Video Game / Pikmin

aka: Pikmin 2

When it comes to walking vegetation, there is definitely strength in numbers.

"Let's make a game based entirely around micromanagement.

Let's make a game where every moment must be spent efficiently or else it can't be completed at all; any wasted time means a growing anxiety of being able to finish. All your units must be fragile enough that a literal stray wind will severely debilitate them, and every enemy must be powerful enough to steamroll through and obliterate your entire squad in an instant if left unchecked. Let's make a game that forces you to spend several hours and superfluous effort to reach a goal that, if not reached correctly, will cease to exist.

Hell, while we're at it, let's put a time limit on the whole thing.

BUT WHY DO I LOVE IT SO MUCH"

— Katie Tiedrich, Awkward Zombie, "The Breakdown Machine"

Real-Time Strategy at its quirkiest, Nintendo's Pikmin series came about from a mix of Shigeru Miyamoto's childhood observations of insects at work, his hobby of gardening, and general RTS gameplay. The Pikmin games lead players into a world where they must use the different kinds of plantlike creatures called "Pikmin" to defeat enemies, produce other Pikmin, collect treasures, and survive in a strange world with even stranger creatures.

The first game's basic storyline follows Captain Olimar as he crash-lands on a mysterious planet, destroying much of his ship in the process. The parts are scattered all over the region, leaving Olimar to command armies of Pikmin to get them back. The twist? He has 30 days to do it, or he dies from the dangerous oxygen in the air! Sounds fun already, doesn't it? Enough people seemed to think so, and the game became a hit in the Nintendo community.

A sequel was soon created, Pikmin 2, in which Olimar and his partner Louie went back to the planet in search of the rare treasures it held, in an attempt to bring their company back out of debt. Pikmin 2 soon became even more critically acclaimed than its predecessor, gaining rave reviews for its improved length, reliability, clever challenges, and unique style. Despite this, for whatever reason, the series hit a snag here. The series went on a hiatus with only the vaguest clues that it was still around, with Miyamoto giving rather vague hints to a third game in the series. In the meantime, fans had to contend with nine or so years of waiting before Pikmin 3 was revealed at E3 2011.

Pikmin 3 launched on July 13th, 2013 in Japan, followed by releases on July 26th in Europe, July 27th in Australia, and August 4th in North America. It was first shown at E3 2012, and introduces a system where the GamePad can be used to have a quick look-around of the map. If you play with the GamePad alone, the game controls and looks more like a Real-Time Strategy game. Interestingly enough, the player does not step into the shoes of Captain Olimar this time around, but rather three new pilots from the planet Koppai: Alph, Brittany, and Charlie. The planet is currently suffering a massive food shortage, and in a desperate attempt at salvation the three fly to the Pikmin planet (which they dub PNF-404) to collect fruit. However, an accident before landing scatters the trio and their Cosmic Drive Key, a component critical for getting back home. The three pilots, with the help of the Pikmin, must reunite, recover the drive key, and gather enough fruit to save their race from extinction while dealing with a familiar pair of explorers that also seem to have business on the planet...

A fourth installment was suddenly and surprisingly announced to be "very close to completion" on September 7th, 2015, by Shigeru Miyamoto himself, but no word was said since because it wasn't a high priority of Nintendo's because of the Nintendo Switch coming out soon around the time. On September 13, 2022, Pikmin 4 was finally confirmed to have a release window, 8 years after Pikmin 3. It was released on July 21, 2023.

A spin-off for the 3DS was also surprisingly announced on the 9/1/16 Nintendo direct and released in July of 2017, featuring Olimar and the Pikmin cast from 3 back in the lead roles on a 2D action platforming adventure. The story involves Olimar in his new ship, the S.S. Dolphin 2, once again crash landing, this time on a new planet that somehow also has Pikmin on it. Rather used to this by now, Olimar must use the various Pikmin colors to collect treasure in order to refuel his ship and blast off. This new title, called Hey! Pikmin, is compatible with amiibo, with its own specific Amiibo featuring the titled plant creatures releasing the same day as the game.

Another spinoff, Pikmin Bloom, is an augmented-reality location-based phone game. It was co-developed by Niantic Labs, creators of Pokémon GO, and released on October 27, 2021.

The official Japanese website for Pikmin 3 can be found here, while the English version of the site can be found here.

The first two games have been ported to Wii as well, with enhanced Wii Remote controls, then those were in turn ported to Nintendo Switch with upscaled graphics and some additional quality-of-life changes inspired by the third game. In 2020, the third game was ported to the Switch with all DLC included and extra side missions starring series regulars Olimar and Louie; in 2023, the first two games were ported to the Nintendo Switch as well, with upscaled graphics and the motion controls from the previous Wii ports. Olimar is also a playable character in the Super Smash Bros. series beginning with Brawl, with Alph added as an alternate costume in Wii U and 3DS. The series as a whole is represented in Nintendo Land with its own subgame, Pikmin Adventure, and is also referenced a few times here and there, like in WarioWare. It even appears as animations used to represent the transferring of your data to the 3DS and Wii U!

Some animated shorts hinted at during Pikmin 3's development have been released for the Wii U and 3DS eShop for around five US dollars, with the Wii U version being in HD, and the 3DS version being in 3D. In 2020, Nintendo uploaded these shorts on their YouTube page, where they can be watched free of charge.

Compare to Overlord, which has a similar but darker premise. Not to be confused with the trope Pig Man, or with the short story "Pickman's Model" by H. P. Lovecraft.

Games in the series

Main Series

• Pikmin (Nintendo GameCube, 2001)
  • New Play Control! Pikmin (Wii, 2008)
  • Pikmin 1 (Nintendo Switch, 2023)
• Pikmin 2 (Nintendo GameCube, 2004)
  • New Play Control! Pikmin 2 (Wii, 2009)
  • Pikmin 2 (Nintendo Switch, 2023)
• Pikmin 3 (Wii U, 2013)
  • Pikmin 3 Deluxe (Nintendo Switch, 2020)
• Pikmin 4 (Nintendo Switch, 2023)

Spinoffs

• Hey! Pikmin (Nintendo 3DS, 2017)
• Pikmin Bloom (iOS and Android, 2021)

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This series provides examples of:

