April 24, 2024|

Filed under: Editorial

Treasure Collected: The Social Satire of Pikmin

Thanks to AShadowLink and NantenJex for edits.

Pikmin was a simple game. It might well have had to be given what it was: a launch title for Nintendo GameCube, the evolution of multiple failed projects, and one of Nintendo’s very first takes on 3D modeling more complex than late Nineties polygons. The world was small, and due to an in-game timer a playthrough literally could not surpass seven hours. Its plot was, fittingly, quick and dirty science fiction: a Lilliputian astronaut has landed on a world reclaimed by nature, and only dozens of plantlike, insectile creatures can help fix his spaceship. The relationship between Captain Olimar and his Pikmin army was depicted as symbiotic; he led them to victory against their natural predators while their numbers overcame obstacles and recovered ship parts too big for a man the size of a quarter. He had thirty in-game days and thirty in-game parts, and since Pikmin only ends when you either run out of one or get all of the other, it was on players to play as efficiently as possible. The gameplay—two thirds real-time strategy, one third environmental puzzle solving—lent itself to that.

Image: Source Gaming. Pikmin gameplay at its most basic: some things you need to move, a time limit that ticks down, and a a lot of tiny Pikmin to help you out. Image from Pikmin 1, the game’s HD remaster.

You could find several science fiction tropes in this. There’s the social order governed by a food chain you disrupt, the way nature has come back into dominance in the absence of some kind of intelligent life, and the relationship between the working class spaceman and his adorable charges. Olimar was distinct amongst other Nintendo heroes for the way he was both a salt of the earth worker and a curious scientist—the hints the game gives you are literally his journal entries as he catalogs everything he sees. His was a story about understanding a world clearly not meant for him, though not much else. Pikmin was, again, a small game, at times little more than a brilliant tech demo. That’s what makes it great; it’s small, hard, but also digestible and replayable and innovative. The final product just didn’t lend itself to deeper storytelling.

Image: Source Gaming. After every in-game day, Olimar writes a diary entry usually based on something you experienced. I had some trouble with the bombs, I think in the Distant Spring. They’re notoriously challenging.

Three years later, Nintendo released Pikmin 2, a much bigger game. In some ways that was to its detriment (namely, it puts too much of an emphasis on bland dungeons and adds a mechanic that’s somewhat limited, but let’s table the latter for later). But one area in which that expansion was for the best was in its world building and lore. Where Pikmin 1 was a fun if somewhat slight sci-fi adventure, Pikmin 2 reads as Nintendo’s first mainstream attempt at explicit social satire. And it charted a course for the series that has led to it being a space for the company to tell more overtly political or allegorical tales.

Image: Source Gaming. Olimar in Pikmin 4, the most recent entry in the series. He’s evolved with each entry in the series, representing new tropes and mechanics each time.

The story of Pikmin 1 is that a decidedly not Deep Purple-esque space trucker crashes down on a toxic and unsafe planet and has to escape. The story of Pikmin 2 is that the spacefaring trucker has escaped, come home, only to be sent back by his boss to seek out treasure. Olimar isn’t risking his life to survive, but because the president of Hocotate Freight has unwittingly put his company in the grasp of hellacious loan sharks. So instead of collecting parts to fix your ship, you’re collecting treasure to pay off a debt with which you’ve been saddled. That matches a change in the gameplay to be less survival focused; you’re not a forager but something of a colonist. It makes the tone far less intimidating, aided by a removal of that threatening day limit, and it also changes gears from a drama to a comedy. Now you’re a put-upon laborer strip-mining a planet of its resources for profit, though those “resources” are mostly trash: surprisingly well preserved foods, Nintendo peripherals, a set of dentures, rubber ducks, and real-world products like Duracell batteries and Snapple bottle caps that were changed for re-releases.

Image: Source Gaming. Pikmin 2 shakes things up by emphasizing the collection and setting much of the action in caves like this one. The “Prototype Detector” the Pikmin are carrying back is one of Nintendo’s toys from the 1960s. Image from Pikmin 2 HD.

