Hey! Pikmin (2017)

“Here I am, stranded on a toxic planet, fighting to survive, and yet I’m intrigued… I must research this fascinating creature!” -Captain Olimar

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If you’ve been a diehard fan or timid follower of Nintendo over the past few years, you’ve probably gotten used to the perpetual risk taking. I always respect a good amount of risk being taken during the game development process – after all, put out the same game again and again, and you risk tiring out the fanbase, but change the game completely and you risk alienating the long-time fans. Once a franchise becomes popular, one of these two directions is where most seem to torpedo towards.

In the curious case of our beloved Japanese corporation, risk taking has blown up over the past few years, and though they’ve been very innovative throughout their existence, the Nintendo 3DS has been home to quite a few experiments, not all having been well received. Nintendo loves experimenting with their IPs, and while this is a great thing that pays off handsomely, crashing and burning is also another direction that some games have taken.

Some have landed somewhere in the middle.

While 2013 brought us the nostalgia-filled masterpiece Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, 2015 brought us Legend of Zelda: Triforce Heroes, which was not nearly as successful. Fans were eager to see a new entry that used the same game engine as A Link Between Worlds, yet suddenly were expected to solve puzzles with strangers over the Internet sans voice communication – an idea that sounds fun on paper, but in practice yields chaos and ends up being an exercise in frustration.

Those of us who have attempted this game with online multiplayer, as opposed to the far superior local co-op multiplayer, probably can attest to it being a bit of a nightmare. With the lack of a voice chat and a small set of communication buttons at your disposal with the depth of an emoji, it wasn’t uncommon to find yourself yelling at your 3DS as a stranger repeatedly picked you up and tossed you off a cliff. Not fun in my opinion. One of these days I need to play this game through with two other friends.

Of course, I’m still on Step 1 of that process: find two friends who play 3DS. I’m at the age where it may actually be easier to procreate and raise two fellow humans to fill in seats two and three than to go out and meet more like-minded folks who want to play multiplayer Zelda on a random Tuesday evening.

Well, this sure has been a strange tangent. Anyway!

Triforce Heroes was not entirely well-received, and was followed not even a year later by yet another risk taker: none other than Metroid Prime: Federation Force, probably one of the most notorious hornet’s nest-shaking game announcements of all time. Fans of the Metroid series were craving a followup to either Metroid Prime on the Wii U, or Metroid: Zero Mission on the 3DS, but what they definitely were not hoping for was yet another multiplayer spin-off. Long story short, the game did not perform well at all, as it was predicted by said fanbase.

And here we are, almost a year after Federation Force, having received the third spin-off title for a huge Nintendo property that was questionable upon reveal. That game, of course, is what we’re here to talk about today: Hey! Pikmin.

Click here for the full review... https://thewellredmage.com/2017/08/25/hey-pikmin/