Series-Wide

• Ability Required to Proceed: A standard feature of the games has the player encounter obstacles and hazards barring access to collectibles, Plot Coupons, new areas or other forms of progression, which require the use of specific Pikmin types' abilities to cross. Specifically, blue Pikmin can swim and are needed to explore flooded areas, red Pikmin are fireproof and are needed to navigate fire hazards, yellow Pikmin are immune to electricity and are needed to tear down electrified gates, white Pikmin are immune poison and are needed to cross areas laced with toxic gas, rock Pikmin are needed to break apart glass walls and crystals and flying Pikmin are needed to access objects on high ledges. The ability barriers go further in some cases; one boss in the game can only be damaged after getting hit by a purple Pikmin.
• After the End: It's strongly implied in the original that the Pikmin planet is Earth. The second game doesn't waste any time and outright shows Africa and Europe clearly in the opening. Whether or not there's any humans left is up for debate. Also, in the sequel, two of the items you need to open new areas are halves of a globe. In Pikmin 3, the planet resembles "Pangaea Ultima", a hypothetical model of what the Earth would look like 250 million years in the future.
• Airborne Mook:
  • Shearwigs are relatives of the common Sheargrub enemies with wings, allowing them to fly above the Pikmin's reach.
  • Puffy and Withering Blowhogs, unlike the other two Blowhog varieties, are filled with air and float above easy fighting range.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • The first day in all of the main games has no time limit and it is impossible to lose Pikmin without some sort of major glitch. Even the Dwarf Red Bulborb at the beginning of the second game cannot kill them. This allows new players to get a good grasp on commanding Pikmin without the worry that they're wasting time that could be spent doing something else. In effect, Day 1 is an Antepiece for the entire rest of the game.
  • In all three games, sleeping enemies are not woken up by the whistle even if it is directly blown on them, making it easier for a player to call Pikmin from a distance without risking alerting anything that would chase after them.
• Aquatic Mook:
  • Water Dumples are aquatic relatives of the common Bulborb enemies, provided with fins instead of legs and adapted to aquatic environments.
  • Generally, all games feature one or two enemy species that live chiefly or exclusively in the water. This can present a problem to deal with, as only Blue Pikmin can swim or survive underwater and the most powerful Pikmin types are thus useless for fighting them.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: You can only have up to 100 Pikmin outside at any one time. In the second game, the ship speculates that this may be an evolutionary strategy developed by the onions: no matter what happens on the ground, only 100 Pikmin can be lost, so the species will never die out. Even though the Pikmin short movies released years later showed far more than one hundred Pikmin on screen at certain points. On a meta level, this limit was put in place to avoid over-straining the game's AI, which obviously wouldn't be a problem when making the animated shorts. In 3 Deluxe, the Ultra-Spicy difficulty lowers the count to only 60 Pikmin. The fourth game takes it even further by starting you off with a measly 20 Pikmin limit. The max count can be increased by collecting new Flarlic items and caps out at 100. Caves do not let you have more than 100 Pikmin at once, but you can go over your current limit by finding wild Pikmin in the caves.
  • Furthermore, in the fourth game, you can't have more than 3 types of Pikmin in your party at one time. While this extends to the Pikmin you choose to enter a cave with you, you can have more than 3 types of Pikmin in your party via wild Pikmin, Pikmin transformed by Candypop Buds, or Glow Pikmin summoned from Glow Seeds.
• Armless Biped: The Bulborbs are stout creatures that waddle around on a pair of short legs, and use their giant mouths as their only weapons.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • The little creatures for which the game is named seem to be completely blind to the hazards around them. Whistle to your blue Pikmin, summoning them across water? Any reds that are too close will happily march straight across the water with them. Red Pikmin can't swim. Take a few Pikmin that you thought were all electricity-immune yellows to destroy some electric hazards, set them on the electricity, and oops. Apparently a white or two was in there as well. Too bad electricity's an insta-kill in Pikmin 2 (it was nerfed in the third so it only stuns Pikmin, but that's still an inconvenience when many enemies roam around).
  • The enemies have a bit of this as well. A Firey Blowhog just keeps on breathing fire on an idle, heat-resistant red Pikmin.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Having the max amount of Pikmin on a collectable makes them take it back to the ship/Onion quicker, but this is more of a timesink than it helps. It's better to have the minimum amount of Pikmin on a collectable so that you have a larger group overall to carry multiple collectables back at a time.
• Baby Factory: Bulborbs, common enemies in the series, are not people, but they still amble around after food, nap during the day, and are dangerous and energetic at night. Except for the Empress Bulblaxes, which have enormously distended abdomens so swollen that their feet don't touch the ground. Unlike every other Bulborb, rather than chasing and biting attackers she can only roll and thrash and continuously give birth. This is not the natural state of female Bulborbs — it happens to the largest one in a given range in response to environmental changes — like, perhaps, Pikmin-sized Captains showing up and making the food do weird things.
• Backstory Horror: Shigeru Miyamoto confirmed that the Pikmin planet of the main games, PNF-404, is the planet Earth 250 millions of years in the future, after the extinction of most current species.
• The Beast Master: The series is built around this trope. The Hocotatian and Koppaite protagonists of the games can only deal scratch damage on their own. Meanwhile, the Pikmin themselves will only stand still or defend themselves if not given orders.
• Breath Weapon: Fiery Blowhogs and Watery Blowhogs breathe fire and water, respectively.
• Button Mashing: Throwing multiple Pikmin onto an enemy very fast needs a good jamming of the A button.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": The games' plot coupons are generally mundane Earth objects given quirky names by the various captains (for example, a banana is dubbed a "slapstick crescent"). Averted in the original Pikmin because, while the collectibles still have goofy names, they are the disintegrated parts of Olimar's ship and hence not mundane Earth objects.
• Cap Raiser: For most installments, the maximum amount of Pikmin that you can have out at a time is 100.
  • Pikmin 3 Deluxe: The maximum is decreased to 60 in Ultra Spicy mode.
  • Pikmin 4 changes this, however. At first, the max is only 20, but there is a new item called "Flarlic," which increases the max by 10 each time until the max is also 100. Extra Flarlic gives other rewards instead.
• Captain Crash: Everyone. It seems obligatory at this point that going towards PNF-404 (or any other planet with Pikmin on it) will result in your ship getting shot out of the sky. Expands to a frankly ridiculous extent in Pikmin 4. Not only does Olimar crash, for the fifth time in the series, and not only do the Rescue Corps crash in the process of trying to rescue him, but everyone who hears Olimar's distress signal and comes to the planet, for whatever reason, also seems to crash. At the same time, it's notably averted by the Pikmin 4 protagonist, the Rescue Corps Rookie, who is the only one to ever land their ship successfully on PNF-404 their first try. Pikmin 2 has a slight aversion, as Olimar successfully avoids a crash landing, but he still hits a tree that causes Louie to fly out of the ship, forcing the two to spend the first day separated. Pikmin 3 and Pikmin 4 suggest that there might be something on the planet (or even the planet itself) that's causing everyone to crash, but nothing is confirmed either way.
• Chase Stops at Water: Insectoid enemies such as Sheargrubs drown in water and will stop chasing you when you get in the water. Unfortunately averted with your Pikmin, most of whom will also drown but will happily follow you to their watery graves (unless they're blue Pikmin).
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome:
