Pikmin 4

 I just fully 100%ed Pikmin 4!

Not gonna go too in-depth talking about the game this time. Just my overall thoughts on the game.

So Pikmin 4... it was literally 10 years ago Pikmin 3 came out. ... fans have been waiting...and waiting... and waiting for a long long time to get a new game in the series.

So in this Pikmin game, we play as a rescue team who has been tasked with finding Captain Olimar, who has crash-landed onto a mysterious planet. Using the help of the Pikmin, we can recover lots of sparkly treasures that are used to expand the range of the Rescue Corps's radar, helping us on our search for not just Olimar, but also the many other castaways who are lost on the planet as well. ...The story is really just an excuse to run around gathering items again, and I don't mind that one bit. :D

This time around we play as a customisable hero, but the real star of the show is the new Rescue Pup named Oatchi. Oatchi is rather interesting - he behaves like both a Leader and a Pikmin at the same time! You can send Oatchi off to grab items or to attack enemies like a Pikmin, but you can also switch control to him and he will be able to whistle and command groups of Pikmin just like a leader. He's an incredibly versatile tool that adds a lot to your strategic options, and he's very cute too. :3 

Pikmin 4 is like a culmination of everything that made the previous three Pikmin games so good, while also introducing its own interesting ideas into the mix.

The general structure is most comparable to Pikmin 2, where there is no overarching day limit, and each area has many treasures to collect and multiple cave sub-areas to explore.

I would say that everything in Pikmin 4 is a vast improvement compared to how it was in Pikmin 2. For starters, the overworld areas feel much more full and fleshed-out this time around. In Pikmin 2, it often felt like the overworlds were very much secondary to the caves. They didn't really feel all that interesting or important in the grand scheme of things - they mostly just felt like hubworlds that housed the cave entrances, and not much like "real" areas in their own right... But in Pikmin 4, the overworlds really do have their own distinct challenges and landmarks that give them a presence of their own. They now feel just as fully-realised as the main areas from Pikmin 1 or 3 - while also having the cave entrances too.

The caves themselves are also improved - in Pikmin 2, the caves often felt a little bit samey and haphazard, largely due to their randomised layouts. In Pikmin 4, though, the caves are no longer randomised, and are now fully designed. They all feel nicely distinct from one another, and so I found them a lot more interesting to explore.

Additionally, there are two new types of caves that bring back game modes from Pikmin 3.

In Pikmin 3, you had the main story, plus two additional modes: a high-score challenge mode, and a 2-player battle mode. In Pikmin 4, they decided to take these extra modes and incorporate them into the main quest.

Some of the caves you find in Pikmin 4 don't lead to regular underground spaces to explore, but instead lead to either a high-score challenge, or a 2-player battle versus the computer. ....I find this to be a very interesting thing for them to do, because it brings into the main spotlight what was previously strictly side-content. It makes these two alternate styles of gameplay feel less disconnected from the overall Pikmin experience, and therefore less likely to be overlooked by players.

In Pikmin 3, the high score missions were actually my favourite part of the game, yet it seemed like most players never really bothered with them, since they were hidden away in their own submenu. ...I think Pikmin 4 incorporating these challenges into the main story is an ingenious way of making more players actually try them out. Haha. I love it.

This is by far the longest game in the Pikmin series. Pikmin 2 was already pretty long (for Pikmin standards), but Pikmin 4 feels more than double its length! :D 

The game's approach to its difficulty is also interesting - the controls are very much simplified, and the Pikmin's behaviour is much improved (they are less stupid now). This means that the difficulty doesn't come from fumbling and accidentally drowning all your Pikmin anymore, but instead the difficulty comes from the strategy - coming up with a plan and executing it properly. How many of which types of Pikmin to bring? Where to go first? Should I tell Oatchi to go to the far end of the map while I explore nearby? Will we have enough time to fight a boss AND build the bridge as well? ...that sort of thing. It feels more focused on the strategy, and less about the messiness of making sure your army of idiots isn't running off and getting themselves killed.