There’s little nobility in Pikmin 2. It’s certainly dark; the new caves are perilous and the enemies horrifying (bosses like the Waterwraith and Empress Bulblax are truly, delightfully ghastly). It’s still very odd of a setting. But the sense of desperation is entirely gone. If you take too long, instead of losing the game you get silly messages from an increasingly desperate president who ends up living in hiding, squalor, and fear while you fix his mistakes. There’s an absurdity to these proceedings. You could call all of this an excuse to justify the gameplay changes, which were made in part to accommodate players who found Pikmin 1 overwhelming and sparse. It’s now about finding all you can, not staving off a horrific death. Once the sequel cut the danger of an immediate Game Over, the story had to react to that. But these aspects—the wacky and useless President, his comically mistreated worker, and a quest for the accumulation of resources in a land where everything wants to kill you—are still there. It’s a workplace sitcom.

Image: Source Gaming. In the first game, Olimar was the only character and had extensive written dialogue. In the second, he’s reduced to something of a silent protagonist and led around by his ship. It cuts his agency and makes him more of a straight man to the hijinks.

While I hold it in somewhat lower esteem than the other entries, Pikmin 2 is a great example of how a series can jettison a strong tone and find something just as compelling. We lost the lonely, dramatic atmosphere but gained this farcical, satirical black comedy about a poor guy and his life threatening job. It works; I think the president’s slow breakdown is funny, and the game gets a lot from expanding the Pikmin’s already neurotic behavior. And what is most exciting from that is that Nintendo would pull this trick multiple times over. Every mainline Pikmin sequel has actively upended the tone, the story, and the direction. These all directly follow changes to the gameplay that are just as dynamic. It’s part of what makes Pikmin fascinating; every entry actively engages with its new mechanical ideas as thoroughly as possible. And this includes the themes of satire and social awareness, which would only get more pronounced.

Image: Source Gaming. The President of Hocotate Freight, absolutely useless and self-destructive.

Pikmin 3, released nine years later, neatly blends the ideas that powered the first two games: a time limit that ends in your death and a bunch of treasure to collect. In the interest of providing a more elastic challenge than Pikmin 1’s blunt thirty days, the collectibles are fruit, each of which provides juice that expands an ever-shrinking food supply. The narrative explanation for this is that the three protagonists Alph, Brittany, and Charlie are looking for a solution to their planet’s man-made food shortage. The fruit, thus, has both a short term gameplay value (giving you enough days to evade the Game Over and eventually beat the game) and a long term narrative one (bringing back seeds to plant on the starving Planet Koppai). Despite how that sounds, it’s extremely lighthearted for a plot about a planet-wide food crisis—far more so than the environmentalist themes in Nintendo’s own Xenoblade Chronicles trilogy. The Game Over’s also more generous; you realistically only need to worry about your juice supplies a couple times. But the day limit and plot lead to a more traditionally heroic adventure than either the survivalist Pikmin 1 or the hilarious excuse of a plot that is Pikmin 2. You’re getting something that matters.

Image: Source Gaming. Day 2 of Pikmin 3 Deluxe ends with the first boss dead—and ready to be fed to the Rock Pikmin to boost their numbers. Its main gameplay feature is your control over three simultaneous characters; Brittany is offscreen, having gone to check on the newly sprouted Pikmin after the Armored Mawdad was defeated.

There’s still a satirical or socially conscious element, though, and largely through what we see of the Koppaites as both protagonists and a background people. As characters, Alph, Brittany, and Charlie bounce off each other comedically; one steals portions of her comrade’s rations while another is utterly disrespected by his comrades. But the general idea of a population consuming beyond its needs to the point of mass starvation is a main theme here and comes across in dialogue repeatedly (to say nothing of being a major real world concern of the 21st Century). If the Hoctatatians of the first two games are nabbing everything down to the copper wiring, these characters are perhaps the end result of such a practice: with a dispoiled home and utterly in need of outside resources. The best ending gets into this; getting all the fruit implies that your adventure caused a cultural sea change with how the Koppaites eat, while the worst has you starve to death and the middle three are ominous about the planet’s future.

Image: Source Gaming. The game also prioritizes the fruit you collect. There’s dialogue about its importance, but each day also ends with a scene of your findings being pulped into juice. Pikmin 1‘s ship parts were emphasized like this, too. They both matter.