  • Several enemies from the first Pikmin game never made a reappearance in the sequels. While the Pearly Clamclamp, Smoky Progg, and Puffstool would eventually make an appearance in the fourth game, the Armored Cannon Beetle and Goolix have never made an appearance past the original 2001 game and its remakes.
  • Mushroom Pikmin have only appeared in the first game, and haven't been seen since. Likewise, Bulbmin have only appeared in the second game before vanishing entirely.
• Color-Coded Characters: The commanders, after the second, third and fourth games add to the cast:
  • Olimar: Red.
  • Louie (and later the President on his behalf): Blue.
  • Alph: Light blue.
  • Brittany: Pink.
  • Charlie: Green.
  • The Rookie (and by extension the Rescue Corps): Up to the player in-game, but depicted as red in promotional material.
• Color-Coded Elements: The series usually associates a color to an element by form of the Pikmin resistant to it, with red being for fire, yellow for electricity, and blue for water. Aside from the Pikmin themselves, this shows up on enemies related to the element. Fiery Blowhogs have red snout-tips, and they shoot fire. Anode Beetles have yellow on their backs, and they pair up and make electric links. Poison from the second game is an exception to the Pikmin linking up to it — it's maroon, the Dweevil that spits it out is pink, yet the Pikmin resistant to it is white. Crystal, a material introduced in the third game, is often either rendered as clear or white, yet the Pikmin species that's immune to being crushed by it and can break it is dark gray. Poison in the fourth game is green with the corresponding Dweevil as well, although its behavior and White Pikmin are the same as the second game.
• Colossus Climb: Battling enemies in the series often ends up this way — naturally, since even the smallest monsters tend to be about twice your size.
• Company Cross References: Several of the treasures in the second game are references to other Nintendo games, such as a tube of paint from Mario Paint and R.O.B.'s head.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Justified, as all playable characters are wearing space suits and Red Pikmin are Immune to Fire. It should be noted that before upgrading the space suits, the captains still take damage from being hit directly with flames. Presumably it's not enough to burn through the suit, but the heat is still dangerous.
• Cowardly Mooks: A number of enemies — such as the leaf-insect Skitterleafs, the tadpole-like Wogpoles or the grublike Female Sheargrubs and Swarming Sheargrubs — are completely harmless and largely unable to harm either the players or the Pikmin. As such, they have the uniform tendency to run for their lives the moment you manage to harm or kill some of them, or — as in the case of the Skitterleafs — the moment you get within a certain distance of them.
• Crapsaccharine World: The games may be nice to look at and the vast majority of the characters are adorable from Olimar to Oatchi to the titular Pikmin. Even the Bulborbs have an Ugly Cute aesthetic to them. However, that's all paired with the fact that you play as a stranded alien castaway for most of the games on a planet with a toxic-to-you atmosphere and monsters that look at you and your Pikmin like you're their dinner, because more often than not, you are.
• Darker and Edgier: Zig-Zagged with Lighter and Softer. The first game is noticeably dark, with Olimar racing against the clock to survive, and has a general alien feel to it. Pikmin 2, while having the All-Devouring Black Hole Loan Sharks, is much more laid-back and lax about taking your time, and being in constant contact with Olimar/Louie/Prez's family and friends negates a lot of the alien feel of the first game. The third game goes back into darker territory with a pseudo-time limit being reintroduced and the backstory being about the captains trying to prevent their planet from experiencing an Apocalypse How, while the fourth game zigzags between the two - the Rescue Corps and the castaways are largely played for comic relief and the atmosphere is generally lighter most of the time, yet the dangers of PNF-404 and its inhabitants are made more apparent than ever.
• Deadly Gas: Oxygen for Hoctatians. Played with with Koppaites, who can breathe oxygen, but the oxygen levels on PNF-404 are three times higher than what they're used to, so it would still really mess with them if they didn't have their space suits on.
• Death by a Thousand Cuts: It doesn't matter how much HP that gargantuan monstrosity has, there's no foe that can't be vanquished by throwing more Pikmin at it and letting 20+ pairs of tiny fists do the work for you. Alternatively, you can attack enemies directly if your captain doesn't have any Pikmin available for tossing by punching them, which does only marginally more damage then a hit from the weakest of Pikmin. Regardless, it's actually a viable tactic against some foes (As long as you have time to spare), as a number of them are completely incapable of harming you, but can do a number on your Pikmin. Pikmin 2 even offers an upgrade to your captains' punching power.
• Death World: PNF-404. It is actually Earth in the far future. From our perspective it's a pretty standard planet. When you are an inch tall and can't breathe oxygen, things get a bit more dangerous
• Desperately Needs Orders: The Pikmin take this to an exaggerated extent. When the first game starts, the species is literally extinct when Captain Olimar finds them. It's only with his guidance that the Pikmin are able to conquer obstacles, take down the vicious beasts of their environment, and repopulate their species and retake their spot in the ecosystem. Throughout the series the trope is constantly lampshaded too. In the first game, Olimar constantly ponders why the Pikmin are willing to follow his orders and help him repair his ship—ultimately surmising that they likely see him as the leader they've desperately been looking for. And in Pikmin 2 the ship even quips at the Pikmin for how lazy they are on their own and consequent lack of survival skills. Over time the Pikmin have shown signs of being able to thrive on their own better, but their capability alone always pales in comparison to when a captain is leading them.
• Developer's Foresight: The series has a hard limit of 100 maximum Pikmin in the field. Someone will make note of common ways the limit is kept if they occur, such as grown Pikmin being stored away when there are already 100 on the field. However, there are also times when a Pikmin is automatically placed into the field, usually when an Onion releases the first seed of a type of Pikmin after discovering or extincting it, and the game will forcefully put the farthest Pikmin from that location back in its Onion if needed. Additionally, when entering a cave in the second game, Pikmin that aren't buried or with the leaders are put back in their Onions. In a few caves, it is possible to obtain more Pikmin, and those extra Pikmin will be automatically put away if they exceed the limit due to buried Pikmin on the surface.
• Door to Before: This becomes a necessity in the series, due to the time limit. You can spend one or more days exploring a particular area and, at some point, find and enable a shortcut (be it blowing up a hard wall with bombs, building a wooden bridge, or the like) so you can resume your exploration the following day.
• Earth All Along: The first game suggests the Pikmin's homeworld to be a far-future earth, due to the presence of artificial detritus scattered about and of the remains of buildings as major environmental elements, and Pikmin 2 confirms it. Pikmin 3 has an interesting twist: it's indeed Earth, but it looks like Pangea Ultima (which is what the Earth is assumed to look like 250 million years in the future).
• Earth That Was: Earth is clearly in the far future, and yet there are no humans to be found, with no clues as to why. Though the environment is lethal to the protagonists of the games, it still seems like it would be perfectly habitable for humans and that they would see some form of human presence while rocketing around the world. In Pikmin 3, the planet resembles a hypothetical future Earth known as "Pangaea Ultima" where continents have rearranged themselves (the first level, the "Tropical Wilds", is located in Antarctica), so it's unlikely that humanity as we know it would have continued that long, or they simply abandoned Earth and found a new planet to call home.
• Eating the Enemy:
  • This how the grand majority of Pikmin enemies will deal with your horde. Bulborbs, with their gigantic maws, are the most iconic devourer of Pikmin and can gobble down several at a time.
  • In return, the grand majority of enemies in the series, once beaten. will leave behind some form of carcass that your Pikmin can carry back to their Onions to produce Pikmin seeds.
