Seems like time and time again, Nintendo is always trying to sell games to an audience of people who do not wish to play video games. For a sequel, I figured Nintendo should focus on their core audience of Pikmin fans but it seems like they’re always changing things to appeal to people who don’t play games while in return alienating the people who want more sophisticated gameplay and challenges.
What are your thoughts?
I absolutely loved the Pkimin 4 Demo. Having played all 3 prior games, 4 resonated better with more emphasis on exploration and removing the “you have X days” pressure. Made it far more enjoyable personally.
The only thing I really wish they hadn’t eliminated was proper co-op. My son was very disappointed that all I could do was throw rocks and items rather than run around the world with him.
What? That was going to be the main reason I played this. It was so good for me and my girlfriend to play togsther, she loved it. What the fuck is with these companies not making coop games anymore? Do they think noone has friends?
Technically Pikmin 3 also didn’t have co-op when it first released, that was a feature added with Pikmin 3 Deluxe. However definitely extremely disappointed they removed it for 4. Maybe it can be added later, but likely not until they release DLC or another Deluxe version…
Well that’s Nintendo for you. I got disappointed by the Yoshi and Kirby going kindergarten level difficulty, so I haven’t buy any sequal on switch. It looks cute and have nice mechanism, and maybe some harder extra level that’s not required for completion dotted around. But it’s not enough, like even little big planet have more variety of difficulty than wiiu/switch Yoshi/Kirby. And LBP isn’t a hard game to begin with.
Cute and hard game with proper progression is how you curate a new generation of players. Cause they ain’t playing gore flying hack-and-slash from 5yo.
Are you talking about Yoshi’s Crafted World? I found some of those bosses genuinely hard when you didn’t play on Easy mode with the wings on.
Two player also made it a lot easier, but my second player was my 5 year old, and he definitely couldn’t have beat it without help.
Yeah, designing games geared towards kids and younger audiences isn’t just about story/aesthetics, it’s also about difficulty. Most young kids don’t have the attention span or critical thinking skills to sit there and try to beat an enemy or puzzle that older kids or adults would find genuinely challenging.
I could split Nintendo games (I’ve played) into three groups based on target audience:
Younger: cute art style, simple challenges, short game play for young children; Kirby, Yoshi
All Ages: easy-to-learn basics to get you through the main game, but there’s more complex stuff and greater challenge if you want it; mostly pick-up-and-play but not TOO short; Mario, Pokemon, DK Country, Super Smash Bros.
Older Gamers: more (relatively) mature subject matter, challenge from the beginning, complex mechanics and/or puzzles or both to get teen/adult brains going; Metroid, Xenoblade, Fire Emblem, Zelda BotW and TotK (previous Zelda games would be in my All Ages tier)
Zelda BotW and TotK (previous Zelda games would be in my All Ages tier)
I’d consider frankly pretty much all Zelda games more mature. I haven’t played them all, but the pattern I’ve noticed is that the more recent games feel easier (though the open world makes them more time consuming). The bigger puzzle dungeons of older games could get quite difficult sometimes. Easy to get lost and confused. The 2D games often were extra cryptic and combat was more punishing.
As a kid, I bought oracle of ages as my first ever Zelda game and couldn’t figure out where to go after the first dungeon, so had to sell it. As an adult, I beat it and the seasons equivalent just to see what I missed out on. I had to use a lot of save states and recall some bizarre minigame that was just horrible, horrible, horrible (90% of my save states would have been that one minigame). I had to Google multiple times where to go. I dunno how kids could do it. Sometimes I wondered if it was all a ploy to make kids call that pay number for video game tips that predated the internet answering all these questions. Also, I seriously question why I even put myself through that. It wasn’t that fun.
It feels like these games are just marketed to people who already know what Pikmin is. They’ve put 4 out at an absolutely dreadful time too… The average player is still chugging through TOTK!
Tears of the Kingdom is going to last me until the end of the year. I’m taking as long as I need to finish it. Especially since I just found a damn colosseum in the depths where I have to fight 4 God damn Lynels. God I hate those guys lol
@Nintendianajones64 @steve228uk it’s a hard challenge if you aren’t prepared lol, I had to use every trick I had to beat it. You do get majoras mask though which is worthwhile.
I think the tutorial for Pikmin 4 is boring and painful for people who already know the deal. And I think the constant, slow interruptions absolutely kill the pacing, at least at the beginning.
I’m there for the gameplay loop, not to read the same recycled trash dialogue that every Pikmin game has, and it’s ridiculously similar to other basic games, too.
The devs seem to think I’d rather watch the UI do pretty things than play the game, and they couldn’t be more wrong. Maybe that crap snappy, let me skim through dialogue at rocket speed, and let’s get on with the fun.
What gets me the most is that we’re talking about the same company who created Super Mario Bros., a game famous for it’s lack of tutorial. People call the level design “genius” because it teaches you what power-ups and enemies are immediately.
What in the actual frick happened to this? Didn’t Miyamoto create Mario for crying out loud? What happened to these core principles? Money? Demographics for children?
Not that I’m advocating for super in-depth tutorials or anything, but comparing the complexity of SMB to something like Pikmin is a bit disingenuous. In the former your options for inputs are run and jump, which is a lot less than having to corral little plant dudes using a whistle and splitting them up/using them for specific purposes.
Having said that I think the best compromise is to have a tutorial that tells you what you can do/what buttons do what without making you actually do those things just to check if you’re too dumb to understand simple instructions. Also space out the instructions so that they happen while actually playing the game instead of in one big tutorial section right at the beginning.
The amount of text bubbles in Pikmin 2 seemed reasonable, and could be accelerated by clicking a button. I think the over-tutorializing only started in Pikmin 3, when Nintendo started outsourcing development to Eighting.
It’s been a while so I might be misremembering this, but I think a similar thing happened to the Luigi’s Mansion series with LM2 when they started outsourcing to Next Level Games.
Yeah it’s a common complaint of Majora’s Mask, too, even though it’s less of a time limit and more of a timeline that you repeat over and over. It’s just that extra mental barrier for people to deal with, that seems like it affects some people more.
I hear the time limit isn’t in Pikmin 4 though?
As someone who gets random fragments of time for spare time (due to being a key participant in too many family activities to have a consistent schedule–aka, parenting) any game that requires me to optimize a non-trivial activity to fit into a specific amount of time is rarely even worth my checking out. I have between 2-5 hours per week, in increments from 25m to 90m, for gaming. Often I’m exhausted from trying to fit things into my schedule during the day. I don’t need to think about doing stuff for a schedule in my ‘fun’ time.
How do games like Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, and some of the Super Mario platformers with timers fit into this? I ask because they’re more on the casual side of the spectrum compared to something like Zelda.
