Miyamoto wants the stress back in Pikmin 3

Shigeru Miyamoto wants Pikmin 3 to recapture the difficulty of the first game. Miyamoto told GamesMaster magazine (via Official Nintendo Magazine) that Pikmin 2 swung too far in attempting to promote user friendliness.

"[B]y looking at Pikmin 1 we noticed that it wasn't a very easy game for people to play, and from time to time they had to feel some stress," Miyamoto said. "Our main aim in Pikmin 2 was to get rid of any stress as much as possible, so that it would be very user-friendly. Well, I myself couldn't agree with that direction perfectly. That kind of nature of Pikmin 1 was exactly what I wanted to reproduce and I was actually intentionally doing so, so that Pikmin 1 could be a strategic game."

Miyamoto said half his job in creating Pikmin 3 was to gather Pikmin 2's major creators and convince them to "get back to the basics." We'll have to wait to find out how Miyamoto plans to turn up the pressure on players in spring 2013, though the removal of the 30-day time limit from the first game to the second stands out as particularly notable.