• Eldritch Location: PNF-404. The first game presents it as "just" alien wilderness, but sequels add more potentially supernatural elements to it. Time moves slower or stops completely when underground, it is inhabited by bizarre entities like Wraiths and Glow Pikmin, animals can be infected with a leaf parasite that makes them unable to leave the planet's atmosphere, geography can change at a whim^note Awakening Wood is the Forest of Hope after some drastic changes, and Perplexing Pool is likewise the Distant Spring. The time between their respective games is short, and Olimar wonders in his notes how they changed so suddenly, and 3 and 4 both heavily imply that something causes almost all spaceships that go near it to crash.
• Elemental Powers:
  • The Pikmin play around with this. Red Pikmin and Blue Pikmin resist fire and water respectively, but cannot actually utilize it. Yellow Pikmin resist electricity and can safely conduct it through their bodies, but do not utilize it for any offensive capabilities. White Pikmin resist poison and are poisonous themselves, playing it straight. Ice Pikmin also play this straight, resisting ice-themed attacks and hazards as well as being able to freeze enemies and bodies of water.
  • Playing the trope straight are the various Dweevil enemies, which spew out elemental attacks when threatened.
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: While there are elements, there are only a few direct examples of this. For instance, leading a Fiery Bulblax into water will cool it off for Blue Pikmin to attack.
• Emergency Weapon: In the first game, Olimar has a very weak punch that can slightly damage and distract enemies. The second game introduces the Rocket Punch for better damage.
• End-Game Results Screen: This is a staple in the series, where a screen that pops up after the credits shows you various stats, like your playing time, how many days it took you to complete the game, how many Pikmin were born, died (and how), or survived, and (in the first game) how many parts you collected.
• Escort Mission: Escorting various things back to your base, while protecting the Pikmin carrying the items, is one of the main gameplay elements.
• Everything Trying to Kill You:
  • Pikmin seem to be on the very bottom of the food chain. After all, they are part plant. However, even monsters that don't eat Pikmin still inexplicably want to kill them.
  • The Captains, too. Everything wants to eat, stomp, squash, or otherwise slaughter them just as much as the Pikmin.
• Evil Counterpart: One in each game:
  • The Puffstool uses spores to take Pikmin and convert them to its side, sending them out against Olimar.
  • Antenna Beetles can steal Pikmin with their version of a whistle, but only distract the Pikmin rather than turn them against you.
  • The Scornet Maestro boss commands its own swarm of up to a hundred Scornets, which are small flying insects similar in size and strength to your Pikmin.
  • The Leaflings (particularly the Red Leafling) are this to the captains, and can turn Pikmin to their side with their own whistle.
• Extreme Omnivore: The Pikmin's Onions consume pellets and the remains of defeated enemies (including things like pearls) that the Pikmin bring back to make more Pikmin. They work like real-life ant queens.
• Fictional Currency: Pokos for at least Hocotate.
• Fire, Ice, Lightning: The three resistances of the main three colors of Pikmin are fire, electricity, and water in place of ice.
• Flame Spewer Obstacle: Fire geysers that occasionally shoot out jets of fire are present in the series. Red pikmin are immune to them.
• Four-Legged Insect: Most arthropods have four or fewer legs. Arachnodes, spider-like enemies with a full eight legs, are explicitly noted in-universe as unusual, and this and its hermaphroditism have led to in-universe speculation that it's actually two four-legged arthropods, one male and one female, joined together.
• Fun with Acronyms: Mixed with Pun, PNF-404 is actually a punny title: "Planet not found: Error 404".
• Gang Up on the Human: Despite taking place on its own planet with its own ecosystem, with creatures of many different shapes, sizes, and such, the creatures of the Pikmin planet will only ever go after the captains and their Pikmin, even when it would make more logical sense to go after each other. Sometimes this results in three completely different species of enemies attacking your group at once! Olimar notes that without alien presence, Pikmin seem to be at the bottom of the planet's food chain.
• Genre-Busting: Most people don't bother trying to classify the genre of the games, as they blend a lot.
• Genre Shift: The first game is primarily a variant on a Real-Time Strategy game focused on racing against the clock. The second game adds Dungeon Crawling and more in-depth boss fights, and the third adds more Real-Time Strategy elements and larger maps to explore.
• Ghibli Hills: Several of the outdoor stages are serene, almost pristine wooded areas, with soft sunlight and fitting ambient music.
• Giant Spider: The series has both spiders that are around the size of the player characters and spiders that tower over them. In all cases it's not that the spiders are large by human standards, it's that the Pikmin and their commanders are small. A series-wide example is the Arachnorb family: They're massive four-legged spiders with round bodies. All of them attack by stomping Pikmin with their feet, except for the Man-at-Legs, which uses a laser-cannon instead.
• Giving Up the Ghost: All creatures release a transparent spirit on death. Enemies release spirits shaped like bubbles with eye sockets◊, whereas with the titular critters release a small ghost shaped and colored like the deceased individual.
• Glass Cannon: The Pikmin themselves, both in general and referring to using larger groups of them.
  • Pikmin are better fighters than the captains and can lift things that the captains cannot, but will die from just about anything. Anything that doesn't kill them instantly will typically send them flying, often into a position in which they are much more likely to die from something else.
  • While a bigger group of Pikmin can obviously do much more than a smaller group, this makes them a bigger target, and one wrong move can decimate both your army and your plans for the day.
• Glowing Flora: Luminescent mushrooms called Common Glowcaps appear in every mainstream game to date, and in Pikmin 3, their glimmer lightens up dark areas. They're mostly blue, but a pink variation appears in 3 as well.
• Goomba Stomp: Certain enemies, such as Dwarf Bulborbs, Sheargrubs, and Skitterleaves, can be stomped on by any Pikmin with a precise throw, often providing a one-hit kill. Very useful even though they don't pose much of a threat. Purple pikmin in the sequel are especially suited for this, since their heaviness also stuns larger enemies that aren't killed outright by the first hit.
• Gotta Catch Them All: The games each include a large number of collectible items, such as ship parts, treasures, and fruit, which the player must ferret out and retrieve to beat the game. Each game typically only requires the player to collect a set fraction of its collectibles, but finding them all will unlock a special ending.
• Ground Pound:
  • Some enemies in the games can do this to attack Pikmin, and because of how fragile the Pikmin are they can die instantly this way. Emperor Bulblax, the Final Boss of the first game, is so big that its Ground Pound not only kills any unfortunate Pikmin it may end up squashing with, but also depletes as much as half of Olimar's full HP. Luckily, the boss doesn't do this move in the second game.
  • Purple Pikmin are heavy enough to pound the floor when they're thrown, and can stun enemies this way.
• Guilt-Based Gaming:
  • If all of the Pikmin die, you're subjected to a heart-wrenching cutscene where Olimar berates himself for his failure and laments their loss. Then the game gives you one new one per Onion, content that you've been properly chastised.
  • There's the heart-rending squeal the Pikmin make as they die. On top of that, if you reach the end of the day when there are Pikmin away from the onions and not following Olimar (especially if you end it yourself from the pause menu), your reward is watching the scragglers hopelessly race back to the onions only to be chomped by nocturnal wildlife. And the game keeps track of how many pikmin you lose this way, too, so it becomes a Mark of Shame on your part for the rest of the game.
  • The first time you let a/some Pikmin get blown up by a bomb rock it/one might have been carrying. At the end of the day, Olimar posts a sad journal entry about what happened, driving into the ground what you've done (be it accidental or not).
  • The marketing behind the games will probably make you feel guilty of using the Pikmin in the first place: They play up the fact that the Pikmin are sacrificing themselves to help you for seemingly nothing in return (although they actually do benefit by learning how to survive and thrive in their harsh world).