I kind of prefer this style of difficulty actually. As fun as it was to see the Pikmin get distracted so easily in the older games, I think having tighter control over them makes for a less frustrating game overall. It really is all about the strategy now.

I will say, however, that I think they went a bit overboard with the simplifying of the controls - most annoyingly with the cursor's auto lock-on feature. You can't turn off the auto-target, which can make it rather fiddly if you want to throw a Pikmin somewhere other than where the game thinks you're trying to throw them. It gets especially messy in situations with lots of different enemies surrounding you, as the game doesn't let you easily un-target an enemy. They really should have included an option to turn off the auto-target mode in the game. ...other than this issue, the game is pretty fun and smooth though.

Heh...

It's interesting... Pikmin 1 and 3 are both very short-form adventures, designed around replayability and incremental improvement across multiple playthroughs, while Pikmin 2 and 4 are both longer, more in-depth adventures that have a longer campaign full of challenges to work your way through.

That being said, Pikmin 4 actually manages to integrate the best parts of 1 and 3's replayability into the longer campaign format. It's actually kind of the best parts of all previous games combined into one! ...And there's a cute dog too!

I'm very pleased with Pikmin 4! ...I just wish there was a way to turn off the auto-target cursor lol. Because then it would be perfect. :D 

Tomato Adventure

 I played Tomato Adventure!

This is a Game Boy Advance game from 2002, developed by Alpha Dream and published by Nintendo.

This game was released in Japan only. And for a long time, not a lot of people outside of Japan knew anything about it.

In 2021, an English fan translation was released for this game... Wow, that's so recent! As always, the fans' work is greatly appreciated. Now we can all finally play this silly game with a silly name in English!

I played the fan translation on an emulator. :)

In this game, you play as a funny-looking kid named DeMille, who lives in the outskirts of the Ketchup Kingdom, in a village for kids who are outcasts for not liking tomatoes. One day, while exploring in the Toy Ruins, DeMille's girlfriend Pasaran is kidnapped by the evil weirdo tomato-baby man who rules over the kingdom, King Abira. Abira has taken Pasaran to Gimmick Palace, a huge fortress shaped like a tomato. And he wants to use the power of Pasaran's 'soul energy' to charge his evil laser cannon, which has the ability to turn everybody in the kingdom into toys. And so it's up to DeMille to find all six Toy Parts across the Kingdom, so he can enter Gimmick Palace and save his girlfriend. ...

Does that make sense? I sure hope it does.

The game is an RPG with a linear progression. In true Nintendo fashion, you explore eight distinct areas in a row, connected to each other via a a world map selection screen.

In each main area, you walk around town talking to NPCs to figure out the progression, which leads you into dungeon areas where you need to fight monsters and solve puzzles to reach the end. At the end of the main six dungeons is a fight versus a Super Kid, the boss of the area who holds one of the six Toy Parts.

As you progress, a few extra party members will join DeMille in his quest. In battle, you can only use two characters - you must always have DeMille with you, as well as your choice of one other party member. 

The combat system in this game is rather simple, but very unique. It revolves around equipment called "Gimmicks". 

In this game, there are no standard attacks and no magic attacks. Instead, all attacks are performed by using one of your Gimmicks.

Similar to Paper Mario, each Gimmick has a specific button input challenge that must be performed. These can vary from pressing the A button at the right time, mashing the A button as fast as you can, pressing specific buttons in the correct sequence... and some of them get a little more fancy, with miniature minigames that must be completed, such as a memory-match game, or a slot machine game.

Every time you successfully use a Gimmick, you also gain a little bit of "Awe!" power. Once your Awe gauge is full, you can perform a special super attack, which is different depending on which party member you have with you.

If you fail a Gimmick's button input challenge, then the attack comes out significantly weaker, and you also lose ALL of your accumulated Awe energy.

New Gimmicks are obtained for free after every area is completed - they are not found randomly, but rather given out in a set order based on your story progression.

