The more years that pass, the more I feel that Nintendo has become to video games what Disney is to movies. It’s a massive company with a stable of extremely marketable characters; it has its own little theme park; it has legions of fans for whom it can do no wrong; it has its own holidays, and it’s even known to be incredibly litigious when it comes to copyright. It’s not a 1-to-1 thing, but the parallels are there. Speaking of, Nintendo’s just added another holiday to fans’ calendars: 11/1, aka “Pikmin Day.”
Nintendo celebrated the first Pikmin Day earlier this week with a surprise “Pikmin Direct”, sharing some Pikmin game news and other little bits about the IP, starting with why November 1st is going to be “Pikmin Day” from now on. As Pikmin creator and presenter for the 1st Pikmin Day Direct, Shigeru Miyamoto explained, it was because the original three Pikmin (red, yellow and blue) kind of resembled 111 when standing side-by-side. Well, it’s as good a reason as any, I guess.
As for the actual news presented in the short, it was mostly just talking about Pikmin 4 (Switch 2 version) and Pikmin Bloom. For the former, discussion mostly revolved around the release of a demo (as of November 2), the new voice commands for Oatchi feature, Dandori Academy. It’s not a ton of new stuff, but it’s better than nothing when you’re getting charged a premium for a slightly better version, right?
The Pikmin Bloom news, on the other hand, was all about a new “Secret Cave” feature, which allows players to find secret caves via secret cave maps and then have their pikmin explore them for treasures. Aside from this and the Pikmin 4 news, Nintendo also announced that it’ll be releasing Pikmin animated shorts at regular intervals, showing the first one, “Hello Pikmin,” towards the end of the Direct.
I’d say something about how this seems a little light for a whole Direct, but then this is meant to be something for Pikmin fans, which I am not. For those that are, maybe this much is more than enough. So, yeah. Happy Pikmin Day, I suppose.
Did you watch the Pikmin Direct? What do you think of Pikmin Day?
Image from official Nintendo eShop