Boundary Break

#10 PIKMIN 3 DELUXE: A second playthrough Now, if Pikmin 1 was unpolished, unfriendly, abrasive, uncompromising, and uncommercial, Pikmin 3 was probably the first game in the franchise to try to address all of those things. And in its attempt to do so, it makes for a somewhat lesser Pikmin game that is still amazing, and it is still something that I appreciate because I need more Pikmin in my life. But it is by no means a Pikmin 1. I recently played through Pikmin 3 again because Nintendo just released an HD patch for the game, allowing it to finally go beyond 720p to now an incredible 4K resolution. I think that all Pikmin games highly benefit from having a high, high resolution because of all the tiny characters and the pulled-back camera that this series tends to have in general sort of demands that. So with that in mind, I jumped back into Pikmin 3 and beat it again in 2026. And I will tell you that this game is still really solid, really great. There are things that I really love about it, but there are also things that I understand even more now on my second full playthrough than I did all the way back then. First of all, the thing that I need to get out of the way first and foremost is that Pikmin 3 is probably the first game in the series to try to soften the edges of the Pikmin franchise. Pikmin 1 and 2 both held on strongly to the idea of the harshness of nature. A lot of their enemy designs, and the way that the games would operate in terms of how many Pikmin you would lose by engaging with something, all surrounded this idea that nature is very cruel and unforgiving, and you will have casualties along the way. But Pikmin 3 changes the approach. Even on the hardest difficulty, which I appreciate Nintendo introduced later with Ultra-Spicy difficulty, there are things that make it very, very easy to get through the game. I think the biggest thing is that almost all enemies give you a second chance or time to fix the mistakes that you made. And what I mean by that is that with Pikmin 2 for example, if you had Pikmin on the side of a Queen Bulblax, she could crush every single Pikmin and kill them in an instant. You could lose an entire army or swarm of Pikmin. However, in Pikmin 3, nearly all the enemy engagements that you can think of give you some time to course-correct to any mistakes that you make. And I don't hate the game for that. It certainly makes the game more approachable than Pikmin 1 or Pikmin 2. If you are a first-time player, maybe Pikmin 3 would be the game that I would suggest to you out of all the other games in the franchise. But as a returning player, it certainly does make you realize: Oh. This isn't really a game aimed primarily at adults anymore. This is a game designed to be approachable for everyone, including children. There's also a little bit more focus on the cuteness of the Pikmin. One of the things I noticed right off the bat is that in Pikmin 1, the pupils of the Pikmin are much tighter than they are in Pikmin 3. The Pikmin in Pikmin 3 have pupils that are way more dilated, giving them a higher cuteness factor. And on top of all that, there is something that I've started to notice, especially playing on the higher difficulty, which is that the structure of Pikmin 3 is kind of easy. There are big story objectives in each core area that you go to, and once you fulfill that core objective, there's little to no reason to revisit that area other than to get all the fruit. But the fruit is also something that is not as necessary as the ship parts from Pikmin 1. So long as you have enough fruit to survive until the end of the game, that's all you really need to care about. So what I found in my latest playthrough of Pikmin 3 was that I was jumping from area to area very, very quickly. And I suppose this is fine. In truth, it does a lot to make the length of Pikmin 3 roughly the same as Pikmin 1. I'm sure that if I was a Pikmin 3 professional, I could probably beat it in the 16 days it took me to beat Pikmin 1 as well. In the end, I beat Pikmin 3 in about 22 days this time around on the hardest difficulty available. I suppose I could beat the game a lot quicker if I played it on the base difficulty that was originally on the Wii U. But even playing on this artificially increased difficulty, I still had about 17 days' worth of rations available to me on top of beating the game in 22 days. And I did take a good number of days to finish out that final area, which is supposed to be an area that takes you a couple of days. But anyways, the game is really, really fun. I do really like Pikmin 3, and I also like that Pikmin 3 doesn't waste a lot of your time. It is just one of those games where, if you know what you're doing, you can get through it pretty quickly, much like Pikmin 1. But what I feel like is already starting to go missing in Pikmin 3 and, by effect, the Pikmin franchise is the sincerity that was introduced in Pikmin 1. A lot of the bosses have sort of a cartoony approach to their designs. One of the easiest ones to recall is a bee that has a harp for a nose and then starts playing the harp on its nose. It's