Olimar receives a transmission from his wife, Marlia, who tells him to either quit his job and start spending some time at home or they're getting a divorce. Olimar rebuffs her ultimatum, prompting her to quit the call angrily, set on splitting up. Olimar panics and returns home to grab the kids and abscond to The Distant Planet, where they suffer a crash landing after a bright red light flashes outside their ship.
Olimar manages to find his son, Sagittarius, but is horrified to see that he had been converted into a Pikmin hybrid. Olimar calls for help from The President and the Koppaites before setting off to find Libra, his daughter. They find Louie seemingly unconscious atop an Emporer Bulblax; defeating the beast reveals that Libra had been trapped inside. Olimar tells the group of his plight: they agree to travel to the World of Smash in search of treasure to help pay for the divorce. They take off in the S.S. Drake, but are confronted with a glowing red light outside the ship while pulling into the World of Smash, prompting another crash-landing.
Tropes
- Big Damn Heroes: Averted with The President, who arrives with backup just in time, but proves useless himself; it's the Pikmin that save the day.
- Captain's Log: Olimar does this here.
- Cold Equation: Olimar realizes the most effective way to kill the Emperor Bulbax is to have the White Pikmin kamikaze the Emperor Bulbax. It helps that they seem to be okay with it.
- Coming in Hot: Invoked with the recurring crash landings at the start of every new world.
- Chekhov's Gun: The Zap-O-Matic ends up being crucial to winning the day by firing a flare that alerts the President to the party's presence.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: The only chapter in the entire series that takes place outside of the World of Smash.
- Fake Special Attack: Zig-zagged. The Zap-O-Matic is apparently an insta-kill gun, when it reality all it is a flare gun. However, it ends up saving the day.
- Happily Married: Averted as of the very beginning of the CYOA, which shows that Olimar and Marlia are rather unhappily married.
- Kill Us Both: How Olimar is able to take down the Bulbax, by having the White Pikmin kamikaze it.
- Make Up or Break Up: Marlia gives Olimar one in the opening of the series, to either never leave Hocotate again or they get a divorce.
- Snake Oil Salesman: Olimar falls for these, as evidenced by the Zap-O-Matic.
- Spurned into Suicide: One possible option early on for Olimar after Marlia divorces him.
- Taking the Kids: Out of fear that Marlia will be granted custody of the children, Olimar takes them without her knowledge and whisks them away with him.
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They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The hybrid status of Sagittarius and the conflict between whether he should act more like a Hocotatian or a Pikmin is eventually dropped entirely as a subplot. He's still half-Pikmin, but everyone has seemed to just inexplicably accept it.
