balanced approach, whilst others more confident at the game might not get many HP upgrades and focus on their other stats for extra challenge. Of course, this kind of approach may not work for all kinds of games, but similar things can certainly be accomplished, and giving the player options is almost never a bad thing if implemented well.

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In the second part of this topic, I’ll be going over how abilities gained through level ups can affect the game. In case it isn't obvious, they’re a lot more interesting than stats are. The only question is… will my ability to write about them be sufficient?

(Yes. The answer is yes.)

[captaincake]

Aesthetics in Theoretics: HUDs

HUDs, or UIs, or GUIs, or whatever you want to call them (there's hardly any actual distinction between the latter two of those, so why do they both exist? The only advantage of 'GUI' is that you can pronounce it 'gooey'.) are pretty important parts of games. Not all games - some of them can get away with not having them - but for the most part, they're necessary to display important information like health, other stats, and so on. Obviously, since they cover up a part of the screen which could otherwise be used to display the actual game, it's pretty important that they're as space efficient as possible, whilst still being large enough to be easily noticeable.

Doing this is for the most part, pretty simple. The majority of games simply don't require particularly complex HUDs - a health bar of some kind (and maybe not even that), often some other kind of secondary resource bar, and maybe a few other things like objectives or counters of things like coins and so on (which can often be kept hidden most of the time anyway). With so few things to display, it's obviously pretty easy to put them in the corners of the screen, where there usually isn't much action going on anyway. Not much more to say here.

Certain games and genres, however, can get a bit more complex. If it's something like a strategy game, and especially turn based ones, the HUD is much more important and needs to display more information, but on the other hand it may not need to display it all at once. Turn based strategy games in particular have an advantage since visibility is less of an issue, and if the game is on a (3)DS or something (like Fire Emblem: Awakening), a lot of that information can be put on the bottom screen anyway. In fact, despite being some of the games with the most information available to the player, strategy games can still get by with relatively few interface problems.

Where it does get harder is with multiplayer games. MMORPGs, and WoW in particular (in the past, at least - I don't know how true this holds any more) can end up with a lot of things cluttering up the HUD, due to all the spells, minimap, quests, your own character portrait, party members... more recent games have done things to make this less of an issue, often by having less spells available in the first place, and making the HUD more flexible in general - it's worth noting that having options available for the HUD in any kind of game is almost always a good idea, as is having a good set of options in general, but the more complex the HUD the more useful this becomes.

In other multiplayer games, and especially more competitive-oriented ones, a good HUD is even more important because instead of being the difference between annoyance and convenience, it's the difference between... well, still that, basically, but even what might otherwise be a minor issue of the HUD could lead to a mistake that might change how the rest of the game ends up going. I've found that in Awesomenauts, for example, while the HUD is for the most part fine, in some fights with a lot of effects on screen at once, because the only health bar is directly above your character, it can get obscured and lead to you not knowing how much health you have left, which can obviously be a big problem in the middle of a fight. It's not something that comes up too often, but when it does, it's something that makes me think it would be useful to have a second health bar somewhere on the sides of the screen as well.

...I wish I had a second health bar in real life.

[captaincake]

The Punchline: Getting Hit

Have you ever been punched in the face?

In video games, I mean. Hopefully you haven’t been punched in the face in real life (or anywhere else, for that matter). That hurts. In games, though it’s different since getting hit obviously won’t actually hurt you. And yet, at the same time, getting hit does hurt you – mentally. Despite doing nothing physically to you video games can easily elicit a pretty strong response – after all, victory and/or time is at stake. Getting hit takes you closer to dying and having to redo something, or suffering something else (such as a B rank instead of an A rank when you complete the stage), and even the actual event of getting hit can use up time by knocking you down.

In some ways, getting hit can seem contradictory to a game’s goal of providing enjoyment, but in others, it is absolutely vital. After all, if there was no threat of losing, winning would hardly be satisfactory, and many games rely on challenging the player in order as a key component of the game. The key is balance – balance between frustration and feeling fairly challenged. The thing is, aside from how obvious it is that that’s the case (when isn’t something about balance), what actually constitutes balance varies wildly from game to game, genre to genre, and even person to person.

Before proceeding, it’s worth noting that although you (or the things you control) can get hit in RPG’s and RTS’s, I won’t be covering these because it’s not really the results of getting hit that I’m looking at so much as the process of it. Granted, the process of getting hit also has implications for the results, but in those kinds of games, you don’t generally need to worry about being interrupted mid-attack or about being knocked back or anything like that. Well, unless it’s an action RPG or something, but in those cases there’s nothing worth distinguishing between them and other action games.

2D Games

In 2D games, getting hit is generally pretty simple. Platformers are great examples of this – getting hit in a Mario game doesn’t even knock you back, it just hurts you, briefly pauses everything, and gives you a short time of invincibility so that you can’t be hurt by the same thing twice in a short timeframe. The exact mechanisms for getting hit obviously varies a lot from game to game, but one thing they tend to have in common is that you aren’t stopped for long.

I find that Mario games deal with getting hit very well, because getting hit usually doesn’t do anything to your momentum – even if you get hit, you can keep going as you were, and since getting hit by something rarely feels like it wasn’t your fault anyway, getting hit isn’t a particularly frustrating experience.

It’s important to note the difference between something that’s frustrating because the player messes up (and is therefore (potentially) annoyed at themselves for doing so) and something that’s frustrating because the game was poorly designed – such as being hit by an enemy that the player couldn’t see - or something was poorly implemented – such as controls not being properly responsive. While the former is okay in most cases, the latter is definitely not, and is therefore what exclusively what I will be referring to when talking about something being frustrating unless I say otherwise.

Sonic games are very different to Mario games in that getting hit is a much bigger deal. Getting hit, aside from always effectively reducing you to your last hit, will completely remove all momentum and throw Sonic back a bit. This could be viewed as odd for a series that’s supposed to be about going fast, but that’s exactly why it makes sense – you  can’t just go fast, you have to go fast without making mistakes, or else you could just keep running through enemies and hazards with relatively little fear so long as you kept grabbing rings.

