Video Game / Pikmin (2001)

Discover the planet of the Pikmin.

"Here's the deal: you crash on a strange planet, scattering pieces of your beloved spaceship the Dolphin all over. You got thirty days to collect thirty pieces and get outta Dodge."

— TOM, Toonami

Pikmin is the first game of series of the same name, released for the Nintendo GameCube in October 26, 2001 in Japan, December 2, 2001 in North America, and June 14, 2002 in Europe and Australia. The game would later see two Updated Rereleases: New Play Control! Pikmin on the Wii in 2009^note 2012 in North America (which allowed for free aiming with the Wii's pointer controls); and Pikmin 1, a HD remaster on the Nintendo Switch in 2023 (based on the Wii version).

Captain Olimar, a diminutive alien from the planet Hocotate, is traveling through space when his ship collides with a meteor, and he crash-lands on a mysterious planet. His ship's parts are scattered all over the region he finds himself in, but Olimar finds that he can command armies of Pikmin, the planet's strange plantlike natives, to get them back and make his ship spaceworthy once more. However, he has only thirty days to do this — the planet's atmosphere is rich in toxic oxygen, and his breathable air reserves will only last a month; if he's still on-planet by then, he will perish.

Pikmin proved extremely popular with both critics and audiences thanks to its original concept and gameplay. It received a sequel, Pikmin 2, which further produced more sequels and a handful of spinoff games.

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This game contains examples of:

• All There in the Manual: The manual explains a few things about the events that happened before Olimar crash-landed on the planet. For example, the reason Olimar didn't use the Nova Blaster to blow up the meteor that hit him is that the path Olimar was travelling on was one he had traveled many times before without problem, so he set his ship on auto-pilot to get some tea. By the time Olimar had realized what happened, it was already too late to react.
• Almost Out of Oxygen: Played with. The driving point of the game is that after crash-landing, Olimar only has thirty days to repair his ship before he runs out of breathable air. However, in Olimar's case, Earth's oxygen is the poison that's going to kill him.
• American Kirby Is Hardcore: The Japanese cover art contains Pikmin just hanging out on a branch. The North American and European cover art depict Olimar and the Pikmin battling a Dwarf Bulborb while it attempts to devour a Yellow Pikmin.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • The first day does not have a time limit, which allows new players to take their time to get acquainted with the controls and mechanics.
  • The original GameCube release always had item weight in blue and the carry weight in red. Later re-releases have the carry number match the color of the onion that the Pikmin will carry it to, which helps prevent accidentally assigning Pikmin to carry something to an unintended Onion, just like in all other entries.
  • In the Wii and Switch releases, Yellow Pikmin that carry bomb rocks no longer drop them when whistled, making them much easier to manage.
• Artificial Stupidity: Your Pikmin often engage in activities you didn't instruct them to when herding them from one area to another, this often gets them killed when enemies are nearby. Their pathfinding is horrendous on some levels. Took a longer route from base to a ship's part? Too bad, the Pikmin carrying that part are now taking the shortest route, and stuck on a gate or wall you haven't cleared yet.
• Blackout Basement: The subterranean Forest Navel is very dark outside of the landing spot, which is the only part lit by sunlight coming through an opening at its top. The rest of it is shrouded in murk outside of a circle centered on the player, which makes it easy for enemies and dangers to go unnoticed until they're quite close.
• Blob Monster: The Goolix is made out of water and instantly drowns any non-Blue Pikmin.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: The Beady Long Legs and Emperor Bulblax are the only "true" bosses in the game, but the three Burrowing Snagrets, Puffstool, Armored Cannon Beetles, and Smoky Progg are all powerful, dangerous, and unique foes despite being classed as regular enemies. The Snagret gets promoted to full boss in the second game, then gets demoted to miniboss in the third.
• Bottomless Pits: The edge of the Forest Navel is a drop into an endless black expanse. Any Pikmin who accidentally fall in will not be coming back out.
• Bowdlerize: In the original GameCube version, the journal entry for the Mamuta has Olimar compare the eponymous creature's smack to the time a mosquito landed on his head and his wife tried to get it. In the Switch port, this was changed to him fearing that the Mamuta's smack might crack open his helmet, likely to avoid any reference to domestic abuse.
