Pikmin 4delivers everything that longtime fans of the franchise could want. It meshes together the very best parts of all preceding games (while pretending, quite wisely, that Hey Pikmin! never existed), making it the ultimate experience in subjugating little plant creatures. For strategic purposes, of course.
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Given that players had been waiting over a decade for a fourquel, it’s only natural that it’s stuffed to the gills with callbacks and references to prior adventures to make that patience worthwhile. Though Pikmin 4 is something of a ‘soft reboot,’ there’s certainly no shortage of these homages in it.
1Louie’s Treachery
For a series where most of the characters boil down to candy-colored representations of good or… well, not ‘evil’ per se, but ‘carnivorous,’ Louie’s a pretty complex figure. Back in Pikmin 2, he accompanied Olimar on his mission to pay off Hocotate Freight’s debts until it transpired he was responsible for the entire problem to begin with. He’d stuffed his face with Pikpik Carrots and racked up a huge bill in the process. Greedy? Sure, but dismissably childish.
In Pikmin 4, though? The dude’s a menace. In contrast to Olimar’s pleasant demeanor, his diary entries come off as disturbingly detached and immature. He’s revealed to be responsible for turning various crew members into Leaflings against their will, dragging them into the Onion in an attempt to get the Rescue Corps to sod off. A fair enough motivation – but when hecommandeers a giant dogand starts literally trying to kill you, all bets are off. He’s forgiven remarkably fast, too. Longtime players will recognize that Louie’s downward spiral continues unchallenged.
2Olimar’s Adventure Deja Vu
Pikmin 4’s story takes a lot of cues from the original trilogy, and nowhere is this more apparent than in Olimar’s tale. For most of the game, you’re attempting to track down the legendary captain himself after he sends out a distress signal. Once found, you can play a side mode as Olimar wherein you relive the events that led to him being stranded – and it’s mighty, mighty familiar.
Devotees will immediately notice that Olimar’s adventure plays out almost beat-for-beat as it did in Pikmin 1. After crash landing on PNF-404 (i.e. Earth), you’ll gradually round up each Pikmin type in the same order as the original game; find the same ship pieces, with the same functions, in more or less the same order, and all within a time limit, unlike the rest of Pikmin 4. It’s like Nintendo snuck a full Pikmin 1 remake into the post-game content, and fans are sure to dig it.
3Emperor Bulblax and Co. Return
The final boss of Pikmin 1, Emperor Bulblax, was an intimidating prospect. Up to that point in the game, your foes had either been moderately sized or had an obvious weakness if they were larger. Not so with the Emperor. He’s gigantic, fights you in a constrained space, and is roughly 70 percent tongue. All that adds up to a lot of Pikmin corpses if you’re not prepared.
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In Pikmin 4, the Emperor returns – but thankfully, he’s had a downgrade in both status and size. He’s now a recurring miniboss and can be felled with relative ease if you exploit the new Ice Pikmin, making it a satisfying turning of the tables for series veterans. Instead, the new big, tough variation is known as the Sovereign Bulblax, who is more reminiscent of the might long-time fans remember.
He’s joined in his comeback bythe Smoky Progg, another infamous legacy enemy, and the rocklike Mamuta, who have a long-standing fan theory connection confirmed by their data entries.
4Pikmin 3 Crew Relatives
The postgame of Pikmin 4 is exceedingly generous and effectively doubles your playtime if you’re willing to put in the hours. A key goal of these additional missions is to rescue three particular castaways: Yorke, Nelle, and Don Bergman (one of those names is not like the others.) Once you’ve saved them, you might think they look rather reminiscent of Pikmin 3’s playable trio.
And by ‘rather reminiscent,’ we of course mean ‘blatantly copied.’ Yorke is a dead ringer for Alph, Nelle is Brittany’s doppelganger, and Don Bergman is presumably a crime family cousin of Charlie. This is made even more explicit in their profiles and some flavor dialogue, where we’re told Yorke is a brother of Alph’s. Why the Pikmin 3 gang couldn’t make it for the events of 4, which otherwise brings back every notable series character, is anyone’s guess. They might be on holiday.
5Reimagined Dungeons
A major innovation that Pikmin 2 brought to the table over its predecessor was the introduction of dungeons. Whenever you came to a subterranean cave, the usual strategy action (and ingame timer) would halt to allow for a good 30 minutes or so of spelunking. A fan-favorite element, these caves were conspicuous in their absence from Pikmin 3, but Pikmin 4 brings them back with a bang.
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A flaw in the Pikmin 2 dungeons was that they were random and procedurally generated. This meant you could often get floors that either had nothing in them or that were impossibly difficult and rammed with enemies. Not so in Pikmin 4 – every one of the caves is meticulously designed and shows off that Nintendo creative spark.
Some, like Pikmin 2’s Submerged Castle, even return under new names. Turns out a bit of actual level design works wonders. Conveyor beltpuzzles with Oatchi, boss floors that have you changing environmental temperatures, memory tests with buttons, it’s all here.
6PNF-404 Revisited
Pikmin 4 takes things a step further. For the first time, you can advance beyondthe gardens and fields of our planetand into a house. A noticeably clean, manicured house – take that post-apocalyptic theory! It’s also made clear in the items you find that time has passed since the original Pikmin trilogy. While you’ll still find ‘relics’ like GBA cartridges, you’ll also dig up Switch Joy-Cons and encounter enormous 4K TVs. Technology, and your Pikmin army, march on.
7Hocotate Freight In Trouble
When you retrieve Olimar and Louie, they’ll occasionally mention their career back on Hocotate as long-haulers for shipping company Hocotate Freight. They’re the corporation that was the victim of Louie’s aforementioned ravenous appetite, and it and its long-suffering CEO are given some cheeky winks and nods in Pikmin 4. The President himself makes a visual cameo in a dialogue bubble for a start.
More importantly, in one of Olimar’s data logs, he mentions waking from a bad dream in which Hocotate Freight was plunged into ruin via the actions of a ‘subordinate.’ This is a clear reference to the plot of Pikmin 2, but it does throw up some interesting questions. Were the events of that sequel all a dream that Olimar had during this adventure? Have the first two games (at least) been thrown out of canon by the power of retcon? Or has Olimar simply got a poor memory? Only Nintendo can answer those, really – but whatever the truth, Hocotate Freight won’t be making its dough back anytime soon.