The actual animation of getting hit doesn’t actually take that long, either – you regain control pretty quickly, it’s just getting back to top speed again which takes more time, and since you still have control during that time, it doesn’t feel like you’re being punished too much for being hit. It also helps that it’s easier to take out enemies than in Mario games, as you can just spin dash through a lot of them, and don’t necessarily have to jump directly on top of them either. The enemies themselves are closer to environmental hazards anyway than Mario ones simply due to how fast you can go, which means that getting hit is usually less a matter of failing to avoid an enemy so much as a failure to react in time and jump or spin dash into them.

The point is, what happens when you get hit varies wildly (as it should) depending on what kind of game you’re playing and what aspects of it are emphasised. This applies to 2D action games as well of course, especially as fighting is the key component of those kinds of games, but I’m actually going to come back to action games a bit later, after looking at some 3D games.

3D Games

3D games are, in the majority of cases, slower when it comes to getting hit than 2D ones. Getting hit is more likely to result in much longer and more complicated animations, often knocking your character to the floor, and they then have to get up, which takes more time. This doesn’t apply for all of them of course, and games that tend to have larger health bars which aren’t outright action-focused games  may opt for the simpler approach of causing your character to flash and simply take damage, with little other impacts. However, when it does apply, it’s rarely anything but annoying.

3D Mario games are, curiously, pretty good examples of this. Despite how un-intrusive getting hit is in the 2D games, getting hit in the 3D ones can knock you back quite a bit. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem on its own, due to navigating a 3D world being very different to navigating a 2D one, but it results in being knocked down, and Mario for some reason takes ages to get up. It’s especially infuriating when this happens and you get knocked off of a tower or something and have to climb back up anyway if you end up waiting not only to land, but to get up again.

The reason for this is obvious – because it’s more realistic and logical when hit by something to be knocked down, and for getting back up again to take a few seconds. The problem is, this is a completely nonsense reason for making it this way, because nothing else in the game is realistic. It doesn’t make sense that you’d be able to do the crazy jumps you can, not even to mention the creatures and environments you’re in themselves. The time it takes to get up gets frustrating far too quickly, and there’s really no actual gameplay reason for it – the nature of Mario games is that the enemies are not really the main focus so much as navigating the level itself, as being hit once is unlikely to directly lead to being hit again – the damage of the hit itself should be the punishment, not wasting the player’s time. This is especially important because wasting time can cause frustration, which leads to making mistakes the player wouldn’t otherwise make, making them more annoyed and causing a feedback loop of frustration which should never be desirable.

Having said that, it’s not impossible for longer times to get up and so on to work well in a game – they just have to be used in the right kind of game. Monster Hunter games have them, for example, and it makes sense – fights in general are much longer due to them all effectively being boss fights, often taking over half an hour. Animations in general tend to be slower paced (unless you’re using a fast weapon like dual swords) and the games are all about knowing when to attack and when not to, and knowing how long animations will take and therefore whether you can attack before the monster can hit you. It’s pretty common to be sent flying by an enemy attack, and as a result, to end up waiting a while (relatively) to get back up again. However, due to things taking place over a longer period of time (as opposed to a faster-paced platformer), this isn’t as annoying as it could be in another kind of game. That’s not to say that it can’t be frustrating, but it depends a lot more on the player – the games tend to involve fighting the same monsters repeatedly to get materials anyway and can use up a lot of hours of time, so it really just depends on how patient the player is and what preferences they have.

This brings us to action games in general. Obviously, getting hit happens a lot – and this is where finding a balance is the hardest, because it needs to have a significant impact without being too annoying, or else the whole game will simply be too frustrating. Since action games are almost always fast-paced (Monster Hunter games being somewhat of an exception), this means that if you get knocked down, you should be back up again quickly.

However, there are some other things to consider. The first is visibility, in two areas. For one thing, you have to consider where the enemy is – if they’re off screen but can still attack you, that can be a problem because then the player can’t watch them to see when they’re about to attack, and therefore will have a hard time dodging or otherwise responding, which means that they can be hit unfairly. This is obviously bad, but also a fairly easy problem to avoid by simply designing areas and enemies so that it can’t happen.

The other area is the visibility of the player themselves. In most cases, this shouldn’t be an issue, especially with certain camera angles, but occasionally it can. At times when there are a lot of enemies and flashy effects, it may be possible to lose track of your character, and if that happens, trying to dodge things becomes pretty hard. The Wonderful 101 occasionally suffers from this, because instead of controlling just one person, you’re controlling a whole group of people, and you only lose health if your current leader is the one that gets hit.

It’s mostly easy to see where you are in that game because the leader is marked with a circle and obviously runs at the front of the group, and on top of that can be easily identified by being the one who controls the ‘unite morph’ attacks – however, sometimes after being hit by an attack and with parts of your group scattered, and especially if you get caught in a place that can be awkward to see in the isometric-ish perspective, you can lose track of yourself completely for a moment. It’s not an issue that happens too often, but when it does, it can easily lead to being hit by something you couldn’t know would have hit you.

The other thing to consider is what happens in the aftermath. If you can be hit immediately after recovering from the last hit, you could easily get screwed over by the enemy simply attacking again and again, with no chance of escape. This isn’t something that usually can happen in good games anyway, but it’s still important to avoid it because sometimes it can be less obvious that it’s possible, and you don’t want to have invincibility frames that last too long or getting hit could even become desirable in some cases, which it pretty much never should be.

-

In the end, it all comes back to balance between challenge and frustration. Getting hit is not just important in terms of how much it affects the player, but how it does so in general. These aspects should fit the game they’re in, and add to the experience, as opposed to detracting from it as they very easily can.

[captaincake]

Aesthetics in Theoretics: Depth

I've talked about depth twice in the past (though I won't link to the first time I did so, because it's one of my earlier articles and not very good (even by my standards) as a result), and because language is silly, I'm going to talk about it 'again' without actually talking about it again. You see, this time I mean actual depth (instead of figurative depth and what is essentially a pun).

Specifically, what I mean is the depth you see with your eyes - which is to say the difference between 3D models and actual, 3D depth. This is something that, although it can be nice in some situations, more often than not is simply not useful due to the requirements that you either wear special glasses or sit in certain position, as is the case for the 3DS, which for an effect which isn't particularly necessary, usually makes it not very worth it.