• But Now I Must Go: In Olimar's journal entries, it becomes clear that he's quickly become attached to the Pikmin and their strange world. Unfortunately, he's got a family back on his home planet, and the toxic atmosphere just doesn't help anything. If you reach the happy ending, he gives the Pikmin a hearty wave goodbye in an attempt to communicate his final departure, though they don't appear to fully grasp it.
• Captain's Log: At the end of every day, Olimar will make an entry in his log, the contents of which depending on his accomplishments and discoveries during the day. The entries written for the 1st and 29th day are always the same, but all the others can range in topic, in part based on whatever happened that day. He may chronicle his observations about the characteristics of the different Pikmin types, describe the various hostile creatures encountered, reminisce and worry about his family back home, or even wax philosophical about the nature of the alien planet on which he's stranded. If nothing notable happens, Olimar will make idle comments and observations. Some of these are nearly impossible to see — you need to go out of your way to make no progress, staying at the Impact Site and ending each day immediately.
• Chase Stops at Water: All non-aquatic/amphibious enemies will stop chasing you when you get into a body of water. Unfortunately, only Blue Pikmin can swim... and the other colors of Pikmin will still follow you in despite this, potentially drowning in the process.
• Circling Birdies: Olimar has circling stars after he crash lands.
• Critical Annoyance: Applies to two warnings about the end of day:
  • When it's almost sundown, the background music will change to a nighttime-like tune to go along with the sunset and the coming night that ends the day.
  • When Olimar has less than 50 percent health, an alarm tone will sound periodically (and through your Wii Remote in the Wii port). Better get back to your ship for repairs.
• Cool Starship: Olimar's starship, the Dolphin, is a cool starship if only because it is the size of a soda can, yet can travel between star systems at hyperspeed, can more or less withstand an asteroid impact and re-entry, and can even repair itself.
• Cow Tools: The scattered ship parts; Olimar never explains how his ship is built or what the various parts do. Even Olimar himself seems unsure what some of them are for.
• Damage-Sponge Boss: The Emperor Bulblax has more health than any other enemy in the game, with the Superboss being a close second. The only strategy is to Feed It a Bomb and then throw as many Pikmin onto it as possible.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • Olimar's logbook is based on what happens in-game (such as what enemies you fought, or events such as Pikmin extinction). However, it also has a full set of entries in case absolutely nothing happens, some of which can only be seen if the player never leaves the Impact Site and picks "Go to sunset" immediately upon entering it.
  • Even though there's no possible way you should have that many Pikmin by that point, as there's only enough pellets to make twenty-five Pikmin max on the first day, the Main Engine ship part does have a maximum Pikmin carrying cap like the other ship parts, being capped off at forty.
  • If a Dwarf Red Bulborb is lured into the firing range of an Armored Cannon Beetle, the boulder will cause a special animation where the creature is visibly flattened by it, and its corpse can be carried back as such. Water Dumples share this property, even though there's no possible situation in the game where this can happen.
• Difficult, but Awesome: C-Stick Throwing. In the Gamecube version of the game, by rotating the C-Stick so that the Pikmin all bunch around Olimar and rapidly mashing A, you can throw Pikmin a lot faster than normal. It is very difficult to learn to the point of being able to use it effectively but, when you do, you can collect the ship parts much faster and defeat even the toughest enemies really quickly.
• Disney Death: There's a glitch that can happen at sunset where Olimar will be teleported to the ship as the end of day cutscene plays, but the Pikmin following him will not. Though you won't lose the Pikmin, and if they're close enough you actually can see them racing towards the Onions in the last few seconds of the cutscene, it still can induce a massive Oh, Crap! moment in many new players.
• Early Installment Character-Design Difference: Official artwork portrays the Pikmin as having smaller pupils and thinner fingers and toes compared to later games.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • The game has a lonelier and more somber atmosphere than the sequels, primarily due to the overarching pressure of the 30-day time limit and the lack of beings to communicate with. The only other game in the series that has an overarching time limit (Pikmin 3) has a more lax player-controlled one based on item collection, and future games always give the player character(s) someone to interact with, even if it's just the AI of a spaceship.
  • Pikmin turn a pale shade of their color when idle, something not repeated in any following game.
  • Yellow Pikmin have no affiliation with electricity, instead being used just to carry bomb rocks. In fact, electricity hazards are completely absent in the first game.