You can equip four Gimmicks at once. Gimmicks are given to specific characters and cannot be traded between them, which helps each party member feel more unique.

Additionally, each Gimmick has seven levels of difficulty that the player is able to freely adjust in the menu. If you put your Gimmick on a low difficulty, then the button challenge is easy to complete most of the time, so you don't risk losing your Awe as much. But on the higher difficulty settings, your Gimmicks do significantly more damage, and the Awe gauge fills much faster. However, the button challenges can become crazy. Some of them require such ridiculous precision that it's more up to chance than skill when set to the max difficulty, which means you risk losing your Awe every time you attempt it. (though there are also the odd few Gimmicks that are still pretty manageable even at max difficulty)

It's an interesting way of balancing the RPG system, isn't it? You can just decide at any time in your menu "all my attacks are super strong now", but in order to actually make use of that strength, you need to get really skilled at these mini button-pressing challenges.

I personally like this system for the most part, except for the Gimmicks that require you to rapidly tap a button as fast as possible.

I am not a fan  of breaking my fingers trying to tap so fast, and these challenges are not lenient at all on the higher difficulties. 

I know that playing on emulator allows me to set up autofire if I wanted to, but... I didn't. I just mashed the buttons the old fashioned way. ...

Honestly, while the system is interesting and quirky, I feel like it does unnecessarily limit the game's accessibility. Not all RPG fans have the necessary skill and finger dexterity to consistently pull off these inputs, especially the tapping ones. So if such a player wanted to try this game, they would find their damage output much lower than a player who can do them just fine. Would this limitation turn away a player who would otherwise have been a fan? 

And to be honest... as a player who is capable of pulling off these inputs, that doesn't necessarily mean that I always want to do it. It's so annoying to have to always be ready to mash the heck out of the A button just to do a simple attack.  

It's a fun and unique idea, but I think that the implementation isn't perfect - not by a long shot.

...Anyway. That's enough about the combat system.

The general progression of the game... doesn't really leave a good first impression.

For the first half of the game, your options are very limited. You don't have any party members to swap to, you aren't given many new Gimmicks to try out, and the dungeon layouts at this point are extremely linear and basic. 

I think they went a bit overboard in making the earlygame so extremely simple. They could have given us a bit more to work with from the start. I know it's a game for kids, but you should give kids more credit. Kids aren't incapable of figuring RPG things out. I played Golden Sun as a kid just fine, you know?

And the enemy encounters are pretty frequent too, so not only is the earlygame progression very straightforward, it also takes a decent while to get through. It is possible to avoid enemies, as they are visible on the field and not randomised. But the bosses can be pretty tricky, so being low on EXP is not ideal. I fought almost every enemy that appears, and I still struggled against a few of the bosses.

Around halfway through the game, after you've found your third Toy Part, things start to pick up. At this point, you've got another party member, and you actually have enough Gimmicks in your possession to decide which ones you want to unequip. Yes, you now have the ability to make actual decisions about your battle composition! Imagine that.

From this point on, the game became a lot more interesting and enjoyable to me.

The halfway point is also when some optional side content is unlocked, namely "Gimica", the competitive card game.

Gimica is played versus NPCs in each town, but the way it works is extremely awkward. It's not like in Final Fantasy 8 where you can challenge anyone you like to a quick game of cards... no, instead, you can only play versus specific NPCs, and you need to challenge them in a set order. But it's not just good enough to win once. In order to rank up enough to be able to challenge the next player in line, you need to win TEN rounds versus the same opponent! That is quite excessive... The card game itself is very often down to luck-of-the-draw, and losing a match means ranking down, which makes it take even more wins to rank up enough to move on... Thankfully, it's completely possible to cheese it and never rank down, simply by saving the game before playing Gimica and reloading if you lose. If this wasn't an option, it could have been a whole lot worse.

Annoyingly, it isn't possible to build a great deck straight away - if you want some of the better cards, you need to pretty much beat the whole main story first, as unlocking them requires access to every area in the game.

