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Miyamoto wonders why Pikmin hasn't sold more and why people think the games are difficult
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I think the tutorial for Pikmin 4 is boring and painful for people who already know the deal. And I think the constant, slow interruptions absolutely kill the pacing, at least at the beginning.
I'm there for the gameplay loop, not to read the same recycled trash dialogue that every Pikmin game has, and it's ridiculously similar to other basic games, too.
The devs seem to think I'd rather watch the UI do pretty things than play the game, and they couldn't be more wrong. Maybe that crap snappy, let me skim through dialogue at rocket speed, and let's get on with the fun.
What gets me the most is that we're talking about the same company who created Super Mario Bros., a game famous for it's lack of tutorial. People call the level design "genius" because it teaches you what power-ups and enemies are immediately.
What in the actual frick happened to this? Didn't Miyamoto create Mario for crying out loud? What happened to these core principles? Money? Demographics for children?
Not that I'm advocating for super in-depth tutorials or anything, but comparing the complexity of SMB to something like Pikmin is a bit disingenuous. In the former your options for inputs are run and jump, which is a lot less than having to corral little plant dudes using a whistle and splitting them up/using them for specific purposes.
Having said that I think the best compromise is to have a tutorial that tells you what you can do/what buttons do what without making you actually do those things just to check if you're too dumb to understand simple instructions. Also space out the instructions so that they happen while actually playing the game instead of in one big tutorial section right at the beginning.
The amount of text bubbles in Pikmin 2 seemed reasonable, and could be accelerated by clicking a button. I think the over-tutorializing only started in Pikmin 3, when Nintendo started outsourcing development to Eighting.
It's been a while so I might be misremembering this, but I think a similar thing happened to the Luigi's Mansion series with LM2 when they started outsourcing to Next Level Games.