Hi I’m back, I’m done with grad school. Got a degree and shit. Pretty cool. Remember that Nintendo Direct where they announced Pikmin 4? Some of you might not have watched that at all. So Shigeru Miyamoto’s telling us he wants to tell us some stuff about Pikmin. That’s promising right? Yeah it was, Pikmin 4’s coming out this month. Good shit. But before there was Pikmin 4 there was an explanation of Pikmin Bloom. They gave us a mobile game before Pikmin 4. If it weren’t for the announcement afterwards I would have bitter feelings towards the game. I probably wouldn’t have tried it. Fortunately, I got my Pikmin 4, or the anticipation of it. I couldn’t resolve that anticipation with Pikmin 4. Instead I could give Pikmin Bloom a shot right away. I never got into Pokemon Go! yet I went for Pikmin Bloom. How did I get taken in so thoroughly? Let’s get into it.

Pikmin Bloom is a mobile game in the truest sense of the word. It could never exist on a home console. Its gameplay is intrinsically tied to a smartphone’s capabilities. It counts steps, it tracks your location. It only works because people often take smartphones everywhere they go. With these unique capabilities you can collect a bunch of little guys that remind you of where you’ve been. Some of these little guys have different costumes, and they’re based on the area you found them in. The game rewards you for walking around and going to a lot of different places.

So what’s the core gameplay like? OK so you walk around and let this game track your steps. After a certain amount of wandering around pikmin pots and fruit will show up in places you walked by recently. You can then send some of your pikmin over to go grab them. This will take some time. It depends on how far away the thing you’re grabbing is along with how many pikmin you’re sending to get it. It could take less than a minute, it could take hours. In extreme cases it very well could take days. Regardless of how long it takes, you can rest assured that your buddies will come back eventually.

Another notable feature is the friendship level. The more you walk, feed, and do stuff with a pikmin the more hearts you get. When it hits 4 hearts and it doesn’t already have a Decor it will go on a journey to find one. Its pilgrimage takes it all the way back to where you found it, and it will return a changed… man? Enby? Pikmin?

Pikmin Bloom doesn’t just package memories in the form of little plant guys. It’s heavily integrated with a calendar feature. Every day you get a recap of how many steps you took, where you’ve been, and a selection of up to 4 photos you took that day (you can switch them out with different photos if you want). You then get to rate your mood for the day between sad face, meh face, and happy face. In my case I tend to pick one of those faces a lot more often.

You get to look back on your weeks and remember how depressed you were. Who could ask for more? You can also look back and remember those days you considered happy, and maybe the photos will jog your memory a bit. It’s almost like a diary, though it limits how much text you can add. Instead you mark your memories with smily faces, pikmin, photos, and a large amount of information about your movement habits.

There’s a certain amount of trust you have to place in Nintendo to play Pikmin Bloom. The amount of information you give this app could easily determine where you live and where you are currently. I made sure to be very careful with which screenshots I shared. It may provide information on places I’ve been, but it won’t tell you where I currently am. At least I don’t think so. But this app is getting a lot more information than that. They’ve got a disclaimer saying they won’t share the data and stuff, but you don’t have much to go on beyond their word. For those reasons I’d find it reasonable for some people to avoid using the app on those grounds alone. In my case, I trust Nintendo enough to go along with it. Nintendo does not want to harm me, they just want me to continue giving them money. Perhaps I’ll be proven wrong with time, but I doubt it.

Speaking of giving Nintendo money, I still haven’t done that yet with this game. Because Pikmin Bloom is completely free! Well, kind of. It’s free to play, but of course they give you plenty of incentives to give them money regardless. You need coins to buy stuff in the shop, and the quickest way to get coins is to buy them. The not so quick way to buy coins is to just walk around and plant flowers a lot. Which uh, you can do but that takes a lot of effort and time, which provides zero instant gratification. You want a cute outfit for your avatar? You want to store more pikmin? You want to store more other stuff? You need to get more coins buddy. It is not difficult to imagine someone whaling out and spending ridiculous amounts to gear up, but even if you pour ridiculous amounts there’s only so much money can do. Money may buy special decor pikmin, but you got to go to a forest to get a forest pikmin. Or live near one. At the end of the day you still gotta walk.