These are standard allegories heightened by one of the most famous elements of the Pikmin franchise, namely that even a cursory look reveals the Distant Planet to very clearly be the planet Earth. There are bricks, those odd human products that act as treasures; Pikmin 4’s most memorable level even takes place inside a suburban house. When exactly this takes place is… unclear, since there’s no sign of decay despite Pikmin 3’s planetary map showing Pangaea Proxima, how Earth’s continents are predicted to look in 250 million years. At the very least, humanity is conspicuously absent, and it’s hard not to conclude that this is a world after our extinction. Perhaps that’s why Olimar’s Geiger Counter in the first and fourth entries constantly reads high radiation levels. It is beyond easy to read an environmental parable here: this Earth is a future both for us in real life and the tiny alien explorers. The consumption is what we do, the treasure all that’s left of us, the monsters a nature on the rebound in our wake, and the environmental danger an ongoing concern.

Image: Source Gaming. Giant’s Hearth Pikmin 4 is a large, seemingly abandoned camping site.

As for Olimar himself, one of Pikmin 3’s changes is turning him into a victim to save. He’s lost, and rescuing him (and getting his help in escaping the planet) is the critical goal. His captor is an Eldritch monstrosity obsessed with simply keeping him against his will. And while Pikmin 4 continues this idea, complete with a new captor in the dog Moss, it places Olimar into the role of the main antagonist. In the most recent game, he’s become Col. Kurtz from Apocalypse Now: abducting fellow castaways, forcing them under the sway of the planet’s indigenous flora, and leading what is in essence a cult in worship to the concept of efficient labor management. He’s the closest the series comes to having a human mascot, so having him be a victim or a foe adds an element of unpredictability and danger to the latter two games. To an even greater extent, it allows the Pikmin world to take a more active response to these incursions. These enemies act as its proxies for this. This series is about our relationship to the world—as survivors, surveyors, plunderers—and that demands a world with the agency to strike back. The planet’s lifeforms imprisoning Olimar or putting him under its thrall adds an extra dimension to the allegories, but he was certainly not the first character in this series to experience this…

Image: Source Gaming. Olimar in Pikmin 4 and his sidekick / captor Moss abduct characters, forcing you to engage in specialized battles and challenges to get them back.

A lot of the discussion of the series’ stories and themes revolves around a character introduced in Pikmin 2, Louie (just as Olimar’s name is an anagram of the Japanese characters used to spell Mario’s name, his evokes Luigi). He’s the Player 2 character if the game had a multiplayer mode, the second captain who you can switch between. In practice, the mechanic is barely worth using since you can’t order the captain you’re not controlling and it only comes up in a few contrived puzzles, something the sequels improve upon. And whether deliberately or not, Louie’s personality follows that. He’s lethargic, lazy, disinterested in anyone around him, and only curious when it comes to eating. But boy, does he love eating! While Olimar’s notes on each enemy detail their biology and behavior, Louie only cares about how to cook them. In quite gnarly ways, actually. In Pikmin 4, he forges delicacies out of horrifying smoke monsters, sentient toxic mushrooms, and robots with absolutely no organic matter. If the Koppaites suffer from conspicuous consumption, Louie has them all beat.

Image: Source Gaming. Louie: the Gilligan of Nintendo.

Moreover, Louie’s main role in the plot of these games isn’t that of a sidekick, but a problem. Midway through Pikmin 2, he gets kidnapped, the now in the clear company president takes his place, and you find him in the clutches of the final boss… or, as the lore suggests, maybe he’s actually controlling it. Other supplemental information reveals that he’s the one who put the company in debt in the first place by eating a year’s supply of food they were shipping in one session. You rescue him in Pikmin 3 as well, and he repays you by immediately stealing all your food and leaving you for dead, which adds a fun little difficulty spike. And in Pikmin 4, he repeatedly kidnaps castaways after you rescue Olimar and attacks you in the final boss fight for, ultimately, no reason beyond believing you’ll curtail his desire to eat with abandon.

Image: Source Gaming. After retrieving Louie (again) and the stolen food, he spends the rest of the game imprisoned in the main characters’ ship. It’s the only way to keep him from harming everyone around him.

