Over the next few weeks, I'm going to be looking at games I've had sitting on my shelf, silently mocking me for having not played them yet. Some are undoubtedly classics; some are probably just steaming shitpiles. But I'm going to find that out for myself, and hopefully have some fun in the process.
Anyone who's worried about the state of video games and their preponderance with shooting, spewing forth piles of brown muck that passes as "cinematic" experiences, should really just give up trying to fight everyone and go play some fucking Pikmin.
OK, I'm not that much of a fatalist. I do think that there's some hope for gaming, and Shigeru Miyamoto is obviously on my shortlist of people who I think can and have progressed gaming in meaningful ways. In many regards, Pikmin should be considered as one of the best and most innovative games ever created, and Pikmin 2 even moreso. Yes, this sequel may be a case of "more Pikmin," but when it's still so chock-full of new ideas and gameplay twists, you realize that even more Pikmin is better than, well, pretty much anything else out there.
Pikmin 2 is, like its predecessor, extremely hard to categorize, yet instantly accessible (another Miyamoto trademark). It's an action-adventure real-time strategy game with a bit of a farming bent and an incredible roguelike/dungeon-crawling aspect to it as well. Yet even this doesn't really begin to describe it. Pikmin is so much its own category of gaming that anything that even resembles its "leader with an army of drones that can be thrown at an enemy" gameplay has to acknowledge its debt (I'm thinking of the fantastic Little King's Story, mostly).
More than this, though, Pikmin re-asserts the importance of the word "game" in discussions of video games. There are specific rules, guidelines, strategies and objectives, and no effort is wasted on trying to obfuscate these things. The goal is constant forward progression, tied to the childlike glee that goes hand in hand with the world of Pikmin. There's never nothing to do, never a moment when the player isn't in total command of the experience. Pikmin, moreso even than my beloved Zelda franchise, highlights the importance of realizing the limitations of the form and pushing those limitations in meaningful ways.
There's not much of a plot to speak of, but it's still delivered with the kind of wit and charm that Nintendo has perfected in their later years (side note: Nintendo Treehouse have to be the most skilled translators working today – none of the idiosyncracies of the original script get lost, and their work is always charming and funny). The original Pikmin saw Captain Olimar crash land on an "alien planet," discover the race of the pikmin, and work together with them to reassemble his broken ship. Pikmin 2's storyline engenders much less stressful gameplay: Hocotate Freight, the company that Olimar works for, has gone bankrupt, and to pay back the loan the company owes, Olimar and his co-worker Louie need to travel back to Earth – erm, I mean, that "alien planet" – work together with the pikmin again, and collect enough "treasure" to pay off the debt.
The setup leads to an appropriately adorable and frankly kind of amazingly subversive place. The treasure that you collect turns out to actually be trash: discarded sardine cans, pop bottle caps, and any number of old Nintendo curios, including a love tester that alerts you when other trash is around. The game's ecological bent is readily apparent, then: Olimar and Louie are really tiny astronauts, and what we casually throw out is valuable to them. The game, then, is making a point about our (and it really does seem to be North America) disposable culture, even going so far as to lay some of the blame at the feet of Nintendo themselves.
In this way, Pikmin 2 is highly educational without being didactic. I consider myself to be a pretty good teacher, but I don't have shit on Miyamoto: Pikmin 2 is perhaps the best example I've seen of scaffolding, ever. The game doesn't have a difficulty slider – instead, it's tuned perfectly, so that every new challenge, be it a garbage bag to stamp down or a giant bug to overcome, feels just the slightest bit out of your reach. But exploring and learning and practicing yields new challenges, new obstacles to overcome. The game feels incredibly organic, allowing you free reign to discover your own tactics and your own way through the world, a real rarity these days. There's no "right" way to play the game, and I found myself quickly formulating my own preferences, something that I really appreciate in a video game. Scratch that – it's not that I appreciate it, it's that that's what video games should do.
The game is also a great teacher at how ecology works. Yes, most of it is fictionalized ecology, but all of the fauna exhibit realistic characteristics and seem to really live in this world, and not just as enemies to defeat. Indeed, this is reinforced by the inclusion of the Piklopedia, which categorizes in painstaking detail the behaviour of the various animals you come across, given goofy faux-scientific names by the seemingly anal-retentive Olimar. Reading these accounts are often hilarious, but more than that, they seem to be making another point about the nature of ecology and science in general, and that's that it's often based entirely on subjective perception. Not bad for what is ostensibly a "child's game."
The major additions to Pikmin 2 from Pikmin 1, besides the removal of the time limit feature and the expansion of the world, is the inclusion of competitive and cooperative multiplayer, as well as an intense dungeon-crawling aspect to the gameplay. I haven't had a chance to try out the multiplayer, but I've heard that it, like pretty much everything else in the game, is amazing. The dungeon-crawling, though, is the standout of this game. You basically take your pikmin into a one-way dungeon, descending ever deeper into randomly generated and dangerous catacombs. Along the way, you can collect some rarer items, but any pikmin lost down here are gone for good (or until you return to the surface and breed some more). This becomes especially tense during the boss fights that happen here, which are exciting, challenging, and intensely gratifying to defeat. That a game so jam-packed with new ideas and gameplay concepts is generous enough to include literally one of the best dungeon-crawling games in it that I've played is truly unbelievable.
Pikmin 2 really highlights the necessity for a Pikmin 3, now that Nintendo is once again the all-conquering force in the gaming landscape that it used to be. More people need to play these games – I think that with the right attitude and marketing, Pikmin could be just as influential and important as Pac-Man (funny how similar their names are!). The game is a delight all around, from the delightful pikmin themselves all the way to the joy of playing the game itself. I didn't really expect to find one of my favourite games ever when I started this feature, but here we are: Pikmin 2 certainly is one of the best games ever made, and I hope that whatever Miyamoto cooks up next is even half as good as this game.