Pikmin 4 Is Beautiful. (But a Little Too Easy.)
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Like it or not, Nintendo again chooses chill over challenging—making for a soft reboot aimed at a new generation gamers.
Pikmin (2001) is a perfect video game. In the Nintendo cult classic, you play as Olimar, a little guy no taller than a paperclip. He crash-lands on a mysterious planet—and his spaceship's parts fly all over the map. Due to limited air supply, Olimar has just 30 in-game days to repair the ship before he perishes. Luckily, he has some cute little helpers, who aid in his exploration—an even tinier plant species, called Pikmin.
Colored red, blue, and yellow, the quirky Pikmin possess varying skillsets, which create satisfying and challenging puzzles. You can toss Pikmin at enemies, ask them to build bridges, and carry heavy spaceship parts back to your base. Pikmin can also be completed in just 10 real-world hours. In our modern 150-plus-hour open-worldapalooza of a video game landscape, such a great, yet concise game? It's a lost art.
Don't get me wrong—I loved every second of my Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom hibernation. But Pikmin teaches gamers an entirely different skill: time management, AKA «dandori,» which roughly translates to «arrangement» in Japanese. According to Nintendo, Pikmin demands that players «a practice centered around planning things out in advance and working efficiently.» This time crunch adds a true level of difficulty. Nabbing multiple spaceship parts within the same day makes you feel like a fun video game actually taught you how to multitask.
Pikmin 4, which debuts today,is not that game. Like most Nintendo titles of late, difficulty has been sidelined in favor of
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