What this means is that the franchise’s second protagonist is every vice, every sin in its worldview. He’s a creature of seemingly pure id. Louie cares about nothing but immediate self-gratification through consumption, and he pursues this to such a degree that he is an active threat to himself and those around him. I think it’s through him and everything else that you see a worldview the series has explored both dramatically and comedically: man is destructive, nature is his first victim and himself the last, but there may be healthier ways to interact with the world. Olimar survives the thirty days, the Pikmin 3 crew save their people, everyone in Pikmin 4 learns their lesson, and Louie is always towed along at the end lest he ruin more lives. This thesis is perhaps softened by how much of the gameplay involves attacking fauna whose corpses become food to propagate more Pikmin, but I think that works. They’re the lowest creatures in this world, always at risk of extinction (Pikmin 2 implies that Olimar’s crew were almost wiped out by predators after he left).

Image: Source Gaming. Pikmin 3 also implies that the Blue Pikmin came close to dying out. You find a sole survivor after Louie steals your food, and you have to juggle repopulating their numbers and finding fruit.

That somewhat darker, more serious vision is part of the flavor of Pikmin, alongside the Fantastic Planet imagery and the interest in pushing efficient play. It’s a weird franchise. You’re constantly pushing up against time constraints, since every in-game day only lasts about thirteen minutes. The Pikmin die easily, and potentially in large numbers, off even a mild miscalculation. Monsters are bizarre, the night time is perilous, and the gameplay mixes genres that are not merely disparate but seemingly at odds. It’s natural that such an eclectic combination of ideas would have an interesting social perspective, one that sees humanity as both pathetically weak and frighteningly predatory.

Image: Source Gaming. The end of a long day in a Pikmin game. Pikmin outside the sphere of safety or your command die, leading to a push and pull where you try for last minute collections. I got eight fruit, built two bridges, opened up a route to the next boss, but I couldn’t get that dead Bulborb.

This kind of storytelling is fascinating coming from Nintendo, a corporation that is generally disinvested in plot-focused narratives, and it works. The world of Pikmin is distinct and narratively satisfying, and its satirical view of human society is part of that. However, sometimes it doesn’t work, and unfortunately, its newest and most successful entry drops the ball somewhat. Pikmin 4 follows its predecessors’ vision of humanity as constantly consuming beyond its needs, poorly treating its labor, and exploiting the land. It does nothing to oppose that vision (and while you continue to collect treasure, it’s not for wealth but to aid in your ability to find lost astronauts). What it does do, though, is present it through a truly unpleasant and abrasive supporting cast that balloons in size from just a couple castaways to a whopping fifty.

Image: Source Gaming. Pikmin 4 uses camera techniques to give players a perspective closer to that of its characters. It lets you see the gorgeous world more, but it also front loads the larger cast.

And these are unpleasant people. A few of them are standard for the series, like regular joes stuck in a bad job or heroic scientists, but a lot of them are… not. There are two-bit celebrities hoping to boost their popularity, kids on a school trip gone wrong, treasure hunters, a florist hoping to find new species of flower, even someone who came just to add art to the planet now known as PNF-404. Some of these characters are here for gameplay reasons (a hair stylist so you can redesign your character, an appraiser to give your treasure flavor text). But they’re almost all obnoxious. Perhaps more to the point, most of these people just should not be attempting to explore a dangerous, uncharted planet whose very air is toxic. They’re very apt for satirizing a specific kind of shallow person, like poverty tourists or influencers, but nothing else. In a series about our relationship to nature and our attempts to live with it, they’re uncomfortably shallow and make Pikmin 4 oddly cynical at points.

Image: Source Gaming. Though this tone is largely restricted to the (many) scenes at your base camp, not the regular gameplay that’s generally business as usual.

Mechanically, speaking, these characters’ role is to function as reward and quest. You save them (thus getting points to upgrade your beautiful sidekick-pet Oatchi), and they subsequently give you missions like blooming X numbers of Pikmin or finding Y percent of treasures. The general theme of Pikmin 4’s gameplay is to push the idea of dandori, a Japanese term for time management and strategic planning. It’s been an aspect of Pikmin since the very first game, but this one finally puts the idea front and center. At its most specific, that leads to the Dandori Battle and Challenge mini-games, but the game finds many other avenues for it. Each day you’re finding a million things at once: Flarlic to increase your upper limit of on-hand Pikmin, enemy corpses to spawn more Pikmin, Onions to let you spawn different types of Pikmin, treasures to access new sandboxes, blockades to destroy, bridges to build… Nintendo EPD is deeply invested in teaching players to think aggressively and efficiently. The challenge of handling all of these goals at once with panache is the main theme of Pikmin 4.

