Hey! Pikmin is cute af, and fun until like world six

Hey there, it's Menow.

I beat Hey! Pikmin on my beloved New 3DS XL last week, and I have mixed feelings. (Slight spoilers ahead if you're a person who likes to play a game without ever having seen/heard anything about it.)

Feeling 1: It's cute af. 

The cuteness is harming me.

Look at that image. The colors, the little chicken enemy dude, all the Pikmin bouncing around, carrying stuff, having a grand time with our pal Olimar. It's cute af.

Feeling 2: The puzzles are genuinely fun for most of the game. The levels are just challenging enough where I don't feel like a complete life failure because I can't win, but I also have to use my brain a little bit and sometimes have to try twice or more to succeed. 

Feeling 3: The collectibles are 100%. Reading Olimar's "captain's log" type entries fill out the game and make me love Olimar even more. But like seriously look at this.

Gurl, you know I love treasure. And Hey! Pikmin is chock full of treasure. Pages and pages of treasure, each complete with an individual, delightful little description like the one you see above.

Feeling 4: Nintendo, thank you so much for giving me a use for my embarrassingly large collection of amiibo. There is a ton of amiibo functionality in this game, much more than usual, and it includes the entire original Splatoon series, the entire Animal Crossing series, and the entire Mario series. Each statue features Olimar's superbly localized descriptions, bringing the amiibo to life in a fresh way and somehow making them fit into the world of this game.

Did you get that "boss" wordplay? Did you get it?

I hope someday I win any battle ever in Splatoon too, Olimar.

Olimar is right. KK is the best musician of our time. Versatile af.

To obtain any in-game amiibo statues I didn't have irl, I could scan the only actual game-specific Hey! Pikmin amiibo up to five times per system day. (I bypassed this limit by setting my clock ahead one day whenever I ran out of tries. #hotcheatz) So yeah, the amiibo stuff is A+++.

Feeling 5: The bosses were just too easy. Any game where I at least put forth minimal effort in the regular levels, I hope the bosses will present at least rudimentary challenge. Not so for Hey! Pikmin. Extremely predictable mechanics with very easy wins. At least the bosses are as cute as the rest of the game?

Dis dude cute afffffffffffffffff. Can I befriend him instead of fighting him?

Combine all those feelings and heat on low for about 15 hours, and the result is that I was ready for the game to end around world six - two worlds before the game's actual ending. But this game's collectibles are so good, I needed them all. So I stuck it out and beat the game. (That last treasure though - hot damn it is annoying to retrieve. Fair warning.)

Overall, I'd say Hey! Pikmin is a cute spinoff game that, in the words of my buddy Kach, "is nice to have if you want to do some easy puzzles instead of playing a real game." Luckily, during most of the duration of my Hey! Pikmin playthrough, that is precisely what I wanted.