very cartoony, and that's not the sort of approach that I feel like the last two games had. Pikmin 1 and 2 had this sort of creepy yet awkward reinterpretation of creatures that exist on planet Earth. I would not describe the things from Pikmin 1 and 2 as cartoony so much as I would describe them as fictional yet also raw, like some of the stuff that you see on planet Earth. But Pikmin 3 is the first time I feel like the series pivots away from that to give it more of a wholesome Nintendo charm. And it's funny because Pikmin 3 is one of those games where it's sort of stuck in between things. It wants to be more accessible to people. It really wants to draw in more people than ever before. However, it can't fully abandon what it is or what it was, and therefore it's still not quite there in the way that Pikmin 4 would end up being. And it's actually for that reason that I still like Pikmin 3 quite a great deal. It did a lot to improve some of the core gameplay mechanics. One of the things that I really, really like now, in hindsight, going back from Pikmin 3 to Pikmin 2, which I'm currently playing, is the lock-on feature. I don't really see a reason why the Pikmin franchise can't have a feature in which you lock onto an enemy and then have a much better grasp of where your Pikmin are flying when you throw them. Gameplay wise, Pikmin 1 and 2 could be a little brutal and harsh, and not always in the best ways possible, by having you forcibly freeform where you were going to throw your Pikmin. I do think that Pikmin 3 had a very tangible improvement there with the lock on. One of the things I didn't like personally, but I know is different from person to person, is Pikmin 3's answer to replacing the C-stick swarm of Pikmin 1 and 2. Instead, it introduced a charge mechanic where you push a single button on a locked-on target and all your Pikmin just sort of dive into whatever that target is. It works. It's fine. It's just not as nice as swarming in Pikmin 1 and 2. There are things you can do with the freeform swarming of Pikmin 1 and 2 that I think are more beneficial than what Pikmin 3 provides. So it's sort of a give and take. Pikmin 3 provides one thing that's slightly better and another thing that's slightly worse, in my personal opinion. The newly introduced Pikmin, the Rock Pikmin and the Flying Pikmin, are really cool. I do think that the Rock Pikmin sort of moot out the practicality of the Purple Pikmin, which is really sad. You can kind of see that in the gameplay, where the main story does not have Purple or White Pikmin, although they were nice enough to include them in other modes. And they also make Purple Pikmin way less applicable and way less valuable than they were in Pikmin 2. The Flying Pikmin are also really overpowered. I'm okay with it. Again, we're talking about the confines of Pikmin 3 and not the confines of Pikmin 1 or Pikmin 2. So for there to be an OP Pikmin in Pikmin 3, and for that to be Flying Pikmin instead of Purple Pikmin like they were in Pikmin 2, I actually feel okay with this. It's sort of like mechanically we're breaking the game in an all-new, interesting sort of way, and I kind of like that about the Flying Pikmin. Also, the game is visually stunning. I get a lot of pushback about this on social media and stuff like that, but I do think that Pikmin 3 is a better-looking game than Pikmin 4. The reason for that is that a lot of the graphics of Pikmin 3 are highly intentional. It's textures that were made very intricately by hand and not run through some computer program to make an artificial sort of light reflection or light source. All the lighting and textures, and how those textures look within the lighting engine, are done meticulously by hand, and it's one of the last times we see this from Nintendo. So Pikmin 3 kind of wins out over Pikmin 4 in my mind as far as artistic direction. It also wins out artistically over Pikmin 1 and 2 if we're not counting enemy designs. Again, how the fruit looks, how the ground looks, how the walls look, and all the things that go into what the environment does, Pikmin 3 is probably the most gorgeous looking Pikmin game to date, especially with the 4K update that Switch 2 provided. Oh, and its story is fine. I like that Olimar is reintroduced. I like that Louie is reintroduced. I also like that the story sort of picks up after Pikmin 2 canonically with no plot holes. And I also like that there's intrigue at the end of Pikmin 3 that is supposed to be meant for Pikmin 4, even if Pikmin 4 completely dropped the ball there. I do think that the setup Pikmin 3 made for it was very, very fascinating, and it really kept me wanting more. So Pikmin 3's lore can be really fascinating at times, and I appreciate that when you get into the dialogue of the game—the actual text—the game still has a little bit of faithfulness to Pikmin 1 and 2, unlike Pikmin 4. Score: 8/10 + Graphically stunning + Great new pikmin types + expands the lore meaningfully + improved some core gameplay elements - A little too easy - Trying to adopt Nintendo wholesomeness - Enemy designs do not invoke what PIKMIN 1+2 were going for