• He Was Right There All Along: Most of the games' bosses either drop down on you from above, tunnel up from underground, or are an innocuous environmental piece until you got close.
• Healing Boss: If you decide to take on Emperor Bulblax on any other day but the final one, his health will regenerate when he takes damage.
• Healthy Green, Harmful Red: The health wheels of both captains and enemies are bright green when full, and turn yellow at half health and red at quarter health.
• Holler Button: Just Whistle to summon your Pikmin back to you.
• Iconic Item: Out of all the treasures in the series, the Rubber Ugly is easily the most iconic and recognizable of them. Appearing frequently throughout various marketing and prerelease material before 2's release, it is frequently used to represent the treasures in the game. It even made a return in Pikmin 4 with its own series called the "Rubber Cutie series." All of this is fairly ironic given the treasure's name literally having the word "Ugly" in it, and the not-so-pleasing things Olimar has to say about it in his Piklopedia log.
• Immune to Fire: Red Pikmin are fireproof. This is suggested to be because of their noses acting as a highly efficient ventilation system.
• Infinity +1 Element: Explosions serve as a sort of "fifth element"; no Pikmin, not even Bulbmin, can survive it, and only the most dangerous enemies have access to it. Bomb rocks also destroy the other elemental hazard generators, and can take off a third of even the toughest non-boss enemy's health with a single detonation.
• In-Universe Game Clock: Each game prominently displays a time scale showing how much time is left until sunset.
• Instakill Mook: Electricity can kill Pikmin instantly in the second game, so any enemy attack based on this element is lethal. Same with bombs and any other explosive attack. Good thing Yellow Pikmin can use bombs in the first game and are immune to electricity in the second. Also, in Pikmin 3, electricity is nerfed so that it can only stun non-yellow Pikmin, while every Pikmin type can handle bombs.
• It Can't Be Helped: "Song of Love" has this as its premise. It's all about how the Pikmin go through Hell for their leader, Olimar, yet despite the fact that it's very likely they'll die ignobly, "We don't ask that you love us". The song's single actually outsold the game itself because of how it resonated with the Salaryman public.
• Just Whistle: Whilst out in the field, Captain Olimar can summon his hordes of Pikmin by giving a little whistle. He can also perform this move in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, to much the same effect.
• Killer Rabbit: The Pikmin are dime-sized carrot creatures on a planet full of tennis ball sized monsters, but under your control can EAT those monsters and grow their numbers from their corpses.
• Let's Split Up, Gang!: You can order your Pikmin to split into groups sorted by colour. A more fitting version of this trope is that they can, and will, split up to fight or perform tasks based on the proximity of said tasks and enemies, but only when idle and not following a captain.
• Lilliputians: If one wants to get specific, the first game's manual pegs Olimar to be around the size of a quarter, and a Pikmin to be slightly shorter.
• Living Gasbag:
  • Puffy and Withering Blowhogs are floating, air-filled creatures resembling nothing so much as colorful party balloons with fins, eyes, short trunks and series of holes down their sides. Their main attacks consist of blowing gusts of air out of their bodies to blow your Pikmin about, and they deflate when they die, swiftly shrinking to a fraction of their former size.
  • Jellyfloats are essentially hovering, air-filled jellyfish that suck up their prey rather than sting it.
• Macro Zone: The setting, due to the small size of the captains and the Pikmin, consists of seemingly supersized versions of common objects, with buried crockery, pipes and tiling providing terrain, small items and gewgaws serving as collectibles, and bugs and other small animals as fearsome monsters.
• Mimic Species: The dwarf Bulborbs aren't larval Bulborbs, but Breadbug mimics, as stated from Pikmin 2 forward (the first game had them act more like juvenile Bulborbs as their cries would attract larger Bulborbs). Averted with the dwarf Bulbears, which really are larval Bulbears. Pikmin 4 features the Dwarf Frosty Bulborb and the Dwarf Albino Bulborb^note Bulborbs so young they do not have their colour yet, who are both aversions that actually have the Dwarf Bulborb moniker.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: The Snagrets have the heads of a bird and the bodies of a snake. The Pikmin themselves are plant and animal hybrids.
• Monster Compendium: The Piklopedia in Pikmin 2, Pikmin 3 Deluxe and Pikmin 4. It comes with view of the enemy in its habitat (Pikmin 2 lets you toss Pikpik Carrots to see how they attack, while Pikmin 3 has a short demo video instead), and various notes depending on who is writing the entry:
  • Olimar, as the first Hocotatian to discover the creatures, writes out the scientific name and family of the creature, alongside a description of its biology and lifestyle.
  • Louie, a Big Eater, has a cooking recipe for each creature.
  • Alph, the Koppaite crew's engineer, notes the enemy's weak points (listed as a "structural flaw"), weight (how many Pikmin are needed to carry it), and a paragraph on its vulnerabilities, sometimes talking about his own engineering work.
  • Brittany, a botanist, usually brings up aesthetics of the creatures or other observations.
  • Charlie, the Koppaite captain, gives over-dramatic descriptions of fighting the creatures with his Pikmin, often including ideal battle strategies.
  • Dalmo, an animal enthusiast, describes everything as cute or adorable, and seems to think that the reader would be compelled to hug the relatively giant monsters if not warned about their capabilities.
• More Predators Than Prey: Most enemies on the Pikmin planet seem to be carnivorous, and the only thing any of them ever seem to eat are, of course, Pikmin. Or would that make them herbivorous?
• Newbie Immunity: All mainline games in the series give the player unlimited time in the first day to complete an objective (get the Main Engine, reunite Olimar and Louie and get the Courage Reactor, get Alph back to the S.S. Drake, and power up the S.S. Shepherd respectively). Because of the level design, it is also impossible for Pikmin to die on the first day without glitches. Even the Dwarf Bulborb at the start of Pikmin 2, normally an enemy that eats Pikmin, is coded to be harmless on the first day.
• Nice Day, Deadly Night: The surface of PNF-404 can be dangerous during the day, but at night it's so dangerous that the Captains and Pikmin enter low orbit to avoid the predators that become active at that time. Any Pikmin left behind who aren't in the ground are devoured by the native wildlife. Any characters that are willing to go out at night (such as Louie or Yonny are seen as strange for it.
• Nintendo Hard: This series is known for its cute plant-animal hybrids, but it's also known for being pretty tough. The main gameplay is Real-Time Strategy-like with you creating the most adorable army in the world to help you collect items scattered throughout the levels. Doesn't sound too bad until you find out the Pikmin are more vulnerable than YOU and can die in one hit from... anything. Then there's the time limit in the games with each day being 16 mins long in real-time, making searching for ship parts, items, or fruit stressful; each game also handles the time mechanic differently: The first game has a strict 30-day time limit while you search for 30 ship parts; the second has no deadline but you still have to deal with the 16 mins real-time clock while searching for artifacts and objects; and the third balances the first two in bringing the time limit back, but it's given to how much fruit you've collected to create juice, which becomes the key component to keeping you from getting a game over.
• Nocturnal Mooks: Played with. Most members of the grubdog family are only active at night (unless provoked), but you only have a chance to fight them in the daytime when they're asleep, as you leave the planet every night.
• Once per Episode: Each game so far has had a Blob Monster (Goolix, Waterwraith, Plasm Wraith, and Foolix), a new Bulborb type (Bulborbs as a class, Hairy and Orange Bulborbs, Whiptongue Bulborb, and Frosty Bulborb), some sort of enemy counterpart to the player characters (Puffstool, Antenna Beetle, Scornet Maestro, Leaflings), and at least two new Pikmin types (The original trio, Purple and White, Rock and Winged, Ice and Glow)