  • Pikmin 1 is overall a much, much harder game than later entries. Hazards are absurdly lethal, with the player given little time to whistle your Pikmin back before they die from fire or drowning; enemies are lot more durable, with some even being invulnerable during their attack animation; and many enemies are strong enough to take out Olimar in only a few hits (which will immediately end the day). Combine all that with this being the only game in the series to have a fixed time limit, and the Pikmin AI of this first installment making their self-preservation skills questionable at times, and it's not uncommon to hear people say they got the bad ending on their first several playthroughs.
  • The original GameCube release uses a different display for item weight. The number of required Pikmin to carry an object is always in blue, with the number carrying it in red. In all future games, including the Wii and Switch re-releases of this one, the numbers will be gray if there are not enough Pikmin to lift an item, and change color depending on where they are carrying it to. This was done to avoid accidentally assigning Pikmin to carry something to an unintended Onion.
  • The GameCube version has different throwing mechanics than future games and releases. Rather than having the ability to swap Pikmin types, Olimar will simply throw whatever Pikmin is right behind him, with no ability to swap or control which type is being thrown. Future games and the Wii Switch rereleases of this game would thankfully introduce the ability to select between Pikmin types in your group, making throwing much less of a hassle.
  • Nectar eggs and sprays are entirely absent from this game, meaning your only sources of nectar are from grass and Honeywisps. This also means you don't have ultra-spicy sprays to make combat easier.
  • Challenge Mode in this game is simply the main five areas in story mode where the goal is to grow as many Pikmin as you possibly can in a single day. Future games' extra modes would have entirely new or remixed levels based on collecting treasures or defeating enemies. Furthermore, there's no multiplayer aspect to this game, whereas later games allow for co-op or Versus two-player battles.
  • Candypop buds have a limit of 50 Pikmin before wilting. Future games would reduce this limit to 5 in order to prevent mass-farming of types.
  • This is the only game in the series that does not feature upgrades, and the only one that requires a specific item in order to unlock the ability to use the map.
  • This game lacks the trend of giving mundane real world-objects unusual names and having them be collectables. Instead, the only collectables besides the Pellets and enemy corpses are cartoony ship parts. 2 would introduce the idea of mundane items being considered "treasures," which would be followed up in Hey and 4. Even 3, which narrows down the main collectables to fruit, still has the cellphones (used to detect the signal of missing characters) collected after defeating certain bosses, and are also given unusual names.
  • Not counting the Wii U version of Pikmin 3, this is the only game in the series that lacks the Piklopedia, meaning the enemy roll call at the end of the game and Olimar's end of day notes are the only ways to see the names of all of the game's creatures.
  • In this game, every Pikmin has a blue ghost when they die. In future games, a Pikmin's ghost color depends on the Pikmin's own color when it was alive, so a dead Red Pikmin will have a red ghost.
  • This is the only game in the series whose final boss does not utilize elemental attacks, or encourages using all Pikmin types together against it.
  • Dwarf Red Bulborbs will let out a screech that alerts the adults if they are left unchecked for too long. This ability has never returned in any of the sequels.
  • Likewise, Spotty Bulbears sleep in this game, with them being stronger versions of the Bulborbs found earlier in the game. From the second game onwards, Bulbears are always alert and will relentlessly chase after the player character and their Pikmin along with their young.
  • There are only two proper bosses in the game, Beady Long Legs and Emperor Bulblax, alongside a host of creatures that are strong enough to qualify as mini-bosses (Burrowing Snagrets, Armored Cannon Beetles, Puffstool) but don't have a boss track playing while fighting them; there's also some edge cases like Goolix and Mamuta (largely harmless enemies that serve as secret encounters) and the Smoky Progg (a superboss in a series that otherwise lacks them). Later games would feature many more bosses, and they'd be more clearly defined due to having boss music.
  • Certain plants and spots would have unnamed fly-like insects, tiny even by Pikmin standards, buzz around them when walked near by. These have never appeared in any sequel, and no creatures that small have ever appeared in any subsequent game.
  • The Speaking Simlish in the series had not been established yet. Olimar, the only talking character present, has all his dialogue written out with the sound effect of a machine typing out text instead of the Voice Grunting that would become standard starting from 2.
• Easter Egg:
  • The player can make Captain Olimar lie down and cause Pikmin to carry him like they would any carryable object. Once he is taken in to an Onion, he will automatically pop back up just fine, and the Onion will make a firework.