Part of this is due to how it's very hard to make the 3D effect truly useful without it seeming especially gimmicky. Super Mario 3D land tried to do it with some areas with star coins in small, enclosed cubes that looked simple to get to at first, but there would turn out to be a wall or something where there shouldn't be. Turning the 3D effect on however made it clear where some blocks were floating in the air that, due to the isometric perspective (fixed in place), you couldn't tell where exactly in 3D space they were.

Of course, this 'problem' was a very much non-existent one that only existed because it was specifically designed that way - it's not a problem that players usually run into in 3D (as in just 3D models, not the effect) games, because usually either it's irrelevant or there are multiple camera angles that make it clear where objects are - maybe the odd case of it not being completely clear, but only rarely. 

So what's the problem? Well, the exceptions are. They aren't common, but The Wonderful 101 is a game I've been playing recently that, surprisingly, does have the issue of not being able to tell where certain floating things are. You see, although the game is primarily an action game (and a really, really good one at that - if you have a Wii U, buy this game (though you have to wait until the 15th if you're in America, for some reason)), it also has a lot of collectibles hidden in the levels, as well as smaller things like batteries to boost the meter you use for your unite morph powers. These collectibles are where the depth problems sometimes arise.

For the most part, the game is set in a sort-of-isometric perspective, only really changing for certain boss fights and cutscenes and so on. This works fine for fighting, especially since what you fight tends to be ridiculously large anyway, but since a lot of the collectibles are smaller, some of them that are in the air can appear to be in one place, but are actually in another. 

This thankfully doesn't tend to be too widespread or particularly annoying, as when it does there tend to only be a few places where it looks like those objects might be anyway, and the issue more broadly speaking is not one of the most pressing matters that exists. But it does still exist, and ideally, it shouldn't at all.

[captaincake]

Update on stuff

...Okay, so I ended up being gone for a bit more than what I said. I also (obviously) didn't post *anything* during those weeks, as opposed to almost nothing - turns out, although I had internet access, I didn't really have the means to type very effectively, and I didn't have a huge amount of time to do so anyway.

There probably won't be anything tomorrow (Sunday 1st), either, FYI. I'll hopefully try and return to something like normality in the following week, although at this point it seems like not posting something is the norm, so, maybe not normality so much as regularity, or something.

[captaincake]

Notice on next few weeks

So, I'm going to be pretty much away for the next few weeks, as of tomorrow. Specifically, that's the rest of this week, and the two weeks after that.

What this means is that there won't be any long articles or anything (which is why I wanted to have the Pikmin 3 review up when I did) for those 3 weekends. There may, and I stress may, be some of the shorter Aesthetics ones (though definitely not this week) if I can do them, though possibly not always on Thursdays or at the sort of times they usually go up at. I'll try at least for there to be something over the next few weeks, so... yeah. 

[captaincake]

Pikmin 3 - Review

The original Pikmin games it is probably fair to say were among the best games available for the GameCube. They were an interesting blend of strategy and action, presented in a unique style of the real world from the perspective of a small person, combined with the general charm of the Pikmin themselves. The second game took what the first one had going for it and greatly expanded upon it, with a lot more content and a lot more difficult as well, not to mention the additions in terms of new Pikmin and a second playable character.

Having said that, the games weren’t really tremendously successful – true, the GameCube itself wasn’t the most successful itself, but even relative to that, they didn’t sell particularly well. Not badly, certainly, but it’s only been more recently that the games have become more recognised, in particular since their new play control versions for the Wii came out. It’s actually sort of surprising, then, that the third in the series has been being worked on for as long as it has. It was first ‘announced’ in E3 2008, but no information other than its existence was given. Considering that Pikmin 3 was being worked on for the Gameboy Advance and the 3DS before the Wii and then Wii U, it was being worked on for a long time.

Personally speaking, I know that I’ve been waiting for a third instalment pretty much right since the second came out, and I suspect that everyone else who played the first two games felt the same – to say that the wait has been long is undoubtedly true, but not just for Pikmin fans – the Wii U has been lacking in good, non-port games for a while now, and this is the first of those games to be coming out (despite originally being meant to come out in the ‘launch window’ of the console). In both senses of fans and newcomers alike, there’s a lot of pressure for the game to be great. So – is it?

Introduction and Tutorials

There’s no better way to start than with the game’s introduction itself – you’re thrown right into things, as after the (pretty brief) introduction cutscene that explains some of the background to the story, you’re thrown right into gameplay, with no title screen to be seen until you next load the game. This makes for a very effective way of grabbing the player quickly, and the game wastes no time about any of the things it does in general – wasting time is pretty much the antithesis of what the game is about in general, really, but I’m getting ahead of myself. A quick overview of the beginning of the game is worth providing, though.

As the planet Koppai is depleting its food sources, they search for other planets with food, and finding one in ‘PNF-404’, three explorers are sent to retrieve seeds – those explorers being the playable characters of Alph, Brittany and Charlie. However, their ship malfunctions as they approach the planet, splitting them apart on different parts of the planet, which is when the game begins.

You start with control of Charlie, and almost immediately you run into some Yellow Pikmin. This acts as a basic tutorial for controls, but unlike the previous games which simply had (pretty long-winded) textual instructions, here you are simply given some button prompts that are a lot faster to get through. After wandering around for a bit, the game cuts away as Charlie is apparently attacked by an unseen creature and control goes to Alph, where a bit more basic stuff is learnt with Red Pikmin and their Onion, and after some more exploration, the Koppaites’ ship (the SS Drake) is found, ending day 1.

Although this isn’t the end of the tutorials, the big things are covered and only things like taking Pikmin out from the onion is covered, and other minor things when appropriate. They don’t take long at all to cover, and since they often double as the characters’ way of discovering things anyway, they never really seem out of place. A lot of things are meant to be discovered by the player themselves – when you first encounter bomb rocks, for example, the game doesn’t really tell you anything about them, they’re just… there. If you throw a Pikmin to pick one up (and any type can do that now, instead of just Yellows), you’re pretty much left to figure out how they work yourself – that’s not to say there’s no assistance, though.

