Pikmin 4 does some truly weird things with the series' story

eurogamer.net:

On its surface, Pikmin is a cute strategy game about growing little plant people and gathering treasure. Delve deeper into its lore, however, and you'll find fans debating the series' apparent commentary on human extinction, and all sorts of timey-wimey shenanigans going on to make its many story elements match up.

Spoiler warning: the following article discusses endgame details for Pikmin 4.

Before Pikmin 4, I'd never spent much time trying to make Pikmin's setting make sense. It's based on Earth, obviously, though a version with different animals and no humans in sight. And yet, you can still run around and find evidence of human existence — and seemingly very recent human existence at that, with freshly-baked food and other objects simply lying about. Are humans extinct, or have we all simply popped out for tea? It doesn't really matter to the simple stories Pikmin games tell.

Now, however, Pikmin 4 is making fans pay attention to its timeline because of some rather odd things it has decided to include. (Also, because Pikmin 4 probably has more story in it than the previous games combined.) For starters, Pikmin 4 presents, via text logs from the lost Captain Olimar, something of an alternate version of Olimar's initial crash from Pikmin 1. You can read about Olimar encountering Pikmin, Onions and familiar enemies for the first time, and later on get to play this all out via an alternate Pikmin 1-like flashback story where Olimar races to repair his spaceship, on what he describes as an entirely «unknown planet».

There could be a very simple explanation for all this. And the simplest explanation is — Nintendo really doesn't care too much about Pikmin's story, and doesn't want to confuse new players down by