  • Normally, the Nintendo logo screen has a Pikmin shouting "Pikmin!" There is a small chance that it instead plays a sound of a Pikmin cheering or sighing, and a smaller chance of a deep voice making a short noise instead.
• Emergency Transformation: In the Bad Ending of the game, Olimar does not repair his rocketship in time and his supply of whatever it is he breathes instead of oxygen runs out, so the Pikmin save him by transforming him into one of them. Interestingly, this is foreshadowed in one of the journal entries Olimar can write, where he muses that becoming a Pikmin would be greatly preferrable to returning home and having to deal with his annoying boss. He immediately dismisses the thought however, reminding himself that he also has a loving family awaiting his return as well.
• Enemy Roll Call: All the enemies are mentioned by name in the credits in the Golden Ending. Interestingly, the footage used seems to be from an earlier version of the game due to a number of discrepancies, such as Bulborbs being located in the Distant Spring.
• Explosive Stupidity: Mishandled bomb rocks can inadvertently wipe out a good chunk of your troops if you're unlucky. Olimar will even comment on this when it occurs, and review the controls for using bomb-carrying Pikmin.
• Feed It a Bomb: The final boss, the Emperor Bulblax, is a lot easier if you feed it bombs like this, though having a Pikmin manually toss a bomb into its open mouth stuns it longer then having a bomb-carrying Pikmin be eaten. It retains this weakness in Pikmin 2, but has to be lured into eating bombs already lying on the ground.
• Festering Fungus: The Puffstool is a walking fungus with tiny little legs. The Puffstool is liable to trip on them and tumble upside down, giving Olimar a quick chance to wail on it. But once it manages to right itself up, it belches a cloud of spores that turn your Pikmin into Mushroom Pikmin that attack Olimar and any non-affected Pikmin.
• Free-Sample Plot Coupon: The S.S. Dolphin's first and most important missing part, the Main Engine, is found shortly after Olimar learns how to handle the Pikmin in a safe environment. Collecting it is the only way he can access the entire rest of the game, starting with the Forest of Hope.
• Game-Breaking Bug: One ship part, the Libra, needs to be retrieved from a high location that's surrounded by bottomless pits. There's a rare chance that said ship part will bounce into the pit as your Pikmin attempt to retrieve it, never to be seen again unless you start from your last save (or if it happens to reappear somewhere else, but this is very rare). Since this ship part is required to escape the planet, you're unable to progress without it.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: Upon discovering the Red Onion, Olimar will get close to it out of curiosity, only to get knocked back by the Onion activating and popping out of the ground. Later on when discovering the Yellow and Blue Onions, Olimar will stand back and cautiously approach them, so as to not repeat the same mistake.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Upon finding the Interstellar Radio in The Distant Spring, Olimar notes that there isn't enough time left to call for a rescue crew. Even if you have 3 in-game weeks (or more) left.
• Golden Ending: The game has multiple endings — one if you fail to collect everything in time, one if you collect enough to get off the planet but not everything, and the golden ending if you can get everything in time.
• Gotta Catch Them All: The game has thirty ship parts to collection. Only twenty-five of them are critical for escaping the planet, while the remaining five are optional ones required for the best ending.
• The Great Repair: The game focuses on the search for the various ship parts needed to repair Olimar's ship.
• Guide Dang It!: If you make it all the way to The Final Trial, you might not know how to get the red Pikmin over to the box blocking the way to the Emperor Bulblax without a guide.
• It's a Wonderful Failure: Fail to collect the twenty-five required parts before the thirty days are up, and Olimar will try to blast off into space in a last-ditch effort to save himself, only to fail as his ship crashes back into the ground. His Pikmin take his unconscious (if not dead) body and feed it into the onion, converting him into a half-Hocotatian half-Pikmin hybrid which is planted into the ground like a normal Pikmin. His family and friends likely never saw him again, and nobody would ever know what happened to him.
• The Lost Woods: The Forest of Hope is a vast grassland with exotic flora and a large body of water. Dangerous creatures like Bulborbs (red, fanged creatures that chase Pikmin if they wake up), an Armored Cannon Beetle (a dark brown insect which shoots boulders from its mouth) and Snagrets (underground bird-like animals that can seize and eat several times in a row with their peaks) inhabit it.
• King Mook: Emperor Bulblax, the final boss, which is basically a giant bulborb that happens to be immune to tactics that are effective against bulborbs. Attacking its rear won't work as it has a rocky caparace, and attacking its legs won't work because it will fall on and crush your Pikmin.
