I never played the Pikmin games growing up, so experiencing them for the first time is fucking WILD. For anyone who’s only seen the cute lil pikmin dudes on social media and isn’t aware of the first game’s plot, let me catch you up to speed:
YOU are an alien who has crash landed on Earth. This is bad, since Earth is ludicrously inhospitable for you. On this planet you are the size of an insect (actually a bit smaller than the average insect but w/e), and the oxygen that’s in all the air is extremely poisonous to you. Whatever gas you breathe (I can’t remember), you only have 30 days worth of it in your space suit’s tank, and after that you’re fucked. Your only hope of survival is finding your 30 missing ship parts in those 30 days so you can repair your ship. On your first day, you come across these little carrot looking creatures (game’s words, not mine) called Pikmin. They are tiny, stupid, and incredibly weak. But they are also suicidally loyal and strong in numbers, so you use them to your advantage because they’re literally all you have. Also I’m mentioning this because it’s important later, the pikmin reproduce by brining pellets and dead corpses to something called the onion, which destroys the body and uses its nutrients to make pikmin sprouts. Over the course of the next 30 days, you and your army of pikmin navigate an extremely dangerous forest in order to find your ship parts. Along the way you have to deal with predators that can and will eat your pikmin, bodies of water that will instantly evaporate your pikmin, and other obstacles that prevent you from completing your goal. And that’s not even mentioning some of the other enemies that do shit like possess your pikmin so they end up attacking you.
If despite all this you still manage to get your ship repaired in 30 days, you are able to successfully return home. If not, then on the 30th day your ship fails to breach the atmosphere upon takeoff, and you die in the ensuing crash. The pikmin that just spent the last 30 days following you around and fighting your battles for you then give your body to the onion and it is used to make one final pikmin.
so yeah, THATS the lore of the first pikmin game. Incredibly fucking brutal. I just started playing the second one and that game seems a lot more chill, but I was genuinely taken aback by how cutthroat the first installment is. Early 2000’s Nintendo was not fucking around.