So if you're trying to complete the Gimica sidequest alongside the main story, you're gonna have a very hard time, as you will be playing with an underpowered deck the whole time.

This makes Gimica feel less like sidequest content and more like postgame content.

It's also possible to use a Game Boy Advance Link Cable to play Gimica versus another player. ...This is of course a good feature to include, though I have to wonder how often this has ever actually occurred in real life.

"Hey, do you want to play this GBA card game against me?" "Yeah, sure!". "Well, okay, first you gotta find another copy of this extremely obscure Japanese RPG, and then play around five or so hours to get through the first few repetitive, overly-simplistic dungeons in order to reach the card game arena. And only THEN we can play.". ...Like lol. that's a big ask. Especially for a card game that's mostly won by luck-of-the-draw anyway.

And since I've been playing on emulator, I don't even have a "Gimica-ready" Tomato Adventure save file myself. ... Unless I can find a way of injecting my emulator save data into a proper GBA cart. (i think this is possible with special tools, though I don't know for certain). I do happen to actually own a proper Japanese Tomato Adventure GBA cartridge btw. 

.....

i think i'm getting sidetracked.

So anyway! Enough about the sidequest.

The areas all have a nice variety to them - each area doesn't just have one specific theme, they actually have several themes all at once! And the themes are appropriately very silly too.

For example, one of the eight main areas takes place on a former prison island that has been retrofitted into being a hotel, with a famous musical band practicing inside... which then leads into an undersea dungeon area - a sunken pirate ship that still has Christmas decorations everywhere because it just so happened to get shipwrecked on December 25, and is currently being haunted by the ghost of its parrot captain. ... like... how many different things are going on here at once??? lol. It's pretty great stuff. The whole game is just full of ridiculous non-sequitur scenarios like this, and I do enjoy this kind of wackiness a lot.

As you progress later into the game, the dungeons do start to become more mazelike. It's fun to explore these dungeons because enemies will stay defeated once you get rid of them, only respawning if you fully leave back to the world map screen. This means that you can clear a dungeon of its enemies and focus on figuring out where to go next, without having to worry about them getting in the way again.

Occasionally while progressing through the dungeons, the game will force you to complete a minigame in order to proceed.

At one point you need to work out at a fitness club, which involves jumping hurdles on a treadmill, and doing aerobics in the form of a "simon says" game. ... later on, there's also an "air surfing" game where you're falling down a shaft and need to collect coins and avoid enemies on the way down. This one in particular is really tricky and annoying lol.

These minigames serve to act as a fun change of pace. It's nice that you don't have to be particularly good at them in order to progress, but I can definitely understand if some players found them to be intrusive, since they are not optional. ...

...

Overall, the game is fun. It's not the most amazing RPG around, especially on the GBA which has some of my favourite RPGs of all time on it... but in general, it's an enjoyable game. It has some flawed gameplay for sure, but the absolute silliness of the adventure is enough to endear me towards really liking this game.

So yeah! Fun game. :D 

Tomato Adventure was Alpha Dream's second ever game! Their first one was "Koto Battle", which I believe still has not yet received a fan translation. ...Maybe in the future it will happen, who knows.

So, Alpha Dream... Let's talk about Alpha Dream for a second, yeah? They're mostly known for their work on the "Mario & Luigi" series of RPGs released for GBA, DS and 3DS. 

These games are generally very well-regarded by Nintendo fans, however I only have a limited experience with them personally. I only played the first GBA Mario & Luigi game, Superstar Saga. The rest of them....I just haven't played yet.

Nowadays, Alpha Dream unfortunately does not exist any more. In 2019, they released a remake of Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story for the 3DS, and it sold so poorly that they just went bankrupt and stopped existing entirely. :( In fact, the Bowser's Inside Story remake is one of the worst-selling Mario games of all time! And it's not even a bad remake, from what I've heard.

So why did a Mario game sell so poorly? Well, there are two big reasons.

