Leave most gardens for eight years and you’ll return to chaos: weeds, wild critters and grass you could lose a mower in. Only in Nintendo’s world can such neglect spawn the kind of beauty seen in Pikmin 3. Since Pikmin 2’s release in 2004, Miyamoto’s garden world has sprouted the kind of splendour that would have choked the GameCube. A richer variety of textures lends volume to the arena-bordering shrubberies, and new depth-of-field effects provide the delightful sense of peering through grassy fronds into a hidden world. When exploration reveals a succession of crisp HD fruits, it takes restraint not to act like the Very Hungry Caterpillar and greedily charge from cherries to oranges to apples.
And there is a real weight to the garden, a grasp of texture and tactility seen in Mario Galaxy’s planetoids, but more organically woven together here. Varnished ceramic shards are built into bridge shortcuts, each chip reflecting the light as it bobs atop its carrier. Earthen walls are gnawed down to flaky dirt by marauding red Pikmin. New rock Pikmin – flints adorned with a pair of googly eyes – are here to show how deftly Wii U handles cracks and smashes. Chipping strawberries out of rock-hard amber or smashing through glass barriers is a pleasant change of pace from sending frail red Pikmin to their more delicate work.
If the surface details hint at the extra gloss Wii U lends Nintendo’s art designers, a few mechanical tweaks reveal the console’s gameplay potential. Being able to pull the camera back without losing detail emphasises the scuttling scale of the Pikmin army. On this larger canvas, our unnamed spaceman (Olimar has gone AWOL) can take on more tasks at once. As three Pikmin fetch one cherry, another four swarm a Bulborb as others creep up twigs, construct bridges, burrow through barriers and slurp up pools of power-up nectar. It’s a scale of industry the GameCube originals often required from Olimar, but could never show him. Standing centre screen and revelling in a well-run operation is Pikmin at its best.
The ease of operation is largely down to Wii Remote controls, a pointer-based scheme prototyped in Wii’s underappreciated New Play Control ports of the GameCube duo. With the nunchuck steering our spaceman, the pointer aims his commands. Distant Pikmin are easily called with a point and a whistle, while the ease of aiming enables us to choreograph production lines way beyond GameCube’s capabilities. Precision welcomes targeted damage to combat – attacking eyes might now stun creatures, for example. In the demo’s climactic boss encounter, a hardened beetle carapace must be fractured with rock Pikmin before their red comrades can tuck into the exposed flesh beneath.
Focusing on the Wii Remote during the GamePad’s welcoming party may sound counterproductive. In fact, the second screen complements Remote play, its detailed world map tracking your various Pikmin as well as highlighting the strawberry that got away. Apply a finger and the TV view shifts to a more traditional top-down RTS camera as your finger scrolls to nearby action hotspots. For easier access to the map, the game can be played without the Remote, using GamePad’s internal gyroscopes to aim the target cursor. It’s hardly intuitive, but EAD’s experience with Skyward Sword’s similar MotionPlus aiming at least ensures an adequate level of responsiveness. On balance, we wouldn’t throw away those Wii Remotes just yet.
A seven-minute fruit collecting task (a self-contained challenge mode) finds some of the sweaty palmed tension of the original game but lacks its seed-based resource management. A boss encounter, meanwhile, demonstrates more intensive action than we’re used to from Pikmin, right down to an evasive dodge that sees spaceman and 100 root vegetables rolling in tandem. It’s a great showcase for character designers, too, as the Armoured Mawdad seizes Pikmin clusters with his pincers before lapping them up with a greedy tongue. Eight years on and the sight of Pikmin souls rising to Heaven is no less distressing.
What balance the final game will strike is yet to be seen. Miyamoto has hinted in interviews that he favours the against-the-clock strategising of Pikmin to Pikmin 2’s mellowed exploration bent; indeed, ‘strategy’ is the Pikmin 3 buzzword. According to Miyamoto’s speech at Nintendo’s conference, it’s there in the increased playing field, the precision targeting and the scrollable map. Level replays can even be viewed on the map to help identify strategic weakness.
Cynical analysts might wonder how much strategy went into unveiling Wii U with one of Nintendo’s most niche series, but the glimpse of a strawberry in 720p was all the explaining that was needed.