Blorbo Watch

the captains

they’re honestly just generic archetypes tbh, i mean tehyre fun enough and have the nintendo charm TM or whatever but theyre just not rlly worth writing home about. average , in a 4 out of 5 stars way.

Meet my custom captain, Gary. They’re more like a snail than an ant.

Oatchi Fan Shrine

No Flarlic Challenge Run

Flarlic is an item which increases the Pikmin cap on the overworld. Collecting no flarlic, you are capped at taking 20 Pikmin out of the onions. The challenge is to beat the game with this restriction.

You can collect wild Pikmin in caves, which temporarily increases your cap until the end of the cave. I think this temporary increase makes Pikmin management more interesting, while Glow Pikmin trivialises it. So I allowed wild Pikmin, but avoided Glow Pikmin in caves.

This is not a low Pikmin run. You can have as many in reserve as you like.

I used Dingo to complete the dandori challenges and night missions. I’ve put my time into these, I have all platinum medals on my main file. I just didn’t find completing them to be interesting in the context of this challenge.

The Easy

In the pantheon of Pikmin challenge runs, this one is fairly easy and doesn’t require a lot of in-game knowledge. It is an increase in difficulty which makes you change your approach in interesting ways, its a good time. It also doesn’t need an encyclopaedia of game knowledge and planning, just hop in! Its a good casual challenge for a casual fan! I didn’t use Glow Pikmin, but you can choose to use them if you’re stuck! You could also make the run easier by collecting the minimal amount of flarlic you can handle. A 30 or 50 pikmin cap would be a fine time, if 20 is too low. You could also end the run after rescuing Olimar, as that part of the run is the most non-linear and most interesting.

The Hard

There are many rules you could add to this, to make it harder. Collecting no onions at all could be an interesting one, making your only stock of Pikmin those you find in caves. Restricting the use of Oatchi is a challenge run all of its own, but some Oatchi restrictions could be added to compliment this challenge. You could restrict rewinds, but I don’t feel like that would be compelling (save scumming is a natural part of challenge runs to me, and rewinds are just a more convenient version of that).

The experience

like 95% of the game

For this playthrough, my OC will be the incorrigible rookie, captain Pisš.

The Sun-Speckled Terrace was very easy. Its difficulty is built around a low Pikmin cap. The Ice Pikmin are very useful to cheese enemies. Sprays and nectar are more valuable than growing Pikmin from monster corpses.

The Blossoming Arcadia keeps on being easy. Off topic: The Downy Snagrets are my favorite new “minor” enemy, they’re so cute.

I got the Blue onion from Serene Shores. I feel a lot of people get the Blue Onion from the Sun-Speckled Terrace, including me in my casual playthrough.

Anyway, nearby the blue onion in the Serene Shores is The Below-Grade Discoteque. This cave is worth a visit in this challenge run, just to fight its boss. The Groovy Long Legs is difficult, but that’s good. It gives its musical gimmick time to take off, whereas it died all too quickly in my normal playthough. I also got the Purple Pikmin here, which are very useful. Yes, Oatchi can carry heavy items, but Oatchi is just one pup. Purple Pikmin seriously increase the amount of hands that can be dandoring at once.

I rushed through Hero’s Hideaway in the beginning, because Moss is a pain in the ass here. I collected two cards and guessed the third number. I did do some sparklium collecting after Olimar was rescued. I collected the Ice Pikmin Onion here, because Ice Pikmin have been so useful. I could have probably skipped the onion, in retrospect.

The Giant’s Hearth was just going through the narritive requirements. The Cradle of the Beast was the cave I completed to find Not Charlie, because its entrance was the most accessable to me. I didn’t collect the rock onion, didn’t feel like it. This was my favourite area in my casual playthrough, because I liked the public barbeque setpiece.

The Primordial Thicket was just going through the narrative requirements. I don’t have much to say about it, but I do have a lot to say about a certain cave in it.

Cavern for a King

The only part I grinded for was the Cavern for a King. The boss rush of that cave was a lot harder with so few Pikmin.

A few bosses were just a pain in the ass. Toxstool, the Bloomcap Bloysters, and the Gildemander were bosses which had to be taken slow and were easy to mess up.

Its very hard to freeze bosses with only 20 pikle men. Except for the Baldy Long Legs,the only boss you can completely cheese with ice Pikmin. You gotta take it up on that offer. Freeze the puddle of water its in. You only need ten ice Pikmin. Once its dead, leave the cave again to get twenty Purple Pikmin for the upcoming water wraiths.

That bastard Empress Bulblax was the pain in the ass she always was. Only the normal advice, take things slow and don’t get greedy.

The Anchient Sirehound took so many rounds to kill. I even left to restock Pikmin halfway through the battle. It took so many rounds to drain the HP meter, and it’s where I spammed spray the most. Bring at least two Purple Pikmin, it makes bringing down the tail so much easier.

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The Pikmin 4 4koma

I’ve been using images from this throughout this article.

Illustrated by Kino Takahashi, the Pikmin 4Koma is a piece of original promotional material Nintendo is posting to the Pikmin official website several times a month. It’s very cute and quirky, but ಠ_ಠ it doesn’t have an RSS Feed ಠ_ಠ. Anyway. here are some of my favourite strips.

4koma?

Everyone, including Nintendo, is calling it a Comic or a Manga. Which is a fair description, a 4koma is a subgenre of comics and manga. Like, the fact that I automatically refer to it as a 4koma is a sign that being a weeaboo is terminal and forever.

But wait! There’s more! Tumblr use fullmoonfireball has been doing some fan translations of comics before the official translation gets around to it. You can view all their fan translations here, but i’ll also flag up some personal faves.

Previously

Talked about the Pikmin fanon wiki in the post “hey check this out (1)”: clicky

Embed Hell

Stuff i couldn’t think of an excuse to embed anywhere else. Please support the original release.

Credits

• Images:
  • Pikipedia
  • The Sprites Resource
  • Pikmin.nintendo.com, including the Pikmin 4koma by Kino Takahashi.