Hey! Pikmin

Spin-offs don't fall into this trap exclusively, but oftentimes when an existing thing tries a new style, I just find myself wishing I was playing more of the "real" thing. A debate over what "real" means could take an eternity in some cases, and there are absolutely examples where I've enjoyed the spin-off more than the core series, but this problem is exactly where Hey! Pikmin finds itself. Hey! Pikmin isn't a bad game - it's okay - but when you find yourself longing for something else while playing it, that's typically not a great sign.

After three games over twelve years - including a gap from 2004 to 2013 - I can understand why we'd want to change things up, throw some ideas against the wall, and see what sticks. Hey! Pikmin has at it's core the basic principles of the three games to date: You're a tiny spaceman (in this case Captain Olimar once again) in a larger world where you have command of even tinier plant-creatures/people called Pikmin that you direct at obstacles to clear them in order to collect things in the world. The kicker is the perspective has now shifted to a 2D side-scrolling approach instead of the top-down look of yore. The touch screen is used to tap where you want to throw your Pikmin and have them attack, construct or dismantle something, pick up an item, etc. as you use the D-pad to move Olimar himself (or the face buttons for the left-handed option). The levels - because there are several sections broken up into multiple levels in each as opposed to large open spaces to explore - being mostly horizontal makes the top screen seem like wasted space a lot of the time, except when there are levels based around verticality, when it's actually quite useful.

The idea is more or less solid, you find Pikmin in each level instead of keeping an ever growing force of them to draw from, and you can never have more than twenty with you at a time, although you'll rarely need that many. The problem comes with length relative to your goals. From the outset you are told you need 30,000 Sparklium, the arbitrarily named McGuffin juice found all around the world, ranging from little berries you can find to the larger treasures that serve as the majority of the puzzle gameplay of each level. Getting all the treasures in each and every level got me to the necessary threshold about two thirds of the way through the game, and with no need to obtain any more, I found myself racing through the last several sectors with no real drive to try and find the secrets. I get that it needs to be accessible, and while the puzzles were usually at least a little clever, the game isn't very hard. The fact that there was so much of it in total started to work against it by the time I had arrived at the final boss. The bosses are another let-down of sorts as well as they are all far too easy. Most of them took less than a minute to defeat, and usually with minimal to no loses on my side.

There are other things to do, sort of, between levels. Amiibo can be used to open up side-challenges in the level select screen, all of which are one room puzzles to gain more Sparklium. As well, there's Pikmin Park, your home base of sorts where all the Pikmin you collect live. You can use the Pikmin or Olimar Amiibo to call in some extra Pikmin from here once per level, but the main function of the Park is to act as an idle game. There are multiple areas of the park where Pikmin can be put to work to find more Sparlium, but the rewards aren't that great, and there's nothing to do besides just direct each type of Pikmin where you want them to go. It feels more like a mobile companion app or tie-in game than it does a function of this full retail product.

It seems a little silly to nitpick about there being "too much game" in a game, but Hey! Pikmin does end up feeling a little long by the end of it. If there had been fewer levels, or the Sparklium (let's say) economy had been managed better, then the last third of the game wouldn't have felt like it was in the way of the ending. Combine that with the little skits found two to three times per level that cannot be skipped the first time you see them and everything feels long. The useless statement that is "fans of the series will enjoy it" probably applies here - as I count myself among those numbers - but even then it's a different enough package that maybe that's not so true at all. Either way, I enjoyed some of my time with Hey! Pikmin, but found myself longing for another traditional Pikmin game during most of that time. Fresh ideas to try and breathe new life into something are fine, but one is enough, and even then we could have tightened it up a little.