1) It was released in 2019 on 3DS, which was a time when most Nintendo fans had moved on to the Switch at this point - especially the Mario fans who all wanted to play the outstanding Super Mario Odyssey.

2) It was released on the 3DS, a device that could already play the original Bowser's Inside Story just fine! If the 3DS can play all Nintendo DS games, then what's the purpose of releasing a remake of a DS game on 3DS? Who was this remake even made for?

They really should have just released it on Switch instead, no?

So yeah. Alpha Dream is dead, and the Mario & Luigi series of RPGs is dead alongside it too.

...

However, after this, something interesting was discovered. In the year 2020, there was a huge data breach incident in Nintendo's servers, and a large amount of Nintendo's archived internal files were leaked onto the internet by hackers. ... And among these files was a Game Boy Color ROM for a game titled "Gimmick Land". ....and wouldn't you know it, Gimmick Land is quite literally just Tomato Adventure, but made for the GBC instead of the GBA.

It turns out that Alpha Dream had finished making their game for the Game Boy Color, but Nintendo decided they didn't want to release it. Instead, they ordered Alpha Dream to make it all over again, this time for the GBA. ...and to also rename it to Tomato Adventure for some reason. Wow, game development can be harsh. Imagine having spent so much time and effort making a lovely little Game Boy RPG, and Nintendo looks at it and just says "yeah can you just throw this one in the bin and make it again please thanks". ...

So in a way, Tomato Adventure is actually a full-on remake for an older game that never actually came out. How peculiar...

Funnily enough, the unreleased ROM for Gimmick Land has now ALSO received its very own fan translation. So it might be interesting to give it a try one of these days. 

There's so much that goes on behind closed doors in the world of game development that we will never know about. The unreleased Gimmick Land for GBC is just a small peek at the kinds of things that can happen there.

Marvelous: Mouhitotsu no Takarajima

I played "Marvelous: Mouhitotsu no Takarajima".

It's a SNES game released in 1996 by Nintendo.

Marvelous was only released in Japan. Presumably this is because Nintendo outside of Japan had fully shifted their focus to the Nintendo 64 at this time, so they had no incentive to localise and publish any more SNES games.

I played a fan-translated version on emulator.


The game is not really an RPG, it's actually a point-and-click / adventure style game! That's not a style of game you see very often from Nintendo, or even on non-PC platforms in general - especially during the 90s. How unusual. :o

In this game, you control three boys:
Dion, the short and speedy kid,
Max, the tubby and strong kid,
and Jack, the tall and nerdy kid.

The three boys are on a school camping trip, on what is supposedly a legendary treasure island.

At first, the gameplay involves gathering firewood and helping the other classmates with their camping tasks. But after their teacher Miss Gina gets kidnapped by pirates, the three boys have to travel across different islands to gather the crystal orbs in order to open the fortress she is being held at. You know, just normal camping things.

You can either take control of one boy individually, or all three of them together. You press the R button to swap individual control between the three of them, and you can press Y to blow your whistle, which will cause the other two to start following your lead so you can walk together.
At any time, you can press the A button to make a cursor pointer appear. You can then point at anything on screen to examine it. You can point at NPCs to talk to them from a distance, and you can examine environmental objects to get a closer look at them.
Whenever you get a closer look at something, the screen will switch to a zoomed-in first-person view of whatever you're looking at, and you can use the cursor to click on parts of the screen to interact with them. For example, if you examine a keypad on the wall next to a locked door, the zoomed-in view of the keypad will allow you to press the numbers to try and solve the combination.


The general gameplay is typical adventure game stuff - walking around, talking to characters, gaining hints, and solving puzzles. Along the way, you also gain new abilities that are used to help solve some specific puzzles, as well as some used for general traversal.

for example...
Dion gains running shoes and a baseball glove, so he can dash quickly and throw a baseball as a projectile.
Max gains football shoes and a snorkel, so he can kick things and dive underwater.
Jack gains jumping shoes and a fishing rod, so he can jump over gaps and fetch items from a distance.
... and there are more than just these items of course. Dion gets a hammer, Max gets a boxing glove, Jack gets an RC controller - some of these items are definitely more situational than others.