• Marathon Boss: The Emperor Bulblax has a buffed life meter that takes much longer than any other creature to go down.
• A Million Is a Statistic: Zigzagged. The night after you let your first Pikmin die, Olimar's journal entry will be depressed and frightened of his mistake. Later on, when Pikmin might start dying in droves, Olimar won't even comment on the matter. However, if all your Pikmin die, he's wracked with guilt, calling himself "an utter disgrace as a leader".
• Minimalist Cast: Olimar is the only individual character in the entire game, with everyone else he encounters being only wildlife. Though he makes occasional references to his boss, wife, and children, they are never encountered by the player until the sequel.
• Multiple Endings:
  • The bad ending involves attempting to fly away without all twenty-five required ship parts, which results in the Dolphin crashing, Olimar dying of oxygen poisoning, and the Pikmin turning his body into a strange Pikmin/Olimar hybrid.
  • In the neutral ending, obtained by having all twenty-five required Ship Parts but missing the Nova Blaster, Space Float, Massage Machine, UV Lamp, and/or Secret Safe, Olimar makes a hasty jump into his ship before his life support dies, and the Pikmin are left to fend for themselves.
  • In the good ending (received through 100% Completion), Olimar bids the Pikmin farewell before hopping on to his ship, and the Onions follow him into low orbit as a show of gratitude (as they are now able to handle enemies on their own, shown in a scene shortly before that).
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The Smoky Progg is stated to be the direct result of you disturbing a normally peaceful Mamuta's egg before its time to hatch.
• Nintendo Hard: The game can be pretty brutal, especially with the thirty-day time limit that can be quite daunting for on a first playthrough.
• Noob Cave: The Impact Site. There are no enemies (well, aside from the Mamuta, Goolix and the Pearly Clamclamps, but they're a safe distance away from the landing site and the former two won't start appearing anyway until long after Olimar has started exploring the subsequent areas in the game) and there are a lot of pellets nearby to grow more Pikmin.
• Nothing Is Scarier: The Final Trial certainly tries to invoke this. There is only one enemy total in the stage (the final boss), and the average player will be spending an in-game day trying to clear the obstacles to reach the creature's lair. This whole time, the player will encounter nothing else while the game plays very unnerving music which gives the vibe that there's something sinister in this peaceful setting with them.
• Ominous Pipe Organ: The theme of the Final Boss consists solely of an Ominous Pipe Organ.
• Only Mostly Dead: The game has multiple endings. The bad end happens if you don't manage to collect at least the twenty-five necessary ship parts within thirty days; in it, Olimar, unable to take off with his spaceship, dies offscreen from oxygen poisoning, but his corpse is brought to an Onion by the Pikmin, thus reviving their "leader" as one of their own kind.
• Palmtree Panic: The Distant Spring takes place in an idyllic, hazy coast next to a large body of water. Instead of Boundareefs, it uses shale walls to delimit the playable zone. Enemies present here include Bulbears (black variants of the red Bulborbs, and far more dangerous than them), Puffy Blowhogs and Yellow Wollywogs. A very dangerous Unique Enemy can be found inside an egg, but it has to be freed before the end of Day 15.
• Piggy Bank: One of the optional ship parts is a massive one (relatively speaking — it's a normal-sized piggy bank, but he's the size of a quarter) that contains all of Olimar's savings.
• Player Death Is Dramatic: Used twice:
  • If Olimar's health is depleted, all enemies and hazards freeze in place, and he collapses to the ground as the screen loses all color and fades to black. He then sluggishly drags himself back to the S.S. Dolphin while the day is forced to end and sad music plays.
  • If all of Olimar's Pikmin die (referred to as a Pikmin Extinction), he is shocked and extremely disappointed before walking back to the S.S. Dolphin alone. He then explains in his ship log that he feels like an utter disgrace, and that he won't sleep that night.
• Plot Coupon That Does Something: The Whimsical Radar is one of the required parts to fix the S.S. Dolphin, but it also allows you to see where all of the ship parts in a level are on the pause menu map.
• Post-Defeat Explosion Chain: After a Burrowing Snagret is defeated, its head explodes in a burst of feathers and the rest of its snakelike body is destroyed in a series of smaller explosions.