Throughout each area are many different ‘data logs’, floating/spinning yellow data files that generally contain a little bit of information about a particular object or enemy, which can be accessed through the gamepad screen. The usefulness of these can vary – some stuff can be things you already knew or figured out, whereas others might be something actually useful, especially when it comes to certain tactics with enemies. In addition, at the end of each day, like the first game, one of the characters will write their own journal entry type thing, the contents of which can be plot related or something regarding what you may have discovered during the day. These are overall less useful than the data logs, since if nothing else they’re a lot less frequent and don’t seem to be accessible again after you’ve read them once, but they can still be entertaining to read.

In fact, on that note…

Story

Considering the fairly simplistic plot you’re given at the start of the game, as well as the series’ precedent, you’d think that this game’s story would not be one of its best parts. And… you’d be right. Kind of. The basic premise, beyond the ‘get as much fruit as you can’ thing, is that when the ship malfunctioned, its ‘cosmic drive key’ has gone missing, which you need to find in order to get back to Koppai.

The game’s overall story – without giving anything away – is, to be fair, more interesting than you may be initially be led to believe, but it’s nothing amazing. It’s more interesting than the first two games, though, in particular in the sense that it develops gradually – in the first two games, the only real ‘story’ development was when you reached the main goals of the games: escaping in the first, and getting enough money in the second. Most of the other key points were things in relation to the Pikmin themselves or other ‘discoveries’, like gaining access to a new area. While these discoveries were cool and definitely gave that sense of being explorers in an unknown area, they weren’t much more than that.

In Pikmin 3 however, they are more than that. I don’t want to discredit that element of discovery, because it’s undoubtedly still there, but things like discovering a new area are accompanied by other things, too. For example, after the first day, you discover a new area on the basis of it being accompanied by a signal coming from Brittany, and when you go to fight the first boss of the game, it’s under the belief that the signal coming from it belongs to Charlie. These aren’t ultra-critical plot elements or anything, but it certainly makes the game a little more interesting without being overbearing.

One thing I do think is done pretty well though is the interactions between Alph, Brittany and Charlie. Unlike the last two games, the characters actually talk to each other instead of just writing things in text logs, and at the start of a day before you choose which area to go to, they have full conversations with each other. They’re certainly not going to make more story-driven games look bad in comparison, but seeing how they interact with each other can still be quite entertaining. While each individual character may lack the same depth Olimar had in the games which you could gather from the things he wrote in his logs, it’s the way you can tell what each person thinks of the other two that makes it interesting – the conversations don’t last too long, either, so for those who don’t care, skipping past it is pretty easy to do.

Presentation

The first two Pikmin games already looked pretty good on the GameCube – the realistic style, although maybe a little boring sounding considering how often today the style is used in a very standard manner, was actually really well done as for one thing, it’s actually pretty colourful (especially because of the variety between areas) and for another, is seen from the perspective of something very small – there are ‘huge’ flowers everywhere, and remnants of humanity can also be seen both as parts of the environment (flower pots, for example) and in the second game, the treasure you collected.

In Pikmin 3, because of the much more powerful Wii U, everything obviously looks even better. The aesthetic is perfectly suited to being in HD, and the addition of environments not seen before in Pikmin games, such as a tropical area, help to cement this even further. The characters, Pikmin and enemies all also look much improved, with the Burrowing Snagret for example having a more detailed model to account for its feathers.

The game’s music is not necessarily as apparent as the graphics, but that by no account means that it isn’t wonderful either. The music, with a few exceptions like the boss themes and so on, does a very good job of being calm and fitting with the area, and also changes slightly when attacking an enemy so it never seems out of place. Of course, when you do fight a boss or mini-boss, there’s a huge change in tone to something a lot more intense – for mini-bosses, a slightly improved version of the boss theme from Pikmin 2 is back, and there’s a new theme altogether for the main bosses.

Actually, one of the really nice things about the main boss music isn’t necessarily the music itself, but the build up to it. Each boss area is always separated by two area transitions (I’ll get to those in more detail later), with one being a small pathway that has the area music gradually fade out to become mostly silent except for some wind, going silent altogether until the boss appears and the music starts. It’s a simple effect, but it adds a lot more suspense than bosses in the previous Pikmin games (which were usually already there and just had the music start when you got close), which makes sense considering the main bosses are generally much bigger in scale than bosses in the previous games.

The sound effects in general are pretty much what you’d expect: the same whistle sounds, same kind of enemy sounds (except for new enemies of course), all good as you’d expect. The most notable improvement in this area is actually the Pikmin themselves – they’re pretty much like before, but each type has slight variations. The two new types obviously do, but there are even some differences between the Red, Yellow and Blue Pikmin for the sounds they make, which work great.

…And yes, the death sounds are still as heart-breaking to hear as ever.

Controls

The Pikmin games have always done well when it comes to controls, and for what you have to do, that’s obviously pretty important. If you couldn’t control your Pikmin effectively, them dying wouldn’t have nearly as much impact, because it would feel like it was the game’s fault and not yours. However, when the controls do work, things going wrong make you feel like it was your fault that they died, not to mention that it’s just generally less frustrating to have good controls. Thankfully – and as you would expect – Pikmin 3 is no exception to this. In fact, it probably does the job even better than the originals.

You see, unlike the originals, there are several different controller options. One of these is simply to use a classic or pro controller connected to a Wii remote – this essentially controls very much like the GameCube controller does, with a few changes and one in particular that I’ll get into in detail later. This is a pretty simple, option, though one that I didn’t really use very much.

The second control method – and the one that I found myself preferring – was to use a Wii remote and Nunchuk. This control method is much like the New Play Control versions, where you aim where to throw your Pikmin with the remote’s pointer. The pointer is the ‘selling point’ of this control method, I suppose, in that it offers more precision in aiming the point for where you throw your Pikmin than the other control schemes (in my experience, at least), and in fights can therefore make it easier to aim at specific parts of an enemy. The only disadvantage to this is that when you press ‘A’ to actually throw them, the remote naturally moves a little bit (and your hand can wobble anyway) so if you throw a lot of Pikmin to the same place, you have to be careful to control the wobbles. It’s not a big deal, but it’s worth noting.