• One-Hit Kill: Bomb rocks, crushing, consumption by a Bulborb Larva, the Smoky Progg's poisonous smoke, and electricity will all instantly kill Pikmin, without the normal brief period that would otherwise allow the player to rescue their Pikmin. The last one isn't lethal to yellow Pikmin and Bulbmin, and in Pikmin 3 it was demoted to only stunning non-Yellows, while rock Pikmin (gray in color) cannot be killed by crushing.
• Only Mostly Dead: If one of the leaders in the second and third games runs out of health, you'll see them lying on the ground in front of the ship, unmoving for the rest of the day until you leave, in which they get back up and board the ship.
• Opening the Sandbox: The first two games after you get Blue Pikmin, as that will allow you to explore the aquatic portions of each area (they're not a problem for Olimar or any of the other playable captains, but they are for the Pikmin of the other colors except Pink). To a lesser extent, this also applies to Pikmin 3 once you get the Yellow Pikmin and rescue Charlie, since the game up to that point has been extremely linear and requires you to visit the first three areas in a specific order.
• Our Monsters Are Weird: Most of the lifeforms qualify, but the ones that stand out are a lumpy stone-like thing with what appear to be tribal tattoos that loves flowers for decorative purposes^note the Mamuta, a goldfish on two legs with a natural glass windshield that shoots mortar rounds^note the Gatling Groink, a spider merged with a machine that shoots with a machine-gun when agitated enough^note the Man-at-Legs, a three-legged clump of marshy soil with a fruit for a head and two vines that serve as eyestalks^note the Quaggled Mireclops, and what could be described as a "hominid" made out of water that rolls around on stone rollers and is implied to be an Eldritch Abomination^note the Waterwraith.
• Palette Swap: The whole series does this with some members of the Bulborb subspecies. There's red, white, black (Bulbear), and orange. Others, like the Whiptongue Bulborb or any of the Bulblaxes, have more unique features.
• Palmtree Panic: The Distant Spring in the first game, Perplexing Pool (which is a revisited form of Distant Spring) in the second, Tropical Wilds in the third, and Serene Shores in the fourth, all areas themed around sandy beaches with multiple pools and other areas of shallow water. Due to the abundance of water, the areas are explored more easily with the Blue Pikmin. Enemies are often aquatic or amphibious and, in the Tropical Wilds, the boss is a Sand Worm fought on the beachside proper.
• Pictorial Letter Substitution: Starting from Bloom, the general series logo has the hollow in its "P" replaced by a white Pikmin flower.
• Planimal: Various creatures have both animal and plant traits. Aside from the Pikmin, there are the Creeping Chrysanthemums, Bulbmin, Pellet Posies, and Candypop Buds.
• Plant Mooks: The series is about leading an army of the titular plant/animal-like creatures to ensure your survival and prosperity.
• Plot Coupon: Each game requires the player to collect a number of items — ship parts in Pikmin, treasures in Pikmin 2, and fruit in Pikmin 3 — in order to progress through the game. This continues into Pikmin 4, where fruits are folded into the greater "treasure" category, and Olimar's Shipwreck Tale is focused around recovering his ship parts.
• Plot Tailored to the Party: You won't get too far unless you utilize all of the Pikmin's strengths efficiently.
• Puzzle Boss: Many of them. The third game takes it up to eleven, with the Vehemoth Phosbat being the most notable. What were boss material in the previous games are now miniboss material.
• Ragnarök Proofing: The games all take place on a very distant future on what seems to be Earth After the End. And yet, the various objects the protagonists find throughout the series are as good as new. Electronic devices are still at full battery, metal objects are free of any rust despite having been at the mercy at the elements probably for centuries and the food items are still edible. There are also the Ravaged Rustworks in Hey! Pikmin, the map of which looks like a well-tended industrial park.
• Real-Time Strategy: While not a particularly orthodox example, the series mostly focuses on coordinating a large force under the player's command, making efficient use of time, resources and your troops' specific skillsets, and devising ways to efficiently defeat enemies while achieving specific goals.
• Riddle for the Ages: What happened to the previous inhabitants of the planet? Unlike Splatoon, another Nintendo series that takes place in Humanity's Wake, there's no sign of any calamity that might have caused humanity to die off. Electronic devices still have power, fruit hasn't decayed, and the Hero's Hideaway map in the fourth game is a completely intact house. Pikmin 4 implies that the various "alien" races such as Hocotatians and Koppaites are actually the distant descendants of humanity after they took to the stars, but that still leaves the mystery of why they left. Olimar also raises the possibilty that they're still around on PNF-404, but are simply somehow out of sight, a theory which becomes more plausible when one considers the Wraiths, who appear to exist outside of space-time as we know it; Olimar also noted that the Plasma Wraith may be an important key to understanding what happened on the planet, but this is never elaborated on.
• Ruins of the Modern Age: There's some of this in the first game, but it especially stands out in the second and third — many areas explored on the Pikmin planet have recognizable remains of human constructions, such as metal pipes and ceramic tiles.
• Sailor Earth: Original Pikmin varieties are extremely popular in the series' fandom. It helps that the Pikmin have a pretty blank template to go off of. Just pick a color that hasn't been made official yet, give it some unique body feature no other Pikmin has, and then give it any power or immunity you want.
• Sanity Slippage: For the most part, Louie starts Pikmin 2 off as a somewhat quiet, but still decent worker. But after he accidently is left behind on the planet, he goes a bit off the deep end by choosing to hide in the the final level of the game and it's heavily implied he was controlling the Final Boss. By the time Pikmin 3 rolls around, the only word he can say is food and he manages to get himself stuck on the planet again.
• Savage Setpiece: Bulborbs by default sleep unless you a) get too close to them or b) attack them. You can find out which is which by looking at their eyes. The ones with half-open eyes have the lighter slumber.
• Scenery Porn: Quite a common tradition for the series. The first 2 games, while showing their age, already didn't look too shabby, especially compared to the other games released at the time or on the same console it was on, with the overworld areas being filled with lush greenery and serene landscapes all around. The 3rd game, however, pushed things to the max, with the more dynamic lighting, improved textures, clever usage of camera angles, and overall enhanced graphics creating a visual wonder of a game, all helped by its more realistic art style. And despite Pikmin 4 going back to the more cartoony and exaggerated styles of 1 and 2, it still managed to look just as great as the 3rd game, taking advantage of the lower-angle camera to give some of the nicest-looking vistas in the series. This is especially evident when looking at the area beyond the map's bounds from a high point, such as the edge of Sun Speckled Terrance's park or the giant (by Pikmin standards) river in the distance in Giant's Hearth.
• Sdrawkcab Name: The main protagonist of the series is Captain Olimar. In Japanese, though, his name is written with the three katakana characters O-RI-MA. Write them backward and you get "Mario"; the English version retains the pun via Significant Anagram (and an extra "l").
• Seasonal Baggage: Downplayed in Pikmin 2 and 3. In both games, each of the four seasons is present within one particular area, rather than all seasons appearing in a cyclic fashion through all areas. In the second game, Valley of Repose is set in winter, Awakening Wood is set in spring, Perplexing Pool is set in summer, and Wistful Wild is set in autumn. The third game has it like this: Tropical Wilds (summer), Garden of Hope (spring), Distant Tundra (winter), and Twilight River (autumn).
• Serial Escalation: The Final Boss of each game tends to be more extravagant and nightmarish than the last. As this image demonstrates, the protagonists go from fighting King Mooks as the final boss to downright Eldritch Abominations.
• Series Mascot: Naturally, the Pikmin; the little cute race of Plant Aliens that the game centers around. Nintendo likes to feature them prominently in portions of their handhelds and consoles UI, most notably with system transfers for both the 3DS and the Wii U (when transferring original Wii data).
