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Pikmin 4 has something I haven't seen in a first-party Nintendo title for years: a quality-of-life feature so good that every game should probably steal it. Just like in previous Pikmin games, there's a map screen with a cursor you can scroll around. But here, you can press a button anywhere on the map to immediately return to the game with your character facing in that direction.
The 'look this way!' button is not the kind of feature that makes for an exciting bullet point on a store page or a provocative moment in a trailer, but it's become a personal icon for what I've found so impressive about Pikmin 4. How many times have you looked at a video game map, returned to gameplay, and had to spend a few seconds reorienting your brain - and your character - to match what you just saw on the map? Those few seconds are nothing if it only happens once, but multiplied maybe hundreds of times over the course of damn near every game you've ever played in your life, it adds up.
Little touches
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This button stands out because Nintendo has historically been bad at exactly this kind of quality-of-life feature for both its games and its hardware - just look at how long it took the Switch itself to get folders. While Nintendo's starting to make efforts toward offering options like, say, disabling motion controls that would've previously been mandatory, it continues to lag behind the robust customization and accessibility options that are becoming more common in other AAA productions.
But Pikmin 4 is full of little touches that bypass those tiny annoyances you put up with in other games. There's a lengthy list of mappable shortcuts you can put on the d-pad. You can look at the map in your home zone to see which characters have side quests for you and immediately teleport to their location. There's even a full-on story recap that you can access at any time - certainly not a Pikmin-exclusive invention, but a feature I'm still shocked more games aren't implementing.
Nintendo has often been proactive about introducing optional difficulty-lowering features, and Pikmin 4 has a great one: rewind. It's basically just a checkpoint system that lets you quickly return to a point before you made some disastrous decision that wiped out half your Pikmin, but it's fast, convenient to use, and doesn't make you lose much progress. Previous Pikmin games would've forced you to return all the way to the start of the day, which could be a major time sink to make up for one bad split-second decision.
"Pikmin 4 is full of lovely little touches that address the sorts of tiny frustrations we've gotten used to in other games"
In our Pikmin 4 review, we called this "the most approachable Pikmin entry ever," and that's very much by design. In a recent developer interview series, Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto said "There have been three games in the series until now, from Pikmin to Pikmin 3, and personally I've always wondered, 'Why haven't they exploded more in sales even though they're so much fun to play? Why do people think they're so difficult?'"
As director Yuji Kando explained, Pikmin 4 "prioritized ease of play" from the earliest stages of development, but that didn't mean reducing the game's overall depth or challenge. Instead, the devs wanted to reduce the friction for new players, without taking away what made Pikmin interesting in the first place Planning director Yutaka Hiramuki said "we thought it was more important to lower the barrier to entry for new players by implementing features that make it easier to play, and then let the fun of Dandori [time management] sink in naturally."
I've played and loved every Pikmin prior to this latest entry, so Nintendo's focus on courting new fans was never going to make or break my interest in the game. But I'm so glad it happened. Pikmin 4 is full of lovely little touches that address the sorts of tiny frustrations we've gotten used to in other games, and I can't help but hope that other developers start stealing these ideas without shame or remorse.
I can only hope all the upcoming Switch games impress in similar ways.
