Nintendo has a history of making weird announcements out of the blue. Remember last year’s alarm clock? But even in its current chaotic era of tweeting out game reveals and doing hour-long follow-up livestreams for games like Kirby Air Riders, Wednesday’s Pikmin 4 announcement is low-key bizarre.
The Mario maker revealed its 2023 strategy adventure game will be getting a free update two years later. But not for the newly released Switch 2. Instead, Pikmin 4 will get new content in November for the original Switch version. That game can be played on the new hardware, obviously, but an official Switch 2 upgrade remains nowhere in sight. Hmmm.
The meat of the update revolves around new cross-functionality between Pikmin 4 and Pikmin Bloom, the augmented-reality mobile spin-off by the creators of Pokémon Go. Decor Pikmin, which wear funny outfits and were previously only available in Bloom, can now be found in Pikmin 4 and transferred back and forth between both games. Meanwhile, Pikmin 4‘s Ice Pikmin will be joining Bloom for the first time to mark that game’s fourth anniversary.
The rest of the update includes a camera mode for Pikmin 4 and new difficulty settings to make the game easier or more challenging. There’s also now a free demo for the game on the eShop. Pikmin 4 sold over 2.5 million copies, making it the best-selling game in the franchise that began back on the GameCube, but still far from one of the platform’s bigger first-party sellers.
So why Pikmin? Why now? And why on the original Switch? Nintendo hasn’t shied away from making DLC and packaging it with paid “next-gen upgrades” to push sales of older Switch games on the new hardware. At the same time, this seems unlikely to feed into any meaningful holiday resurgence in Pikmin 4 for the original console, with the update wedged in-between Pokémon Legends: Z-A and Metroid Prime 4.
Is Nintendo laying the groundwork for Pikmin 5 or something completely different?
There’s also the extra weirdness with this update coming just after Nintendo released a couple of Pixar-like Pikmin shorts. It claims those were tests to prove out the capabilities of its new internal Nintendo Pictures team, but the company rarely does random one-offs on a whim. Could this all be laying the groundwork for Nintendo’s next Pikmin project? And will that be a full-fledged Pikmin sequel, a Pikmin-centric movie or TV series, or a more unorthodox venture in the toy or theme park realm?
There’s also the Shigeru Miyamoto factor. The famed Nintendo developer created the Pikmin franchise and it clearly lives near and dear to his heart. Would Pikmin 4 have even happened without him pushing for it? He told press it was close to completion back in 2015, only for it to lay dormant until it was suddenly re-revealed in 2022 and released the following year.
Pikmin 4 is also notable among Nintendo’s first-party projects for being made in Unreal Engine 4. There’s also that mysterious MMO playtest Nintendo performed exactly a year ago this week. It included world-crafting mechanics and user-generated content references that suggested things like Minecraft and Roblox were possible inspirations.
Could Nintendo be prepping a Pikmin crossover with Fortnite? Will the next Pikmin game be Nintendo’s ambitious take on the survival crafting MMO genre? Will Miyamoto return to development to make it the last game he ever directs? Or is Nintendo just throwing hardcore Pikmin 4 stans one last bone before the franchise goes dark for another decade?
About the Author