The final (although probably most obvious) control method is to use the Wii U gamepad. This for the most part controls like the pro controller does (just with the buttons themselves in a different arrangement), but has the obvious addition of the screen in the middle. This screen serves as a map of the area for the most part, centered on the character you’re currently controlling. Touching the screen will cause the game to pause on the TV and allows you to scroll around the map, with the ‘actual’ map also scrolling around on the TV in case you want more detail, although it will only show what you’ve actually explored, the rest simply being black. This also gives you a top-down perspective which can be sometimes useful as you normally have a third-person view of the area.

This functionality also allows you to plot a route for one of the characters to automatically follow (again, only in areas you’ve explored – it’s a fog of war effect, essentially), an incredibly useful feature for multitasking. As it allows you to focus on one thing with one character while the others can move to somewhere where they can still be useful. Of course, you still need to be careful that they aren’t walking right through the middle of some enemies, but even when you mess up and that happens, the character in question will say something along the lines of “I’m being attacked”. They also speak up when they actually arrive at the destination, which is useful.

The gamepad also essentially functions as the pause screen. Although there is an ‘actual’ pause screen you get by pressing ‘+’, it simply exists so you can decide if you want to automatically end the day or restart. The gamepad screen can also be used to keep track of Pikmin in the field, as well as the data logs which I mentioned earlier so that if you want to look at something again, you can.

It’s also worth noting that you can play the game exclusively on the gamepad screen, with no TV in use. The controls remain the same, but since the action takes place on where the map was, you have to press down on the control pad to access the map and other options. It’s still pretty nice to be able to play only on the gamepad though, especially since you can plug your headphones into it as well. It’s also really easy to switch between using the TV and not – all you have to do is press ‘-‘.

The final thing – and probably the absolute best thing about the controls – is that you can use the gamepad in conjunction with another control method. Whilst you can have the gamepad in your lap, serving as a map to use when appropriate, you can use another method for the ‘main’ controls (I used the Wii remote and Nunchuk), simply touching the pad whenever you want to command another character. It may sound a bit awkward, but it’s actually pretty simple, and incredibly convenient to use. Of course, if you prefer controlling with the pad itself anyway it won’t help you, but if you prefer another method it’s certainly very good.

 Gameplay

The core gameplay of Pikmin 3 is, as you would expect, pretty much the same as the first two games: get Pikmin, clear obstacles and enemies, explore, and retrieve objects – in this case, food (mostly). As I mentioned earlier, the initial story of the game is that your group of explorers came to the planet to find and retrieve seeds to solve the hunger problem on Koppai, and this means gathering fruit. These serve as the ship parts and treasure did in the first two games in terms of them usually being in locations that require you to defeat (or sometimes, avoid) some enemies or clear an obstacle, or perhaps solve a (usually fairly simple) puzzle. However, the fruit in this game are unique in that they also function as a sort of lifeline.

Time limits are something Pikmin has always been about. Aside from each day consisting of a limited amount of time (around 15-20 minutes for a full day), the original had a 30-day limit before it would be game over – if you didn’t get the 25 required ship parts (and potentially the 5 optional ones), you lost. The second actually removed this altogether, and there was no time limit for you to get the treasure in. In fact, when you entered the holes (which were like dungeons, in a way), there was no time limit at all – not even the daily time limit applied there. Both approaches worked well for their own reasons, of course: in the first, you had crash landed on an alien planet, so having a time limit really increased the pressure, whilst in the second, since you were returning to find treasure, the tone of the game was more exploratory, and considering how much treasure there was to collect (over 200 pieces), having no time limit made more sense.

In Pikmin 3, the overall time limit returns, but in a different manner. Instead of being a ‘stationary’ time limit, you have a food supply. Starting with food for 3 days, you have to collect fruit in order to get more food, increasing your time limit and keeping with the game’s theme.

Having said that, the time limit is, much like the first game, the time limit is almost never a problem. For one thing, the overall time limit is much longer – with 66 pieces of fruit to collect (a lot of which gives food for multiple days), your time limit is something around 100 days in total. For reference, I finished the game with all the fruit in just under 40 days, so even if you took twice as long, you’re probably not going to have much trouble. There are very few occasions where the time limit is likely to be imminent, and at that point, it’s still usually pretty easy to find some fruit that you haven’t gotten yet, and it probably won’t be long before you have a pretty large stockpile of food.

You could probably make the case that the overall time limit is therefore pointless, but I would disagree – it still influences the tone of the game, and it gives you a pretty good motivation. Although it’s true that the story has already given you motivation to collect fruit (not to mention that it’s fun), by translating the story’s motivation into actual gameplay mechanics, I would say that it gives both the game and the story more impact, without being too stressful at the same time.

One thing you may have noticed there was that this game has 66 things to collect (which isn’t quite true, but I’ll get to that later and it mostly is anyway), whereas Pikmin 2 has almost 3 times that amount, with over 200 pieces of treasure. Yes: Pikmin 3 is a shorter game. Whilst a full playthrough of the game took me around 13 hours, and for someone new to the series maybe something closer to 20, the game is simply not as large as Pikmin 2. This, in some ways, is maybe a little disappointing, but the phrase ‘quality, not quantity’ comes to mind. That’s not entirely accurate of course, since Pikmin 2 by no means lacked quality, just as Pikmin 3 by means lacks quantity. However, I would absolutely say that what the latter has is better than the former’s.

The thing with Pikmin 2 is that the vast majority of its content was underground, in caves. That’s not necessarily bad, of course, but a lot of those underground areas were partially randomised. Not all of them, but a lot of cave areas shared general layouts, only with different enemies, hazards and treasure. As a result, they weren’t necessarily designed very ‘specifically’, whereas in Pikmin 3, there are no areas like that (no holes like that all, in fact), and there is a very definite sense that each area was designed very carefully. Since the entirety of the game is above ground (well, not exactly), the areas are also much larger, and based less on old areas (as a lot of the above ground areas in Pikmin 2 were based to varying degrees on areas in the first game).

