![]() ![]() ![]() This is just one of many genius design decisions. If you already have 100 Pikmin in your group, the newborn will spawn inside the onion. Whichever Pikmin carry the corpse of the enemy home will decide the colour spawned at your base, which you can then pluck and add to your party. You can only have 100 Pikmin in your party at any given time, so you’ll have to plan your routes carefully, avoiding enemies that are too strong for your current party, or perhaps risking loss because you know that if you successfully vanquish your foe, you can take it back to the Pikmin’s home (an onion, delightfully) and create more Pikmin. Each type is doled out slowly, and it’s the variety of the Pikmin themselves that hold the key to the maps. Also new are the pink Pikmin, who can fly and will give you an early chance to explore certain water-based locations. Returning from the previous games in the series are the red, yellow and blue Pikmin (Red can withstand fire, and are the strong-guys Yellow can conduct electricity and dig Blue can swim), but there are now rock-type Pikmin, who can be thrown at glass or other strong barriers. In fact, Pikmin 3 feels very much like an evolved form of itself. In that way, it feels as though the distinctly mapped-out locations (there aren’t that many, more on that later) are evolving before your eyes, and that’s a wonderful feeling. Within minutes of feeling like you’ve cleared an area, or discovered all there is, you’ll just happen across something that changes everything. Such is the exceedingly high quality of video game design, not once do you feel disorientated, lost, or frustrated during these exploratory experiences. And that’s where the aforementioned confidence comes in. When they crash land on a planet believed to hold the answers to their fruit-based problems, you take control and are immediately thrown into the driver’s seat (metaphorically speaking, that is – there are no horrible, tacked-on mechanics here) and given an introduction to the world. ![]() No, instead you are immediately plunged into the story: our intrepid trio of adventurers (Alph, Captain Charlie, and Brittany) from the distant world of Koppai are on a mission to save their planet – they need fruit, and they need it fast. We, as gamers, have come to expect certain things, but conventions are discarded right from the beginning, as there is no “press start to begin” option the first time you load up Pikmin 3. The confidence in the idea is staggering. It’s become a cliché now, but clichés are such because they hold universal truths: Pikmin 3 is exactly the kind of magic that you rarely see outside of Nintendo’s platforms. Miyamoto is a designer rightly lauded by everyone (with intelligence) as one of the very best there is, and whilst Pikmin 3 not only matches his previous work, if there’s any justice done by his team’s wonderful experience, it will pull the Wii U up by its bootstraps and finally offer people the software that Nintendo is so clearly capable of producing. The cuteness charms you, the colours make you smile the darkness will scare you, and the sadness will defeat you. ![]()
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