For a free to play game with microtransactions, it doesn’t seem especially predatory. Perhaps someone would whale out and make poor financial decisions for themselves to gear up in Pikmin Bloom, but there’s diminishing returns on spending a lot. There’s no C6 Zhongli to roll for. If you upgrade your storage capacity for anything, you gotta keep walking before you need another upgrade. You’re not going to buy 80 different outfits at once. Probably. Even heavy spenders would likely pace their spending out over a long time playing. If you’re going to do microtransactions, I wish more games were like this. The only problem I face not paying is that I have to be more conservative with growing new pikmin between upgrades. And I’m still stuck with the default outfit. The default outfit’s good though.

I could review every mechanic of this game that comes to mind, and break it down further. I won’t, largely because I don’t feel like it. Also this game updates often enough where some of that commentary may be outdated by the time you read it. Use it often enough and you will find the chinks in its design. Some of those chinks I’ve noticed were improved with later patches. Some problems emerge with updates as well. We’ll see how the game improves or wrecks itself with time. For now all I can say is the core gameplay is good and the updates have been solid for the most part.

I will end this post with an update of my own. I originally started writing this post in late June, hoping to get it done by the end of the month. Then a certain game came out, and time just slipped away. I’ll likely be writing a separate post on that game so stay tuned. Setting that aside, things have changed a bit since I first started writing this blog. Remember that Red Pikmin that took a long ass journey to Manhattan? They’re finally back!

My pikmin set off on a long and arduous journey alone and came back changed. 15 days to find a cardboard box. Perhaps it swiped one from a local homeless guy. Plenty to go around there… Regardless, I’m glad its back.

However, with this reunification came another departure. After my train pikmin returned I decided to feed everyone in the squad a round of nectar. As it turns out, that little bit of nectar was enough to get a new pikmin to 4 hearts. This time headed to somewhere a bit less exciting than Manhattan.

This little fella’s headed off to Downtown Champaign, a place I am pretty familiar with. After all, I lived nearby it when I was in grad school. Today as I’m writing this I’m on the way back there to retrieve everything left in my apartment. I have mixed feelings about doing this. I am glad to be done with grad school and all it entails, but it’s a nice space. It’s a space that I called home. One that I spent most of my life in for the past couple semesters. It is now a place I’ll likely never see the inside of again. I’m a bit sentimental.

Just as we ride down the highway my white pikmin is walking its way in the same direction. Maybe I should have waited until we arrived to send it off so it would have a much shorter trip. If I hadn’t pressed those buttons immediately as they appeared the little fella would be back much sooner. But nope, have a nice trip buddy.

Of course, such sentiments don’t truly affect a pikmin. They are ultimately unfeeling lines of code that don’t care how long they need to walk. 15 days or 15 minutes, both are just values to plug in. Even so, the fantasy they provide is effective.

No matter where I go, what I do, how long I neglect to open the app, the pikmin will be right there waiting for me. Perhaps one day the app will no longer be supported and it all breaks down, but there’s no signs of that happening any time soon. So for now, the plant guys are my ride or die. If no one else’s got me, I know these pikmin do. Their unconditional and undemanding companionship is reassuring. There’s only so much they can provide from a phone screen, but there’s not much you have to do for them either. Just take them on walks and remember to feed them nectar occasionally and they’re chill. Even if you don’t do either of those things they’ll still be there whenever you open the app.

While the pikmin themselves are technically devoid of feelings, there’s still something poignant conveyed. Behind those lines of code, artificial intelligence, 3D models, etc. are the people who created this game. They sell a fantasy of weird plant gremlins following you around. A world where you want nothing more but to cover it all with flowers. I think it’s a beautiful concept. I can feel the care put into this game as I play it. That counts for something.

Its been a hot second since I last posted on here, and plenty has happened. I’m 24 now, I got a degree, I’m figuring out my next steps. But if I’m being honest I could have posted earlier if I put my mind to it. Under the hood are a few posts that have yet to be finished, one of which probably won’t ever be. But hey, I’m here now, and I want to put more work into my blog this month. Might start working on redesigning it. Almost certainly got more posts on the way this month. We’ll see how that holds up. Until next time, later folks.