Another difference is that there are ‘transitions’ in each area. At certain points, designated by an arrow in the map, going to a particular place will cause a fade in and out to a different location within the area. These locations are still within the same overall area – Pikmin carrying something through a transition won’t simply disappear on the map at a transition and reappear at the other side of it, but walk ‘through’ it, as if there was simply a plain old path between the transitions (and that pretty much is the case, you just can’t really see it). The transitions are also used to mark cave entrances – not like the ones in Pikmin 2 with multiple levels and such, but just normal caves part of the area you’re in.

As a result of these transitions, areas on the whole are much larger than the previous games, and I’d say the areas are on the whole more fun to explore in general. There’s more height variation for one thing, but the large size of the areas combined with the ‘fog of war’ effect means that you can’t see a lot of the area surrounding you without actually going there, and because all of the focus is above ground, the actual areas are designed more interestingly. Not to mention, of course, that it looks a lot nicer, and that you have new Pikmin types to make the exploration more interesting.

In fact, on that note, those two new types are worth discussing in more detail. They are the Rock Pikmin and the Winged Pikmin, and both have several interesting characteristics (aside from being adorable).

The Rock Pikmin, as the name suggests, are rocks. I know that makes no sense for what are supposed to be plant-like creatures, but hey, I don’t make the rules. Being rocks, they have a unique quality in that the actual act of throwing of them is what does more damage to something – if you throw one at an enemy, it will do some damage, but instead of latching on to them and continuously attacking them like other Pikmin do, they will bounce off and instead continuously ram the enemy, doing less damage than the throw itself did, and exposing them to more danger, meaning you’re often better off throwing a bunch and then whistling them back immediately, and repeating. There are several enemies that have parts of them acting as armour, but which when Rock Pikmin are thrown at them, can break the armour and leaving them vulnerable to other Pikmin types. Similarly, they are also capable of breaking down crystals and glass walls.

(Actually, the nicest thing about Rock Pikmin is that they are immune to being crushed, which is incredibly useful for getting revenge on any Wollywogs that have wronged you in the past, laughing maniacally whilst doing so.)

Winged Pikmin can obviously fly, which is a fairly simple ability, but a huge one for the Pikmin series. As they can fly, they can fly over many obstacles, avoid a lot of enemies, and are “immune” to water in the sense that they can fly over it. They’ll still drown if they get thrown in of course, but their ability to transfer things over water is extremely useful, and they can often take shortcuts when carrying stuff too. Their key disadvantage though is that they’re weak – they can be effective for dealing with some flying enemies, but otherwise, using them in battle with other options available is a bad idea. This is probably for the best though, as otherwise you’d probably never want to use another Pikmin type again. They end up as a sort of utility Pikmin a lot of the time (not that that’s a bad thing necessarily), and can also lift up certain gates for a time to allow other Pikmin and the captains to pass through.

Both of these Pikmin types are undoubtedly worthwhile additions to the Pikmin line-up, and certainly ones that I hope don’t go anywhere for any potential sequels. However, there are two Pikmin types that did go somewhere: the Purple and White Pikmin introduced in Pikmin 2. They don’t appear in the story mode at all. Now, they aren’t gone at all, as they actually do appear in the ‘Mission Mode’, which I’ll get to in more detail later, but for the story mode, you never come across them. That may seem a little disappointing, but it’s not too bad – for one thing, having to deal with seven different Pikmin types at a time would be really hard, but for another thing, their roles are already taken, in a way. The Purples’ roles of being a heavy attacker is more or less taken over by Rock Pikmin, and the speed of the White Pikmin is, in a way, taken over by the Winged Pikmin’s ability to fly.

You might be thinking I forgot about their other ‘advantages’, but those were kind of arbitrary – being immune to poison doesn’t matter when there is no poison, just as being able to detect underground things doesn’t matter when there is nothing completely underground (only partially) and just as being able to pick up certain very heavy items doesn’t matter when the most Pikmin you’ll need to carry a single thing is around 20. They can be useful abilities in a more restricted environment (Mission Mode), but in the main story, they would likely serve simply to make it harder to manage things without many benefits.

There are a few other changes in regards to the Pikmin themselves. First of all, bomb rocks are back like they were in the first game (i.e. useable, and not falling from the sky to freak you out), but with the key difference of being useable by any kind of Pikmin. It’s not much, but it’s convenient, especially since they aren’t used as often as they were in the first one anyway.

Secondly, a lot of the underwater areas are deeper than they’ve been in previous games. That may not sound like a big deal, but it isn’t entirely insignificant – when throwing blue Pikmin underwater, they actually swim towards enemies there (and more slowly than a normal throw), instead of just walking on the ground. It’s not a hugely significant detail, but it’s something noticeable enough while playing that helps to make the Blue Pikmin stand out a bit more - which is especially nice when considering that Winged Pikmin can do some of the things that previously only Blue Pikmin would be able to do.

The final thing, and probably the biggest thing, for that matter, is that controlling Pikmin with the c-stick is gone, and not just because the c-stick in general is gone – you have no control anymore of the way the Pikmin walk behind you beyond where you move yourself. That sounds like a pretty bad thing, and I thought it was odd at first, but it’s actually just fine. For the most part, that functionality wasn’t actually needed, except for in two areas: the first is for particularly thin areas with no walls to prevent Pikmin falling off. This is solved easily, simply in that the Pikmin now follow you better, and don’t fall off thin pathways for the most part unless you do yourself or if they got knocked off by something else. In fact, this is even better than it was in the first two as it could be very awkward to command you Pikmin along thin paths with a lot of them without some falling off.

The other and perhaps more important area, is in actual fights. The ability to move your Pikmin around somewhat manually was very helpful for avoiding certain enemy attacks, so it seems as if removing your ability to do that could be very annoying. But again… it’s not, really. For one thing, there’s an upgrade you can get (I know I keep saying this, but more on those later) which adds a ‘dodge’ function to your whistle, where if you press right or left on the control pad, it will make you and your Pikmin dodge in that direction. Secondly, the game seems to be designed such that this otherwise doesn’t matter – the enemies you face tend to attack in ways that the precise control of the c-stick isn’t really necessary, especially since the Pikmin movement is much more closely tied to your character now.

