Review – Pikmin 1 HD

Developer: Nintendo | Publisher: Nintendo

After the recent Nintendo Direct, to everyone’s surprise, Nintendo shadow-dropped the original Pikmin 1 and Pikmin 2 as HD versions for the Nintendo Switch. As of the release of Pikmin 4, this means the entire mainline Pikmin library will be available on one console. For the first time ever in HD – is Pikmin 1 good, or has it aged like a bouquet of flowers left on the window ledge on a sunny July afternoon? 

Pikmin 1 perfectly fills the criteria of a brutally stressful strategy management sim. Your cute army of powerful plant-like creatures will do anything for you, at the risk of their own lives. This can be equally heartbreaking as it is fun. The landscape is full of insect-like creatures who will munch on your tasty Pikmin and blast fire at them as you attempt to navigate the planet identified as PNF-404. 

For those unfamiliar with the core concept of Pikmin, you must manage your day by exploring enclosed areas, collecting treasure and attempting to survive whilst under attack by the many aforementioned insect-like creatures on your journeys. You can take up to 100 Pikmin with you at any given time, however if they are eaten, crushed or drowned by the harsh environments surrounding them, they will perish and you will need to rebuild your army. This is done by harvesting the remains of the creatures you have defeated, and by collecting numbered tokens found around the planet. Items that you carry back to your base will have a number value, which determines how many Pikmin are required to carry it. With your in-game days limited, planning and efficiency is crucial in managing your exploration.

Although abandoned later in the series, Pikmin 1 offers a terrifying 30 in-game day limit. After a collision with a meteor in space, Captain Olimar has crash landed on planet PNF-404 and 30 pieces of his ship have scattered across the world. As more pieces are found, Olimar can travel to further areas of the map to discover more of the world and seek out his ship’s missing materials, with the help of the Pikmin he discovered on the way. The aim is, of course, to collect all pieces to aid in Olimar’s successful escape of the planet before he finally succumbs to the “toxic oxygen” and meets his fate. The Pikmin are drawn to Olimar in a mutually beneficial relationship of survival.

Pikmin are found in three colours in the original title. Red Pikmin are the first that Captain Olimar discovers and are impervious to fire. Blue Pikmin are the only Pikmin who may traverse deeper waters without meeting the hideous fate of drowning, making some areas exclusive to them. Yellow Pikmin are able to pick up explosive rocks which will detonate once dropped and help destroy some obstacles to pave your way to a desired treasure, or clear a more efficient route to transport your goods. The start of a new day is often met with deciding where to go and what Pikmin to bring with you. It’s not always best to fill your squad with every type of Pikmin. Some treasures are best sought out with an exclusive squad of Blue Pikmin as you explore the trenches, while other paths are full of fire-breathing monsters and holes in the ground that explode with flames.  

While the 30 day limit may sound intimidating, it’s actually very reasonable in the setting of Pikmin 1. As you explore the world and learn how to navigate it efficiently, you can easily grab multiple pieces of the ship in a single day, leading to more time as you approach the end-game. One Quality of Life feature added to Pikmin 1 is the ability to rewind to previous days, allowing the player to reverse their steps if they had particularly bad days with heavy losses, or to rectify silly mistakes, meaning the game fully respects your time. In the original GameCube version, you had to live with your decisions and simply begin a new file if you couldn’t make it in time. While frustrating, this wasn’t the end of the world as the game itself is roughly 8 hours long and built for replayability. 

The controls have been significantly improved. In the original game, you had to press a shoulder button to navigate the camera and it would simply snap behind Olimar, providing the view you usually wanted, albeit a little inconvenient. Now, the right stick takes full control of the camera in a significantly improved style of control. The C-Stick on the GameCube Controller was once used to order your Pikmin into a line or to push them forward in one swoop. This is now controlled by holding R and using the right stick to command your army, significantly improving the overall experience of this classic. 

Whether you spend a day replenishing your stock of Pikmin or exploring to swiftly recover the missing parts of the Dolphin, the fun in Pikmin 1 is perpetual. Danger lurks around every corner, and although exploration can occasionally be frustrating due to the AI of the Pikmin when in a large group, sometimes separating themselves or not correctly crossing a bridge, it adds to the overall experience of the game. The somewhat unintelligent movement of the Pikmin might be intentional to add to the difficulty and tactics of the game, or perhaps it was an original limit of the software and hardware of the early 2000’s, we may never know, yet it keeps you aware of your surroundings and careful pacing of the environment around you. No Pikmin should ever be left behind. If you fail to return them to their home at the end of the day, you may be punished by watching them desperately fail to fend off monsters as you fly off the ground at the end of the day.  

Pikmin 1 is often looked back on with dismay and is the black sheep of the family. The elder child who took the hard route in life while its younger siblings let Mum and Dad have a much easier, more relaxed time. I think history has been too harsh on the game, and while the 30-day limit does sound exceedingly punishing, it’s actually incredibly well set-up in that you will suffer mild-stress and panic attacks while some creatures diminish your army in the limited setting, 30-days is generous enough to allow you to make some mistakes on the way while maintaining a fun and well directed campaign. There isn’t much to talk about in the way of narrative. Olimar lands on an alien planet, he must escape and that’s all there is to it. At the end of each day, the player is treated to a quirky and humorous Captain’s Log style diary entry of Olimar, which peppers some personality over the otherwise silent protagonist. 

Pikmin 1 originally might have been a little bit more hardcore than it is now, but with the ability to rewind your days to undo any major failures on your journey, I’m happy to say that there is almost no time wasted in this adventure. Pikmin 1 is a short adventure, but is designed for players With reasonable goals and a scaling difficulty as you approach further areas of the game, Pikmin 1 is an underrated masterpiece and should not be ignored.

9 out of 10

Tested on Nintendo switch