Wii U Shaping Up: Pikmin 3

Dropped about 7 hours into Pikmin 3. Holy shit this is a good game.

For those who haven't played it, Pikmin is a unique take on RTS that resembles a cross between the old PC games Mule and Syndicate. A group of spacemen have been stranded on a strange uncivilized planet, and find themselves aided by oddly obedient and helpless creatures called pikmin. Using these cute ant like things, the crew must survive, gather resources, and repair the spaceship to go home with the greatest treasure of the planet, fruit.

Pikmin are controlled (enslaved??) by blowing whistles, which results in a mob of colorful and cute followers following your heroes. The heroes can then throw them at whatever you want the pikmin to interact with or fight like adorable grenades. With three heroes, the player is given the choice to travel around as a giant horde or split up into groups as needed. Multitasking is not only required for certain puzzles, but is needed to efficiently clear areas before night sets in. Once it gets dark, the dangerous lifeforms awaken and any pikmin left behind are devoured while the heroes bravely flee to orbit on their spacecraft. There's a really sad animation for this, so don't let it happen

There is also a time limit to the number of days, as space-elves require fruit juice to survive. This requires players to juggle efforts between collecting fruit, defeating enemies, and tending to pikmin reserves. Clearing an area efficiently requires quick reflexes, good planning, and tons of multitasking.

Pikmin 3 stands out by using motion control and the gamepad to allow easy multitasking and responsive, mouse like controls. Combining two radically different controllers isn't gimmicky in the slightest, it's so ergonomic and intuitive that it's makes a mouse and keyboard look clunky in comparison.

Where Pikmin stands out from the typical RTS is through the focus not on combat, but managing different tasks with the different types of pikmin. Some types are great at fighting certain monsters, others better suited to carrying or digging, others can survive in water. Two players are supported through both co-op play and battle mode, which is guaranteed to give this game as much depth as any other AAA Nintendo release. Bingo Battle, the competitive 2 player game, is quirky and unbelievably good, combining task management, solid game design and battle arena type gameplay with multiple victory objectives. Unfortunately, it is local play only. This game mode would have been fucking great online, easily standing up with the top tier multiplayer games that have been released this generation.

If you have a Wii U, or are thinking of picking one up for the holidays, Pikmin 3 is highly recommended. Not only is this a challenging game, but I dare you not to smile when playing it.



Right now, the Wii U is in the same funk the 3DS was in about a year ago. The system is fairly barren, but some great releases are on the near horizon. The problem with the Wii U isn't that the launch is bad. Rather, it's been so damn long since a system launch that people have forgotten what it's like to sit through a drought of games. This long period without a launch has also forced the Wii U to compete with two consoles with an unbelievably large library of quality games.

The next generation is creeping up, and I have a strong feeling that Nintendo has positioned themselves well to be churning out fantastic games at a solid pace while Microsoft and Sony find themselves in the position the Wii U is in now. If the Wii U library turns out half as well as the 3DS, core gamers are going to be damn tempted to pick up Nintendo as a second console during the wait. I've got a PS4 on order, but I have a feeling that the next year will be a few stellar games on the Sony, but most time spent with the Wii U.

I loved the original Pikmin and enjoyed Pikmin 2, sounds like it is right along the same lines.

Gary Sax wrote: I loved the original Pikmin and enjoyed Pikmin 2, sounds like it is right along the same lines.

It has a reduced version of the time pressure of Pikmin original with the large world exploration from the sequel. The only thing missing are the semi-randomized caverns from Pikmin 2, which I found kinda boring anyways. The new pikmin introduced are a balanced version of the purple pikmin and a flying pink pikmin. The useless white guys have been dropped from single player.

Remember, it's been nine damn years since the last pikmin game, there's a lot of polish that went into 3 both visually and in gameplay. The controls are polished to perfection, the maps and time pressure encourage splitting up your blob far more often. On the whole, it feels more like the original than the sequel, a good thing imo.

As much as I recommend this game, I wouldn't buy a Wii U for it (or any one game!). However, between this, Donkey Kong, Mario Kart, NSMBU, Monster Hunter, Mario World 3D, Monolith's 'X', Smash Bros., Wonderful 101, and Bayonetta 2, the system is solid on exclusives for the next 6-9 months. That's 10 HUGE exclusives compared to the handful of announced games for XBone/PS4 that look interesting. On top of that, there's a bunch of multiplats, but we'll see if they get butchered for the Nintendo version (the non-Ubisoft games probably will!).

To put it into perspective, that's more announced games than the 3DS had to end it's drought, and that's the best system on the market right now, home consoles included.