Image: Source Gaming. I’ve sent a team carrying a strawberry and a pile of raw materials, used to build bridges and buying upgrades. After they’re done, I’ll jump into this cave, which will cause all the Pikmin to go away and rejoin my team. After that, I’ll reemerge and bring my team over an offscreen bridge we had repaired earlier today. You’re always trying to do a little more with the time you have.

Generally, it works very well. I think the game is good at subtly pushing you into being more aggressive, daring, and intelligent with how you use your resources. Pikmin 3’s elastic time limit is one of the series’ single best ideas, but I also recognize that stuff like it has always been a hurdle to people intrigued by Pikmin but put off by how stressful it is. These are games absolutely filled with friction, because they are about friction. 4 does well at transferring that into spaces that are more contained, like the caves, Dandori levels, and the admittedly less fun night expeditions. A lot of the changes to the gameplay fall into that, reducing some options in one way but adding more in another. The larger cast is crucial to this, since each one is tied to one of the many, many quests, upgrades, or abilities. Naturally, this also brings back tropes from the stories of the previous games. You meet a gang of doppelgängers for the Pikmin 3 team dealing with the same food crisis, Louie is as nightmarish as ever, a few castaways have—or are—terrible bosses, and your crewmates are all morons who lean on you for everything because you’re the new meat. The same themes of survival and exploitation and nature are here in some way. They’re just a bit weaker by virtue of how broad and mean-spirited the cast is.

Image: Source Gaming. In keeping with its attempt to synthesize the preceding entries in the series, Pikmin 4 brings back the somewhat maligned caves from Pikmin 2. Its versions are much better, but several are also combined with the high-level Mission Mode levels of Pikmin 3.

Despite my misgivings, Pikmin 4 is an excellent game, to be clear. And the problems of its storytelling are important in their own way, because they show how for Nintendo, themes are not merely part of the text. They come from the game. Pikmin 1’s tight, short plot came from a game that was tough and brutal and a bit uncomplicated. Pikmin 2’s sillier, lighter plot was the direct result of the gameplay losing all threat of death and fully zeroing in on the collection aspect. Pikmin 3’s more traditionally adventurous plot was the direct result of the gameplay finding an innovative way to bring the threat back. And Pikmin 4’s tonally mixed plot was the direct result of the gameplay trying to promote player efficiency, improving accessibility to some degree, and remixing ideas from its three predecessors. These games tell stories that can only exist from the gameplay. The themes come almost entirely from mechanical changes.

Image: Source Gaming. A major puzzle of Pikmin 3 involves building a bridge by juggling Pikmin between leaders stranded on opposite sides of a river. I’m a fan of the game’s greater focus on puzzles, but I think it also fits this more heroic tone. Almost Zelda-like.

Nintendo puts, and has always put, gameplay first. It’s a natural extension of their history as a creator of toyetic, kinetic games. Because of that, the more kid-friendly nature of their series, and their non-confrontational public stances, it’s easy to miss that their works do have political and social themes, sometimes very bluntly. Xenoblade and Fire Emblem are their most overt, but you can find them in Pokémon, The Legend of Zelda, even the odd Mario game. Pikmin is notable because these themes always come fully from that gameplay-first attitude. Each game has worked aggressively to differentiate itself, and it uses those changes to have a different kind of story. And unlike Mario’s Popeye-esque cartoon reality or Zelda’s Wagnerian cycles, Pikmin has a relatively short and tight canon. Even Pikmin 4, which at least appears to have retconned the other games out of existence, is still very tightly connected to the others. You see a very specific perspective evolve over the course of every game. That’s exciting, and it makes the wait for a prospective Pikmin 5 all the more so. Because it’ll most assuredly bring new changes of its own, with new forms of satire right behind them.