The only exception to this really is if you try to fight a boss with 100 Pikmin or something like that – Pikmin 2 favoured this idea because most of its bosses were underground, and since you couldn’t grow more Pikmin underground, it made more sense to take as many as possible with you. However, since everything is above ground and you tend to do more multitasking anyway, it’s much easier to fight with only around 30-50 Pikmin at a time anyway, mostly. This is both because it’s easier to control that many Pikmin and because enemies tend to shake Pikmin off after some time, limiting how many you can actually have attacking it at once. Since you’re taking less Pikmin with you, that extra control isn’t really necessary and instead allows for the second analogue stick (if playing with a pro controller or gamepad) to control the camera, which is a much more useful feature a lot of the time anyway.

Since I’ve brought up bosses, it may be worth bringing them up in more detail. As is probably pretty obvious, there’s a lot less of them than there were in Pikmin 2, simply due to being a smaller game. However, the ‘main’, story-required bosses are a lot larger in scale than any of the bosses in the first two games. I mentioned the build-up previously, but even aside from that, the boss fights themselves tend to last longer and take place in larger environments, and generally carry with them a larger sense of threat – both literally and figuratively.

One thing I did notice about most of the main bosses - with a few exceptions, like the first one - is that they tended to resemble the kinds of bosses you’d find in a more action-oriented game (not that Pikmin games aren’t action-oriented, just not exclusively) that have different stages, and often have a set number of times you have to make it vulnerable and attack it, whereas in the previous Pikmin games, you could do as much damage as was possible when making a boss vulnerable (if it was that kind of boss at all). In Pikmin 3, with these sorts of bosses, there will be a point when even with Pikmin attacking it; it will stop taking damage until you get back to the point of it being damageable again.

This isn’t too annoying for the most part (and again, it doesn’t apply for all of the bosses), but it does make the returning Ultra-Spicy Spray (which makes your Pikmin faster and more powerful briefly) less useful as often the bosses won’t return to the point of being impervious until you’ve done enough damage or have run away altogether. That’s not to say the spray is useless, as the smaller mini-bosses you fight are still good options to use it against, and it can often be useful against even normal enemies anyway, but it certainly doesn’t seem as useful as it was in the second game. The Ultra-Bitter Spray does not return, by the way, but that was generally less useful anyway, so it’s fine.

The ‘smaller mini-bosses’, by the way, are not actually that small at all – in fact, they’re probably a lot more comparable to the bosses in the previous: they include, for example, the Burrowing Snagret, and a much more annoying form of Beady Long Legs. There are actually less of these than the main bosses, spread out in the areas in certain spaces like you would find them in the last two games. They’re still a threat and can take a little while to defeat, but they’re optional (if you aren’t going for all the fruit, that is) and aren’t on the scale of the main bosses, which can literally take days to defeat due to the fact that their health now carries over for multiple days.

In case it wasn’t clear, by the way, the bosses are very fun – done a little differently to how they’ve been done before, but certainly overall for the better, I think. This is assisted as well by a new addition in the ability to target an enemy for the first time in the series – it works pretty much like Z-targeting does in the Zelda series, just from a slightly different camera angle. Being able to target the boss is obviously a pretty big help as it means you don’t have to worry about fiddling with the camera in the middle of the fight, which for certain boss fights in the previous games, could be a bit annoying.

The targeting isn’t just good for boss fights, of course – it’s useful for normal enemies (it especially makes it easier to aim at flying enemies) and can even be used for things like Fruit and pellets to ease the aiming process (though you obviously still need to be in range). Another nice feature in relation to this is that if you dismiss your Pikmin with something targeted, they will all immediately rush and attack/pick up whatever you’ve targeted, which is very nice for attacking certain enemies as well as for breaking down walls.

For what improvements the action area of the game has had though, it’s the strategic things which got the most significant improvements. Obviously, the new Pikmin types themselves add more strategy, but there is a lot more emphasis on multitasking and using the fact that you have three playable characters to your advantage. The areas in general have a lot to do in them – as I said before, they’re bigger for one thing, but also have a lot more branching pathways as opposed to wide open spaces and in general there is a lot more things to do.

The gamepad map is a very effective way of improving this aspect – once you’ve explored a little bit, there’s usually several areas with gates that need to be broken or bridges which need to be made (and the tiles needed to do so are often found in multiple different locations, too) and as a result it’s pretty clear that the game is encouraging you to split your Pikmin apart to go and do multiple things at once. The ability to plot a path for your playable characters to walk along is a critical part in establishing this, as is the fact that you need to wait for walls to be broken and such.

Although it may seem annoying to have to wait, that’s actually a good thing – it allows you to then focus on something else in the meantime, and often once you’re done there the first thing will be finished so you can check back and continue in that direction. The only things that will require full attention are fighting enemies (pretty obvious) and a few pathways that require you to use the ability to throw other characters across gaps or up ledges to get to another area, in some cases using all three at a time. These kinds of areas aren’t common enough that they become annoying, but merely add another layer of time management to consider – do you want to split your party and find fruit all across the map, or do you want to send someone up a certain path requiring all your characters be there immediately so you don’t run out of paths altogether?

In fact, multitasking and being time efficient is emphasised very heavily in the game. Not just because it’s more fun to play that way, but the areas designs being more complex encourage that kind of thing, and even some boss fights can encourage it too if you need to use multiple Pikmin types, as it can often be easier to give one character one type and another character another type and switching between them when necessary instead of trying to control fifty Pikmin of a bunch of different types without accidentally throwing the wrong type and trying to keep each type out of different hazards.

In this sense, Pikmin 3 is fantastic at executing its combination of action and strategy – even action-oriented bosses encourage strategic play, and it is extremely rewarding to play well in both areas. Being efficient and collecting five fruit in one day feels great, and similarly, playing well in battles means that less Pikmin die, and less Pikmin dying is always satisfying in the sense that when they do die, it’s heart-breaking. It’s that combination of the death sound effect (which I mentioned previously to be incredibly sad) and the little Pikmin ghost you can see floating away. And one or two deaths can be okay, but if twenty Pikmin all die at once, it feels terrible. I actually reset the day a few times while playing because I made a mistake that caused a lot of Pikmin to die at once that could have easily been avoided.

