Coda Gradascevic

This game is so very dear to my heart. It pulls you in the mysterious blossoming of the world’s inner-workings. The detail, from how the ecosystems respond to your kills, to the heart-warming way pikmin look at and follow you, with their own little quirks and interactions, to how the music and visuals come together to form a place you want to spend all day exploring and relaxing. But time’s ticking, olimar needs to collect all his ship parts within thirty days or he’ll die from the planet’s atmosphere, and the game piles on the importance of this through the slow descent into madness tumbling down his notes if you slip in your progress. And this is the main tear of pikmin- you can preserve the pikmin’s lives they ever so dearly trust in you, or you can get Olimar back home as quickly as possible. Very rarely is it easy to take care of the pikmin and make progress on the goal at hand, and this game does everything in its power to make you feel hyper-responsible for the lives of olimar and the pikmin. Olimar describes the horrifying expressions of the pikmin on days after harsh battles, and the exploratory, tutorial-less nature of the game makes everything new daunting, the lives of the pikmin fragile in the midst of a terrifying, unknown world you explore *with* olimar, only getting small tips from him after encountering something at the end of your day. The day-to-day questions are, do I follow these pikmin to make sure they’re safe, or do I go do something else and risk they might die. All the while, the hypnotic serenity of the environments pulls from the quick, strategic thinking the game needs. It’s so hard to muster the focus winning the game actually requires, in the most masterful use of interactive temptation I’ve ever seen in any game. Absolute emotional roller coaster. The most emotional game I’ve experienced without a beat-for-beat plot. Only incentives through game design, a brutal, yet beautiful world, and a strong responsibility to these adorable little creatures called pikmin. Needless to say, this is one of my favorite games of all time.