• Shock and Awe: Yellow Pikmin are immune to electricity in the second game and can conduct it in the third game. Several enemies can also produce electricity, like the Anode Beetle, the Electric Cottonade, and the Bearded Amprat.
• Shout-Out:
  • In Japanese script, Olimar is a Sdrawkcab Name of Mario. Louie = Luigi is not as clever, but seems thematically appropriate for Olimar's second fiddle.
  • The Poko symbol looks a lot like the coins from Super Mario Bros.. The Mario games later returned the favor in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, where Chapter 2 has Mario leading a swarm of tiny creatures around to aid him.
• Shrink Ray: The utility of the beams of light emitted by the ships. As explained in 4 with the Beagle:
  Colin: The ship uses a special type of light ray that miniaturizes objects during collection, so it shouldn't be a problem.
• Significant Anagram: Captain Olimar's name in Japanese is Orima, an anagram of Mario.
• Sleepy Enemy:
  • Bulborbs are nocturnal and thus typically found laying down in the open and snoring away. If awoken, they will pursue you and your squad but return to their sleeping spots if you lose them. Sneaking up on them is complicated by the fact that they're usually found alongside dwarf bulborbs, which unlike them are diurnal and will wake the larger creature with their cries if startled.
  • In the first game, Spotty Bulbears are also found sleeping much like their bulborb cousins, being woken up when approached or when a Dwarf Bulbear lets out a squeal. Later games would drop this and instead have them roaming the area.
• Species Title: The series involves the titular plant-based creatures that obey the command of the Player Character of each game to fight the dangerous beasts of the initially unnamed Planet, later named PNF-404, and explore the planet and sometimes perform the The Great Repair of their ship so the Player Character can leave.
• Speculative Biology: A core part of the series that makes it so endearing. The franchise as a whole deconstructs the trope of Mooks being Always Chaotic Evil by portraying them as simple animals roaming around their territory with the closest thing to a real antagonist in any of the games is either a predator that just wants to eat and go on with its day or a creature just trying to defend its territory, or by socioeconomic warfare outside the Pikmin planet as shown in 2's side story. All of this is not even mentioning the Piklopedia which where most of the game's reputation of being this trope comes in.
• Stalked by the Bell: In every game in the series, you have a limited amount of time in any given day. At the end of the day any Pikmin that isn’t with you, in a certain radius of an onion, stored in the onion, or underground gets left behind and killed by nocturnal creatures.
• Stone Wall: The bramble/dirt walls found above ground are mostly harmless, but they can take far more damage than the generic enemy can; the toughest have more effective health than most minibosses.
• Super Not-Drowning Skills: Only Blue Pikmin can swim. The other types only flounder around for a while before drowning. If you call them, they can possibly flounder on over to the bank and survive. Or you can disband your Blues, who will then act as lifeguards and throw any drowning Pikmin onto dry land. The captains can also go underwater just fine, but this might be due to the fact that all of them wear space helmets.
• Technicolor Toxin: Poison is usually brightly colored, and generally purple.
  • The first game has the Smoky Progg, which leaves a trail of instant death green sludge.
  • Poison gas in the second game is purple, as are Munge Dweevils, so you can tell them apart from the other three species.
  • The third game uses either an inky black (for aquatic enemies) or a neon pink (for the Vehemoth Phosbat) for poison.
  • Hey! Pikmin uses lakes of bright purple poison as terrain obstacles.
  • The fourth game changes the main color of poisonous enemies and obstacles to a sickly shade of teal. The Smoky Progg's instant death poison is also recolored to bright red, indicating it's not normal poison.
• Timed Mission: The entirety of the first and third games. The original Pikmin is about Olimar trying to escape the planet before his air supply runs out, while Pikmin 3 is about Alph, Brittany, and Charlie working to save their dying home planet of Koppai by using food from the Pikmin's planet as a resource. Specifically, they're taking the seeds of the fruit back to their planet to cultivate. The fruit they find on the planet is turned into juice that is used to sustain themselves in their search. If they run out of juice, that's Game Over. Adding up all the obtainable fruit, they have ninety-nine days, or fifty in the case of the ultra-spicy difficulty in Pikmin 3 Deluxe, though both of those are much more generous than the first game's thirty days.
• Trilogy Creep: Originally, Miyamoto stated he wanted Pikmin to be a trilogy. However, merely two years after 3's release, he confirmed that Pikmin 4 was close to completion.
• Underground Monkey: Several, though the differences often range beyond color and ability. Typically you see alternate-elemental forms of certain enemies, or ones that are just plain tougher such as the cave-dwelling Wollywogs.
• Updated Re-release: The "New Play Control!" Wii versions of the first two games, which primarily iron out bugs, tweak controls, and improve graphics, audio and other technical details. The third game got a Deluxe remaster for the Nintendo Switch, implementing the original's DLC into the base content, bringing back the Piklopedia, and adding a new story segment (Olimar's Comeback).
• Variable Mix: The games subtly change the music depending on what time of day it is, whether or not you're in combat, carrying items back to the ship, or just walking around, and — in 2 — who you're currently playing as and how deep into a dungeon you are.
• Video Game Caring Potential: Zero death runs, which are quite difficult to do in any of the games — sometimes it's not for the challenge, but because some players just can't bear having any of their adorable little friends die on them.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Want to drown, electrocute, burn, poison, or let Pikmin get eaten up by predators? Go ahead. You monster.
• Water Is Blue: Averted for the actual water, which is transparent as in real life but almost anything associated with water but not aquatic itself (Watery Blowhogs, Caustic Dweevils, the Blue Pikmin themselves, etc.) is blue.
• We Have Reserves: You can have far more Pikmin in the onions and ship than the hundred allowed in the field at once, and building up their numbers is rarely difficult, allowing you to draw on functionally inexhaustible reserves of troops to recover from losses.
• We Need a Distraction: The ability to switch between two captains allows for the use of one to lure away monsters into a convenient position for a Zerg Rush led by the other captain. This is required for the Ranging Bloyster in the second game which deliberately goes after the active captain, though just spamming the captain switch button even as a single group will also leave it too confused to fight back. The Scornet Maestro in the third game is another boss that only goes after the active captain, though unlike the Bloyster this isn't required.
• What the Hell, Player?: It's possible to make the Pikmin extinct, but it probably won't happen unless you do it intentionally. If you do manage to kill them all, you get a depressing "Pikmin Extinction" cutscene followed by Olimar beating himself up in his journal for letting it happen. It won't end the game, but you are forced to start over with just a single seed. It's still possible to cause an extinction in Pikmin 3; however, the Onion simply produces a single seed and acts like nothing happened.
• What Were They Selling Again?: The song Ai no Uta, originally made to advertise the first game, ended up being so explosively popular in Japan that its CD release outsold the actual game by a wide margin (900,000 copies for the song, 500,000 for the game). Thankfully, this didn't prevent the game from shining on its own, especially with the release of the sequel, and since then Ai no Uta has become an iconic part of the series' legacy.
• You Bastard!:
  • "Ai no Uta" is a song dedicated to this.
    Uprooted, we'll gather and be thrown to our deaths
    But we won't ask you to love us.
  • Averted with its sister song, Namida ga Afureta. Olimar does care for the Pikmin greatly, but just Cannot Spit It Out.
• Zerg Rush: Basically the entire premise of the series. The C-stick in the game is used to direct the mass of pikmin following you in a more precise direction, and when facing an enemy, is circled around to rush the entire pack in even faster. There's nothing more satisfying than swarming a tiny little Bulborb with all 100 of your minions from all sides.