Often you will also come across an obstacle that requires all three of the boys to work together - lifting up a large rock, or pushing a piece of furniture across the room, for example. In these cases, you need to position them around the object correctly, and then select the "Teamwork" option from the menu.


The progression through the game is linear. There are five chapters to play through, and once you complete a chapter, you don't return to the previous areas.

The different chapters have different feelings to them:
Chapter 1 is the introduction in the island campsite setting,
Chapter 2 is an old west town with a touch of time-travelling shenanigans,
Chapter 3 is a jungle settlement with a slight horror-themed flavour to it,
Chapter 4 is a forest kingdom with a scavenger hunt to complete,
and Chapter 5 is the final fortress, a large maze to solve.

I found the puzzle design in this game to be pretty good overall. Very often you are only given partial hints to the puzzles, so you have to come up with the rest of the solution yourself, which feels satisfying.
It never gets too difficult or too obtuse, so the game stays easygoing to play. If you ever do get stuck, you can always buy a hint from a friendly bird, so you'll never be stumped for too long.

I will say that it can be a rather slow-paced game. Max and Jack are pretty slow walkers, so whenever Dion isn't around, it can feel a bit annoying to be moving so slowly. And the menus and interface can get rather fiddly, especially in regards to swapping characters and selecting items. Thankfully I had emulator speedup functions available for when I was getting impatient with the slow movement. I think I would have gotten a little bit more frustrated with this game if I had played it on proper hardware...

I occasionally had a few issues where I tried using an item that seemed like it logically should have done *something*, but the developers never created an interaction, so it didn't work... For example, one of the inventory items you can find is a pocket-sized tiny girl named Polly, who is used to investigate inside keyholes and other small places. In one area, you find a mouse hole - and I wanted to send Polly in there to investigate, but the game didn't accept that as as valid interaction... (the real solution, of course, is to use a cheese to lure out a mouse).
I mean, this kind of issue is extremely common when it comes to old point-and-click games, so it's not all that surprising, but I do wish they could have put in some more bespoke interactions, just in case players tried using the wrong items like this.

Graphically the game looks great, and there are some really nice detailed sprite animations for the characters. Everyone is extremely expressive and animated well, especially for a SNES game. The game has a nice, lighthearted sense of humour, perfect for its fun treasure island adventure aesthetic.


In regards to this particular fan translation, I had some issues with it. It does its job well enough for the most part, but there are definitely some problems. There was a puzzle involving number-related wordplay that they just didn't bother translating properly - they had a character just say "This would be a useful if you knew the Japanese word". ...yeah, not very helpful! And in one case I saw an NPC that had "FIX THIS" written in their dialogue - presumably a leftover note from the translation team. ... it felt rather unprofessional.
They did a good job replacing all the graphical text, however the maps you find during the final chapter seemed to have bugged-out graphics or something, so I had to navigate my way through the maze without them... Despite its problems, the fan translation does allow me to play the game in the first place, and for that I am thankful to the fans, as always. :)


Overall, I had a good time. It was a short and easygoing adventure, and it was interesting to see a Nintendo-developed point-and-click style game like this. Normally Nintendo makes more action-focused games, so it was nice to see something different from them.

Looking up information about this game, apparently Nintendo was considering using Marvelous for the basis of a new multiplayer game, sometime around 2003... and in fact, some unused Marvelous-related graphics can be found hidden away in the ROM files for The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures. How unusual! Aside from this, Marvelous hasn't had any attention at all. It was rereleased on the Wii U eShop in Japan only (which has since become defunct), and also the artwork of Dion, Max, and Jack appears in Super Smash Bros Ultimate as one of the many many collectible "Spirits". .... So I guess Nintendo still keeps this game in the back of their mind, but I doubt it will ever see the light of day again.
Still, it was a fun time. :)