Recollections on Pikmin

06 Jan 2023

I was always afraid to play the Nintendo Gamecube game ‘Pikmin’ when I was a kid.

I associate the game with pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds on a cool December morning - bought during the holiday season along with a pack of pumpkin seeds I was trying for the first time. (I decided I like sunflower seeds better.) I have no recollection of what drove me to want the game, which was not a platformer and therefore not my Platonic ideal of what a video game should be. Despite its unfamiliarity, I liked it a lot.

For the uninitiated, Pikmin is a game where you essentially micromanage your workers, to the point of literally throwing them at the job you need them to do and they follow you around all day if they’re not working on something. Your workers are called ‘Pikmin’. They look like carrots with legs and they grow out of the ground. You’re stranded on an alien planet, so your tasks involve building bridges, carrying back the pieces of your destroyed ship, and fighting monsters.

That last part was tremendously upsetting to me, as it meant that some of my precious Pikmin could die. Pikmin are meant to be replaceable in the game. There are no ‘unique’ Pikmin, and beyond the fear of running out of Pikmin and having too few to do some important task with, there’s no real reason to care about Pikmin dying from a gameplay perspective. As a kid, though, I hated hearing the sounds of Pikmin dying and watching their little ghosts ascend into the ether. I thought I could get through the game with no Pikmin dying, and only embarked on the safest possible adventures.

My hopes were dashed by the 30-day time limit. Because your life support system is damaged, you only have 30 days to get the pieces of your shattered ship before it runs out and you die. This meant that slowly chipping away at every enemy wasn’t a viable strategy. You didn’t need to get every single ship piece, since some were optional - only if you cared about getting the ‘true’ ending. I was a very impatient kid, and I was lucky enough to have a lot of other games to play, so I think I just ended up playing the first half of Pikmin over and over. Pikmin 2, where you have unlimited time, was more my style, and at the time I enjoyed that one much more.

Several years later, in the summer between high school and college, I decided I wanted to beat some of my old games that I had never done because I was a finicky kid who didn’t like losing. I managed to beat the game with all the ship pieces, skidding close to disaster at 27 out of 30 days. Some Pikmin died, but I couldn’t imagine actually getting through the game with no Pikmin dying.

Several more years later, having graduated college and entered the working world for a while, I thought about the challenge of finishing Pikmin with no deaths. It was possible, but would require a massive amount of resets and good resource management. Was it really going to be fun?

And so another summer of Pikmin began, though I didn’t have this one off. And I decided to play on an emulator, since being stuck to my actual Gamecube would limit me to only one room (and every death would mean the penalty of waiting for the entire opening sequence when I reset). The game’s controls were even wonkier than I remember, and I had forgotten how bad the Pikmin AI was. In later games, the developers found ways to make the Pikmin act helpfully. In Pikmin 1, the Pikmin are distracted by every blade of grass they find and every flower stalk, to the point that if you are running away from an enemy, the best thing you can do is keep away from any plant life. They will stop what they are doing and run to pick the blades of grass, and then your Pikmin will get eaten. It is frustrating, but that’s what I get for deciding to do a challenge run of a glorified Gamecube tech demo.

The biggest challenge came at the start of the game. I didn’t have enough Pikmin to overwhelm my opponents through sheer numbers, so I had to be careful when entering fights. I started by only using one or two Pikmin to attack my sleeping enemies, and then calling them off and running away until the enemies ran into the edge of their ‘attack’ zone and robotically walked back to sleep. This worked, but it took a very long time to accomplish anything. Worse, it meant I was still operating under my “no risk allowed” strategy from when I was a literal 9-year-old. If I wanted to get anything done, I’d have to embrace risk.

I must have repeated day 2 of Pikmin dozens of time by now with how many times I practiced killing the large, red Bulborbs. After much trial and error, I found that 7 Pikmin seemed to be the optimal amount for killing enemies. Any less meant I was missing out on precious firepower, any more and they became harder to control when shaken off by enemies and easier to get eaten. (I think I could increase this number as I get better at understanding Pikmin AI and controls.)

Now that the major task of figuring out how to not lose it when I ran into an enemy, the second task was the same one as ever - time management. You have a limited amount of time each day to get your chores done. For example, you’ll often find some piece you need is on an island and you need to build a bridge to get to it. To make the best use of your time, you want to leave your Pikmin there and then do something else. However, you must make sure there are no enemies nearby that will kill your Pikmin as you leave them. Missing some sheargrub has been the cause of many resets. You also need to keep track of how far away things are - there is no fast travel in the game, and so you will often waste time walking from one place to another to manage different groups of Pikmin.

I also wanted to do even better than I had the first time around. My first no-death run took 26 days, which was a one day reduction from my original run that allowed death. For the second run, I decided to try some of the cool tricks I’d seen to cut that time down.

There are three types of Pikmin - red Pikmin can withstand fire, blue Pikmin can walk through water, and yellow Pikmin can throw bombs and be thrown high (but still can be killed by bombs). Different Pikmin are found on different areas, which require a numerical day to get to, so not having blue Pikmin is a real bummer early on. However, there are ways around this which the developers did not expect. For example, red and yellow Pikmin drown when thrown in water, but it takes them a few seconds to do so. If you toss them in the water and then call them back, they will move through the water towards you. If you can get a running start when you toss your Pikmin and then run to the other side and call them, you can effectively ‘swim’ your Pikmin through the water and get to areas you were not supposed to early on.

This is easier said than done. The Pikmin AI is frustratingly obtuse, so sometimes you will call Pikmin and they will seem to ignore you, preferring to drown than move in your direction. Moreover, the patch of dry land you can walk on is small and its geometry is weird - there is an area that it looks like you should be able to enter, but you actually cannot. If your Pikmin try to enter at that junction, they will actually ricochet off to the side, jeopardizing any chance you had of a death-free swim. I was quite grateful for the existence of save-states when I was practicing that maneuver…

If that wasn’t enough, there was the matter of time. I was able to successfully maneuver Pikmin to the island by throwing two at a time. Once the Pikmin were on the island, they had to build a bridge so they could bring the ship part back. More Pikmin on a bridge = bridge built faster. Because I could only throw two Pikmin at a time, it often took too long for me to get the Pikmin on the bridge, and they would run out of time before they could bring the piece back. (I could just bring it back the next day, since ship parts stay the same between days, but I wanted the satisfaction of doing it all in one day, darn it!) I’ve been able to do this successfully twice now, but that’s just the beginning. As with attacking enemies, there’s always the question - can I increase the number of Pikmin I bring with me to get this task done sooner without losing control and killing Pikmin?

If my first childish attempt at going through Pikmin with no deaths was about avoiding all risk and uncertainty, this no-death run was about embracing risk.

As it stands, my current no-death time is 17 days. I think I can get it down even further. The minimum amount of time to complete the game is 6 days (due to certain story-related limitations). I don’t know if I’ll be able to complete that challenge while sticking to the no-death run, but I’m currently gunning for 11 days. There’s no real point to completing these challenges other than self-satisfaction - this game has been out for twenty years now, so most of the low-hanging speedrunning fruit has been picked.

But it’s fun and challenges me to do something better, and there’s no need to justify it any further than that. I like being able to do something that would have impressed my nine-year-old self. I like working in a problem with clear boundaries and all I have to do is become more efficient within those boundaries. Much of the work I do in the other blog runs into the problem of scope, and problems become bigger and more wicked the more you look into them. It’s nice to look at a clearly defined problem (given this set of rules, optimize for Pikmin survival and fastest part retrieval) and see clear improvement in your iterations. All without sacrificing any of my digital carrot soldiers.

Tags: random, videogames