The game is extremely good at creating its own stories – the ones of the player. The emotional attachment you get to the Pikmin is incredibly strong, despite them looking the same and functionally being the same. At the end of a day, even if there’s only one Pikmin left alone which will die, you still feel pressured into going and making sure that they don’t die. It doesn’t matter that they might not make an actual difference in the scheme of things – it just feels terrible not to go and get them.

I suppose it’s the connection of the way that the deaths are presented and the actual gameplay mechanics. A death means that the amount of available Pikmin of a given type go down, and therefore after a certain amount of deaths, you may be low on that Pikmin type. The thing is, in other strategy games, losing a unit means a loss of resources – but the emotional connection isn’t always there. What makes Pikmin (as a series) unique is that you can’t just assign someone to gather resources – you have to do it yourself. Sure, you can carry enemies you kill back to the onion, but that means having less Pikmin actually with you, therefore making you less prepared for whatever else you’ll run into. If you want to increase your Pikmin numbers, you need to focus on doing that, which means not doing other things that you need to do to progress in the actual game. At the same time, it’s rare that you’ll be in a position where you lost so many Pikmin that you have to spend a whole day getting more, so it’s not something that is likely to be annoying either.

The final thing worth bringing up is the existence of upgrades, and a few other collectables. Upgrades can be found much like fruit, but there are a lot less of them and are often more hidden, not appearing on the map. The dodge whistle is one that I mentioned earlier, and is the most useful as well as most obviously visible, but the others you won’t see from a distance. Actually, to be honest – I didn’t find the other upgrades very helpful. They consist of defence upgrades in terms of actual health and making you immune to fire and electricity, but honestly, your characters themselves rarely take significant damage – even when hit by an enemy, for the most part they tend to just get knocked down with minor damage. I don’t think I ever went to half health, let alone died, so the upgrades are mainly there for completion’s sake.

The other collectable of sorts are secret memos. These look like the data logs that give you information, but are usually more hidden or in harder to reach places that you may not think to look in. What they actually are when you find them is a number with a type of Pikmin on them, and there are ten altogether. They don’t serve any obvious purpose, but according to Shigeru Miyamoto form a code that can be used for something else. What that something is currently unknown as of the time of me writing this, but they can be fun to try and find regardless.

Mission Mode

The mission mode is rather like the challenge modes in the previous games, but not without its differences. There are three categories: treasure, enemies, and bosses, the latter of which I’ll cover first since it’s the most simple.

The boss mode is simply fighting the main bosses with a certain number of Pikmin (spread around the battlefield which you need to whistle to), with the idea being to win as fast as possible. You can also compare how you did to other people online, a feature which also exists in the other categories.

The other two categories are pretty self-explanatory, but also more interesting in my experience. As you would expect, you have to either collect as much treasure as possible or kill as many enemies as possible, getting points for doing so, with a set time limit for doing so. There are five stages in each section, each using map layouts unseen in the main story, but shared between the treasure and enemy modes – the differences being in obstacle placement, as well as (obviously) treasure and enemy placement.

For each stage, only some types of Pikmin available to you – in the treasure category, all the Pikmin are found underground already and must be pulled up, with different types necessary to reach certain things. There are usually only three or four types available per map, and in limited number, although since there aren’t a lot of enemies (some, but not a lot), you don’t normally have to worry about losing a lot of them.

It’s also worth noting that the Purple and White Pikmin are available in this mode in some levels – although they wouldn’t have been very useful in the story, they can actually be quite useful here, as the stages heavily emphasise multitasking and efficiency. To go on a detour for a moment, there is a huge density of treasure available in each stage, and with only 5-10 minutes available to get it, you need to be very efficient at the strategy. You only need to get bronze rank to unlock the next stage, which might barely be reachable without multitasking, but to get higher scores, you really have to delegate tasks a lot – practice certainly helps as well.

This is where the Purple and White Pikmin come in. Since the Purple Pikmin are stronger, a single one can carry something that normally would require ten Pikmin to carry. In the main story, you aren’t time pressured enough and there isn’t enough fruit anyway for that to be useful, but with all the treasure there is, being able to send only one Pikmin away (even if it is slow) to carry something is very useful. White Pikmin on the other hand are very fast, which obviously is useful on its own. In particular they can be useful because there are some areas which have piles of gold nuggets that can only be carried one at a time, much like bridge segments. White Pikmin therefore are very good at carrying all the nuggets back to the ship-pod very quickly, and have a purpose themselves.

The enemy category is much like the treasure category of Mission Mode, but one key difference is that you have to grow your own Pikmin. You start with a few of each type (and often start with all three characters separated to a different Onion), and from there have to make more, often by killing enemies in the process. There is a similar multitasking element to the treasure maps, but since you obviously do more fighting, it has a very different feel. Like the treasure category, you get points which are used to determine ranking, and can again compare your scores with other players.

The Mission Mode may not appeal to everyone – certainly not if you want a more relaxed experience – but it is a heck of a lot of fun, and due to the time limits, it is very easy to just play it in short bursts as well. Of course, given the emphasis on trying for a better and better score, it’s likely that you might play it for a long time regardless, but still. Trying to determine which will be the most efficient pathways can be very fun and there’s usually a lot of stuff going on at once. There certainly aren’t as many actual missions as there were in Pikmin 2, but that does make sense given that the missions here on the whole have a lot more depth to them. Well, not actual depth, since you don’t go down actual holes, but you know what I mean.

It’s also worth noting that there is a co-op mode (only two player), in which both players have joint control of the three characters (i.e. they can switch between them but not to someone the other person is currently playing as) but which is otherwise the same, but I didn’t get the chance to try this out proper.

There’s also a battle mode called ‘Bingo Battle’ which has you collect Fruit and enemies to form a line on a bingo card, but again I did not get the chance to try this out. If the other modes area any indication, this is likely to be a lot of fun too, though it depends on you having someone else willing to play it with you as there is no online play.

Conclusion

Pikmin 3 is a fantastic game, both as a part of the series and as a part of the Wii U’s game library. It exceeds in every technical aspect (bar possibly the lack of online Bingo Battle), and the actual gameplay is both incredibly entertaining and incredibly charming. If you played the previous Pikmin games, you’ll love this one, and if you didn’t, this is a great introduction to the series as well. Indeed, as a game, it passes with flying colours.

*Rides into the sunset being carried by Pikmin*