#pikmin my best friend pikmin they're everything to me

[visceracity]

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[struttinevilshroom]

A Narrow Perspective of Pikmin 4

So, I played Pikmin 4 with my friend. My friend, a guy who has played every Pikmin game (including hey Pikmin and the Pikmin game in Nintendoland) and has 100% completed Pikmin 2 which happens to be the most challenging Pikmin game. As for me, the extent of Pikmin knowledge is basically just what my friend tells me and I guess also bingo battles in Pikmin 3.

I'm trying to say that, I have a Narrow Perspective on Pikmin (boom title drop).

Sorry about that, I accidentally pressed on the question and I don't know how to remove it.

I went to my friend's house and he said that we were gonna beat Pikmin 4. I was only helping him with the final cave and final boss. I should also preface that this won't have any spoilers.

How Pikmin 4's co op works is that the first player is doing all the Pikmin throwing and the second player is kinda like the second player in Mario Galaxy, it's an offscreen entity throwing things to help the first player out. The second player can throw rocks to damage enemies or to speed up Pikmin who are carrying treasures to the ship and the more rocks thrown, the more a meter will fill. Once the meter is full, the second player will obtain an item which can only be used by them. This meter does not fill too quickly or too slowly, I think it fills up at an adequate pace. We played together for 2 hours roughly and we had just enough items, we were never in excess and we were never out of any particular item that we needed at that moment. The one outlier for this would be the PikPik carrots, they were always in excess and I had 80 of them exactly before fighting the final boss. It is safe to assume that I ended the game with 77 or 78 of them because I remember accidentally throwing a pikpik carrot 2 or 3 times.

I always knew this friend of mine was professional, I watched him decimate Pikmin 2's Water Wraith and he's always sharing strategies for cheesing (to beat a segment of a game in a way that the developers did not intend) bosses in these games. I didn't know just how good he was until we worked our way to the final boss, I didn't know just how vast his knowledge of Pikmin was until we worked through this final area. We were going in almost completely blind and once he saw layout of any given map and it's enemies, almost instantaneously, he would devise a strategy. This was impressive to someone like me as I usually became overwhelmed by the bosses and his calm demeanor contrasted my surprise.

Of course, every game has the factor of chance and no matter how good you are, there will always be something you can't account for (I'm an earthbound/mother player, I should know this) and this resulted in a few losses. Like, at one point a rolling obstacle resulted in 90% of our Pikmin falling into the Abyss. Another loss, would be our encounter with an enemy from Pikmin 1 and it killed all of our blue Pikmin and the game told us that it wouldn't be wise to progress without them. Other than those 2 losses, we made quick work out each area. I can't speak for my friend but I certainly had a lot of fun even if I was just pelting enemies with rocks and the occasional bomb. I guess it's just fun when someone's really passionate about any given game and they kinda have that capacity to geek out about it and show off their knowledge and skills in regards to it. I was also able to put a face to the enemies and bosses he mentioned in our conversations about Pikmin.

This game also contains one of my favorite things in all of gaming, rest areas. Rest areas are severely overlooked, like yeah, they're gonna save you and prepare the character that you're playing as for whatever lays beyond but rest areas should also prepare the player mentally, one game that does this really well is Mother 3 and I guess Earthbound because Mother 3 gives you hot springs to restore everything and remove all ailments but also there's relaxing music, sometimes there's a rare npc to chat to which always eases my mind before a fight, Earthbound also rest areas, which are usually little parts off to the side of the action with butterflies like in Giant Step, coincidentally this is also usually in caves. I'm going to stop right there with Mother talk because I can talk about that series forever. This game also gives you rest areas both official and unofficial. In my mind, I classify official rest areas as a break from battles where you can heal up and prepare your character for what is to come while also preparing yourself as the player and unofficial ones are just the same thing but they're not there to prepare the character, just to prepare the player (this is not an actual definition, it's just a distinction in my mind). All the actual rest areas are chock full nectar and treasure but they also have ambient music to calm the player. There's also the part after you beat all the enemies on one sublevel and your Pikmin carry everything to the ship and everything is just empty. I know some people find empty spaces unnerving but I find them relaxing, I used to watch those empty mall videos to get to sleep back in the day. Anyway, there's so much empty space in these areas and it's usually a rush to get to the next sublevel but sometimes my friend would excuse himself to go to the bathroom or to do something else and I'd sit there and stare at everything. I'd stare at the emptiness, the Pikmin carrying remnants of humanity away, the dark Abyss that lay below, the beautiful graphics and I listen to the music, it's kind of beautiful in a sense, I have a Narrow Perspective on Pikmin but I wonder if they've ever explored themes like this in previous games, I know Olimar expresses some interest in the previous inhabitants but do they ever explore the idea that people roamed pnf-404 and had each of them had their own lives and now that's all gone? But who's "they"? I shouldn't be calling the previous inhabitants "them" because it's us.

Oh, he's back from the bathroom, I guess let's carry on with the review. Where was I? Oh yeah, the ambient music is really good in this game and when you're actually engaging in battle, there's this almost tribal music that plays, I've jested that it sounds like Monsters University montage music but as good as that is, the beauty of Pikmin's soundtracks always lies in its ambience...

I'm not sure how to transition to this last part so I just put an ellipse at the end of the last paragraph to make it seem like I was leaving you some food for thought even though it was a really blank statement. Anyway, Final boss. I'm not a NARC so I won't be spoiling the final boss for any readers, this is a fairly new game but I will say, if you haven't gotten there yet then please do your best to avoid spoilers because it is a doozy. Even my friend was caught off guard by it and he's a Pikmin veteran, he's crashed on the planet over 4 times now.

I do kinda wanna lightly touch on the characters, just lightly though. I didn't see any of the new characters get fleshed out (do I have to refer to the title of this review for the 3rd time now) so, I'll talk about Louie and Olimar. Louie gets placed in a more sinister light in this game. I feel like the game recognizes the extent of his evil but the characters do not. Olimar is also the most relatable protagonist ever, like he's a family man, who is mistreated at work and can't do anything about this mistreatment. This familial aspect shines through in the way he interacts with the others, (in what I've seen of this game) he acts as an authority and is clearly more experienced, not in regards to using Pikmin but just in general he has more life experience. Also he gives Louie the benefit of the doubt even after all the trouble he caused which just goes to show that he wants to believe that Louie is a good person, it's almost parental, like no parent wants to believe that their child is capable of bad things. I also watched a Pikmin 2 twitch stream the night before, the streamers were actually two content creators who inspire me in writing things like this. If You're into long reviews of old games nobody cares about, then watch Transparency on youtube. Anyway, as a joke they compared the Olimar and Louie to Peanuts characters and I thought that was really funny. Olimar is basically Charlie Brown, everyone mistreats him and he just has to go with it. Not sure who Louie is though.

You decide, which Peanuts character is Louie. I will judge you harshly depending on your answer.

With that, I draw this review to a close. We played together for 2 hours, in total my friend had 55 hours and has 100% every area on his first, blind playthrough. Everyone give him a round of applause. Give yourself a round of applause for reading this long ass review. I'm also sorry for giving you an existential crisis at one point in the review, if it's worth anything, I actually love the fact that our legacy on pnf 404 will live forever through Olimar's notes.

Thank you for reading.