Yeah you're right asking me is much funnier :)
Pikmin is a fun and relaxing game! You play as a little astronaut man who gets to spend his days growing Pikmin, who are sweet and peaceful little plant creatures with leaves, buds, or flowers on their heads. You can corral them around with a little trumpet, like a bouquet of flowers following you through the pretty and whimsical landscapes of planet PNF-404 :)
Wait did I say fun and relaxing?
It's a brutal skill-based survival game (❁´◡`❁)
So then maybe you're wondering, what's up with the Pikmin? What was that about growing a bunch of little flower guys? Well growing the Pikmin is super important!
It's super duper important mainly because you need to replace the Pikmin who die in the carnage of battle for you!
See on PNF-404, Pikmin are the bottom of the food chain. Just about every living breathing creature on this planet is orders of magnitude larger than the Pikmin and munch Pikmin by the hundreds for breakfast. Predators will do this instinctively. They will do this unprompted. They will do this while you're not looking. They will do this endlessly until every last Pikmin is dead.
So... what good are the Pikmin? What chance do they stand?
Really easy. Pikmin are the most violent creatures in the entire game 🥰🥰🥰.
How else do you survive when you're small and fragile other than incredible violence? Pikmin can exist out and about in swarms of up to 100. And the only way to survive predators as small little leaf creatures is to beat those predators to death with incredible mob violence before they can kill all of you.
Pikmin don't die like plants. They die like warriors.
And sometimes, this is the hardest mechanic to handle. Left to their own devices Pikmin will seek to shed blood. It's up to you to call them away from orchestrating their own demise, their own pursuit of the glory of Valhalla. It's in their nature. It's in their plant-blood.
And they go down hard. They shriek when snapped up in the jaws of predators. They glub and wail when drowning in water. They trill out screams when on fire. They choke and cough in poison. They die instantly to electricity. And you'll know a Pikmin is well and truly dead once it lets out a final whimper, and a ghost drifts away from where it once stood. This can happen by the dozens. This can happen to all 100 at once.
So wait, wait I've gotten far ahead of myself. Why the violence? Why the death? Why the fighting? What was that about a little astronaut man?
Well your astronaut man is Olimar, an honest and simple family man who's a freight ship captain from his home planet of Hocotate. He's a truck driver! He's just a guy taking his first vacation in years.
And a meteorite strikes his ship, tearing it to pieces as it crash-lands on a completely uncharted planet. Welcome to PNF-404...
And so you're Olimar. A truck driver. A nice dad. A victim of capitalism with the world's worst boss. Out on vacation.
Your ship is destroyed. No one is coming for you. No one will save you.
The oxygen on PNF-404 is poisonous.
You have 30 days before your life support system runs out.
You have 30 days until you die a brutal and lonely death.
Your only hope is to find every scattered missing piece of your ship--30 of them--strewn across the planet, return them to your ship, and repair it, before your 30 days are up.
But this is simply impossible. You're one tiny little man. You wouldn't be able to lift a single piece of your ship, let alone 30 of them, let alone doing so while fending off the wildlife hellbent on killing you.
But the Pikmin seem to like you...
So all that death? All the carnage and destruction? It's all in the effort to repair Olimar's ship before he suffocates. You pave a path of destruction decorated with the bodies of any creature that stands before you and your missing ship pieces.
The Pikmin do it. The Pikmin trust you. The Pikmin follow your command and die by your command. After all, you're growing their species. Oh did I forget to explain that part? The "how" of how growing Pikmin works?
Simple. Pikmin are grown from the corpses of the creatures they kill :).
If you kill something, the Pikmin take it back to their base and process it for pieces, and grow new Pikmin from it. That's how you get all the nice little flower creatures following you around. :)
Is it good enough? Can you sleep at night knowing that 50 creatures who trusted you implicitly were slaughtered under your misdirection? All to retrieve a hunk of metal which is 1/30 of the hope of getting you home alive? 100 slaughtered? 200? Day 30 is approaching. Things are looking bleak.
You're Olimar. Day 30 has arrived, and you haven't fully reconstructed your ship. You have no option to stay. Your life support has run out. You watch the Pikmin you've left behind, as you attempt to start up your ship which has not been safely repaired.
You try to take off, and try to make it home.
But at least the Pikmin have another corpse to carry.