• Regional Bonus: While most editions of the Wii port feature audio bugs that result in certain sound effects being sped-up (to the point where they sound more like harsh squeaks), the European and South Korean releases caught onto the issue and fixed it. These repairs would be carried over to the Nintendo Switch port, an enhanced version of the Wii release, worldwide.
• Save Scumming: This trope is a crucial tactic. Saving at the end of a day is only ideal when the number of parts you've recovered is equal to or higher than the number of the day that just ended and you have an ideal population of Pikmin available at your command, ready for the next day's work. If something goes wrong during a day and you fail to get a part as you intended, it might be in your best interest to go back to the last save point to try again.
• Set a Mook to Kill a Mook:
  • With some proper positioning, it's fairly easy to use the cannonball boulders of the Armored Cannon Beetles and their offshoots kill off enemies you don't want to risk losing Pikmin against.
  • It's possible to goad Wollywogs into jumping on you while you're standing next to another enemy. If dodged in time, the Wollywog will land on the other enemy and crush them instead of you.
• Shipwreck Start: Captain Olimar's rocket ship, the S.S. Dolphin, crashes on a distant planet, and he must recover the ship's 30 missing parts before his life support systems fail in 30 days.
• Skippable Boss: The first Armored Cannon Beetle is merely guarding a ship part, rather than holding one itself. As such, it can be skipped by creating an effective distraction while you have the rest of your Pikmin carry it past the creature.
• Superboss: You have to go out of your way to find and fight the Smoky Progg (and do so before the end of Day 15, or else it'll disappear forever). It is only one of the most difficult foes in the game. Fought in the middle of your base, its head is the only vulnerable part of the creature, while the smoke trail instantly kills any Pikmin nearby (and any Pikmin attacking the Progg will probably be thrown right into it if you don't recall them quick enough). Defeating it drops a seedlike object that produces 100 Pikmin when carried back to an Onion.
• Timed Mission: The entirety of the game is a timed mission. You have to get thirty spaceship parts before Olimar's life support runs out in thirty days.
• Title 1: The Switch Updated Re-release is titled "Pikmin 1".
• True Final Boss: Emperor Bulbax holds the Secret Safe, one of the five ship parts not required to repair the Dolphin. Therefore, it's possible to beat the game without even seeing Emperor Bulbax.
• Underground Level: The Forest Navel, a large cavern located in the heart of a dense forest. Its layout is centered on the landing area, the only part of it directly in the light, and slopes down around from it in a series of ledges and snaking paths heading down into the darkness. Unlike the rest of the game's areas, which are decorated by lush plant life, the Forest Navel is instead filled with clusters of stalagmites and with glowing mushrooms that provide the only sources of natural light in most of the area. It's inhabited by swarms of burrowing insects, many fire-breathing Blowhogs, and albino versions of the Wollywog enemies found on the surface, as well as a walking mushroom miniboss and the Beady Long Legs, a Giant Spider boss.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: It's possible to drop the Libra down a bottomless pit, losing it for the rest of the game and making it impossible to repair the ship and, thus, win the game if you decided to save afterwards for whatever reason.
• Unique Enemy:
  • There's only one Goolix and one Mamuta in the standard mode, both of which are found in the exact same location, but on different days. There is at least a Mamuta in the challenge mode, but the Goolix gets no such luck.
  • The game's only Breadbug wanders around the Forest Navel and won't respawn after it dies. Unlike other unique enemies, it isn't strong or dangerous enough to feasibly be called a mini-boss, though it has a unique defeat method and holds one of the optional ship parts.
• Updated Re-release:
  • New Play Control! Pikmin, released for the Wii, irons out bugs, tweaks controls, and improves graphics, audio and other technical details.
  • In 2023, a Switch port based on New Play Control! was released, ironing out more bugs and having HD resolution and upscaled textures.
• The End: Featured in the two good endings; the good ending features a standard "The End", while the Golden Ending reads "The Happy End".
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: The Final Trial, a small area barren of everything except some obstacles that require the abilities of all three Pikmin types to overcome and, at the end, the final boss.
• Too Long; Didn't Dub: In the European translations of the GameCube and Wii versions, the Enemy Roll Call is left in untranslated English. The Switch release averts this by properly translating it.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The Golden Ending has a number of Onions in new colors flying into the planet's low orbit. The sequel doesn't really do anything with this beyond this serving as foreshadowing the existence of other Pikmin types (and the new types introduced in Pikmin 2 don't even have their own Onions).

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