Animated Shorts

• Adaptation Deviation:
  • "The Night Juicer" shows Olimar walking around fine with his helmet off while in the same place as the Pikmin. In the games, breathing their planet's air would fatally poison him.
  • "Occupational Hazards" has a few notable differences from the games:
    • White Pikmin can spit a highly corrosive acid, whereas in the games they can do nothing of the sort.
    • Olimar has a horde of thousands of Pikmin working on disassembling the tractor, far in excess of the games' hundred-Pikmin headcount limit.
• Black Humor: Some of the visual humor in "Occupational Hazards" revolves around Pikmin dying in various accidents, such as one getting electrocuted when touching a string of electrified yellows or a pair being eaten by a Bulborb that then snorts a ghost out of its nostrils.
• Bloody Smile: Made to look like this in "The Night Juicer" after three Pikmin see (what they think is) Olimar blending a chopped-up red Pikmin and drinking it. He then turns around and gives a smirk as they see the red liquid remains on his teeth. Turns out it's just Pikpik carrot juice, but the Pikmin are still freaked out.
• Brick Joke: Early in "Occupational Hazards," a White Pikmin gets launched in to the air by two Purple Pikmin landing on a catapult, then is not seen for the rest of the short. It finally lands in the end screen.
• Circling Birdies: In "Treasure in a Bottle", the Yellow Pikmin's plan is to use a Bomb Rock to free the Red Pikmin trapped in the bottle. It works at first, but the Red Pikmin falls back into the bottle. When the three Pikmin go to the bottle, the Red Pikmin that was stuck is now dazed and the Red Pikmin has circling stars around its head.
• Company Cross References: In "Occupational Hazards", a red Pikmin comes out of a green pipe with some gold coins while wearing lint resembling Mario's hat, nose and moustache, then hops out replicating the plumber's iconic jump, complete with the first seven notes of some very familiar overworld music.
• Dramatic Drop: In "Occupational Hazards", when a yellow Pikmin goes into a cave and accidentally wakes up a large and angry Bulborb, the Pikmin drops the two bolts it was carrying in shock.
• Eye Scream: When looking under the wheel to see where the Pikmin have gone, the Bulborb sees one of the reds just in time for it to kick it right in the eye.
• Glass Smack and Slide: In "Treasure in a Bottle", after the Red Pikmin fails to push the marble out of the bottle, it rolls towards the Pikmin who tries to run away but ends up falling down the bottle, coming down hard on the bottom and sliding down.
• Hollywood Acid: The White Pikmin's acid spit in "Occupational Hazards" is vivid purple and can melt solid steel into nothing in seconds.
• Help, I'm Stuck!: In "Treasure in a Bottle", a red Pikmin manages to accidentally get itself trapped in a bottle, and it calls for help from two other Pikmin, who luckily just happen to be walking by, to get it back out. However, the two Pikmin just laugh because from their view, the Pikmin looks distorted.
• Hurt Foot Hop: In "Occupational Hazards", a Red Bulborb tries to get a group of Pikmin out from under a wheel by kicking it. The problem is that a Bulborb's feet are not that strong (not to mention the wheel being buried partially underground), so it ends up hurting its own foot instead, causing it to jump in pain while sucking on its injured appendage.
• Idea Bulb: Parodied in "Treasure in a Bottle". When the Pikmin come up with ideas for getting the first one out of the bottle that it's stuck in, their leaves turn into flowers.
• Mistaken for Murderer: In "The Night Juicer", three Pikmin see Olimar blending and drinking something red while standing next to the chopped-up remains of something with a very familiar leaf, and become convinced that he's been killing Pikmin and juicing their bodies to drink. It turns out that he was simply blending and drinking regular carrots instead.
• Musical Pastiche: In "Treasure in a Bottle", a lawyer-friendly version of Also sprach Zarathustra plays when the Red Pikmin notices the huge ramune bottle and the marble in it.
• Mythology Gag: The ship values the collapsed pile of scrap as being worth exactly a quadrillion and seven Pokos. The pile includes the dead body of the Red Bulborb and, in Pikmin 2, these enemies' corpses are worth precisely seven Pokos.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • "The Night Juicer": When the three Pikmin thought Olimar has eaten one of their own, and then starts walking towards them.
  • "Treasure in a Bottle": After the red Pikmin realizes it trapped itself within the bottle and when the small group sees the yellow Pikmin returning with a bomb rock to blow up the bottle.
  • "Occupational Hazards": The yellow Pikmin's reaction on seeing that it woke up a huge Bulborb, the other Pikmins' reaction when it starts chasing all of them, and the Bulborb itself on realizing it can't parachute its way down from a long fall like the Pikmin can.
• Overly-Nervous Flop Sweat: The red Pikmin starts sweating a lot after realizing it has no way of escaping the bottle in "Treasure in a Bottle".
• Parasol Parachute: In "Occupational Hazards", when falling from the backhoe's shovel, the Pikmin's leaves bloom into flowers and allow them to safely glide down to the ground. The Bulborb has a brief fantasy of growing an umbrella parachute as well while plummeting to its doom.
• Pixellation: In "Occupational Hazards", after the Bulborb is incapacitated, a horde of Pikmin swarms over it. When they retreat, the Bulborb's carcass is heavily pixellated and almost impossible to see properly, implicitly because it was given a nasty mauling.
• Totem Pole Trench: A variant. What at first looks like a single tall Pikmin carrying a stack of nuts around its body turns out to be three Pikmin stacked on top of each other, with only the head of the topmost one and feet of the bottom one showing through.
• A Twinkle in the Sky: A white Pikmin pushes in line past a purple when the Pikmin counterweights meant to launch it from the catapult they were using fail to budge it. However, two purples had been thrown down to deal with this issue, and the much lighter white thus ends up being sent rocketing up into the sky and vanishing in a twinkle.
• Uncertain Doom: The Firey Blowhog in "Occupational Hazards" is last seen coming out from within the backhoe, but their corpse's value (seemingly) isn't accounted for after the backhoe collapses. It's never made clear whether or not the Firey Blowhog survived the backhoe's collapse.

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