Summary: 90/100

Introduction

"Pikmin" is a small-scale real-time strategy/puzzle game for the new Nintendo Gamecube console. You play Captain Olimar, the captain of the spaceship "Dolphin". Olimar has just crash-landed on a strange planet. As the Dolphin entered the planet's atmosphere, 30 pieces of the ship broke off and fell to ground near where the Dolphin eventually landed. Your goal is to get the ship working and return home by finding these pieces and bringing them back to the landing site. The main factor working against you is time: your life-support will only run for 30 days (a game day takes about 13 minutes to play, and nights are skipped).

But working for you are the Pikmin: tiny energetic creatures that you can control en masse. There are also enemy creatures in the world that are keen to eat you and your Pikmin. You win the game by retrieving the parts of your ship, which involves directing the Pikmin to beat up enemies, increase their own numbers, build bridges, knock down walls, carry Dolphin parts, and execute other errands. The game was produced by Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario, Donkey Kong, Zelda, and many other famous games.

The Review

I liked Pikmin a lot! It looks beautiful. You control the game and the Pikmin themselves in a very natural way that's easy to get used to. The game is about solving puzzles are based on logical planning and spatial manipulation: you need to knock down a wall here to build a bridge there to beat up a big enemy in this place to safely get across the water in the other place to get a certain part back to the ship. It requires exploring the areas, developing a plan, and then executing on the plan. The days are short enough that if you don't get it right, you can easily pop back to the start and try again. The enemies are a challenge but observation of their behavior reveals their vulnerabilities. You also get a real-time display of each enemy's health, so you can tell immediately how well your attack strategy is working.
There are no split-second "twitch" requirements for this game, so you don't have to have hair-trigger reflexes, or practice a particular move over and over, in order to achieve all the goals.

I would have given "Pikmin" a score higher 90 but the game is over too soon. The puzzles increase in cleverness and complexity, so that the very best puzzles are at the end. If there had been another dozen days at that level of difficulty, I'd have given the game an even higher score. As it is, it's still one of the best games of 2001.

There are three different types of Pikmin (red, yellow, and blue), and each has its own special capabilities that prove necessary at different times. They're easy to group and organize, separate into smaller groups, direct into action, and so on. Part of the fun is planning on how to efficiently multitask your little guys so that several different groups are working on different assignments simultaneously. It's fun to have one group knocking down a wall while another group is building a bridge at the same time that you're leading a third group to a spaceship part.

There are a few downsides. You can only save three games (some game websites say that you can swap memory cards before saving and thereby save as many games as you like, but I haven't confirmed that). The very final battle with the biggest baddest enemy is harder than it ought to be - even once I knew what to do, it took many tries to bring him down. The time limit works well for the gameplay, but I was wondering during the first few hours if I was proceeding at the necessary pace. I feared that if I was going too slowly, I would run out of time at the end and end up wasting all that time getting there. I needn't have worried. With only reasonably careful planning I was able to collect two parts in one day several times, and I finished the game in 26 "days" out of a maximum of 30. It also turns out that you don't need all 30 parts to blast off, so if you're running out of days you can bypass the optional ones at the end and still win the game. If you can get all the parts then you get a slightly more elaborate animation at the end.

Thanks to the bite-size nature of each day's work, the game is addictive. The days are about 13 minutes each, so you can spend a day exploring and planning what you want to do, and then pop back to that morning's sunrise and execute your plan. If it didn't work out right, go back to sunrise and try again. There are several different areas where the pieces landed. You pick an area at the start of each day, and you spend the whole day there. The order in which you go after pieces, and how you choose to retrieve them, is up to you.
The game looks sumptuous. It takes place in a small garden world of tree stumps, flowers, leaves, grass, twigs, puddles, etc. The camera has three different zoom levels and two points of view. From the medium and long-range views the world is simply beautifully painted and rendered. In the close-up view, which I used rarely, you can see the occasional seam and odd differences in texture scale (for example, you can see details on a Pikmin in front of you, while the ground under him looks a little blurry). But in the normal views, it's beautiful. The visuals are smooth and the virtual camera is almost always in the right place at the right time (and you can override it when it isn't).

The sound design is excellent. You get all kinds of audio cues for what's happening in the environment, the effects are clear and easily distinguished, and most of the music is supportive. Often the music in games can drive me crazy because it can repeat dozens of times before you finish the game. I wasn't paying a lot of attention to the music in Pikmin, but it never jumped out at me and bothered me.

Control is smooth and surprisingly natural. Learning the game mechanics is as straightforward and pleasant as anything I've played. This is one of the very few games I've played all the way through and won without hints.

The game has a definite Japanese "cute" aesthetic that is perhaps intended to appeal to children. This wasn't a big problem for me, but it does put some people off. Once past that, though, the game was very satisfying for me to play as a Western adult. Reaction time isn't a big factor with this game, so my 41-year-old reflexes were more than up to the task.

Summary

"Pikmin" is a great real-time strategy/puzzle game. The graphics and sound are excellent, the puzzles are fair and solvable, the gameplay is enjoyable, and the game itself is surprisingly self-explanatory and easy to master despite enough complexity to be both interesting and fun. I only wish it had gone on longer!