Miyamoto believes Pikmin 3 is one of his best games yet
Shigeru Miyamoto has worked on a ton of games. In terms of titles he’s been involved with on a deep level, he estimates having developed 50 games.
“In terms of games I’ve personally worked directly on and really been involved in development on, probably about 50. If you then include the games I’m involved in the oversight standpoint, it’s well over 100 now.”
Yet out of everything Miyamoto has worked on, he feels Pikmin 3 is one of his best efforts. Why?
“I think so. Because after I made it, I played it and it’s fun.”
When asked if he feels that he’s made a bad game, Miyamoto gave a “Yeah”. We’ll be hearing more about that soon, apparently.
But back to Pikmin 3. In an interview with Kotaku, Miyamoto explained what makes Pikmin 3 so good:
“You know, obviously video games are designed for the player to play the way the designer has intended them to. But a good game—and this is really where I think Pikmin 3 stands out—is a game that gives you enough freedom that the player can create their own way of playing and can find ways of playing that the developers didn’t envision. I think Pikmin 3 is a game that is very much like that. There are so many options strategically and in terms of the items you’re going after. Obviously the stage layout and where they’ve placed the items have all been done by the designers, but, because you’re so free to choose your approach to it and your strategy, I think that people are really going to be able to think through on their own and really come up with creative ways of how to attack these levels.”
Miyamoto went on to say that, in one way, he “almost feel[s] sorry for the people who played Pikmin 1.”
“In a sense I almost feel sorry for the people who played Pikmin 1. What I really feel like is that, in Pikmin 3, we’ve finally been able to include all of the elements that I wanted to include in Pikmin 1. Often times, when you talk about movies, people say, oh the first one was the best… I feel Pikmin 3 has become sort of the ultimate version of Pikmin 1 if we’d had more power.”
Much like the way in which player can control three different leaders in Pikmin 3, Miyamoto sees some similarities in the way he manages the different development teams at Nintendo.
“It’s very similar. It’s actually similar to cooking. In Japan they often recommend for people to cook a lot to prevent the brain from aging or deteriorating. Cooking, of course, involves doing multiple tasks simultaneously. You’re preparing ingredients, boiling the water, doing something else… This time the gameplay is particularly fun, because it’s introduced into Pikmin the idea of managing multiple different processes simultaneously.”
More from Miyamoto on Pikmin: a comparison between the series’ three games:
“With Pikmin 1 certainly we had the ideal we were striving for. With that game, I think we ended up with a basic ruleset of the game that was a little bit too strict and confining, the 30-day time limit in particular… from that sense it was difficult for people to get into that game, particularly if they were novice gamers.. And, I think the other challenge we had with Pikmin 1 was that people would want to go back and replay the game, but partially because of the limits—the time limit—people just felt it was a bit too much to go back and replay that again.
“And, with Pikmin 2, we wanted to focus on really trying to ease the gameplay to a certain degree so that it was easier for people to get into and play so we polished the Pikmin idea a bit but really only focused on how to make it easier to play.
“Whereas with Pikmin 3 we’ve really taken it and taken that Pikmin 1 ideal and really tried to bring that to life in a way that encourages replayability all throughout the game.”
“We’ve designed the game in a way so that, as you play it, you get better and better at it and start to understand the depth of the strategy and the best ways to use the Pikmin in it.”
Miyamoto also confirmed that the Pikmin 3 developers will be creating videos to show off some of the best strategies in the game:
“It’s sort of like watching a professional drive on a close-circuit track, where, watching a race like that, what it really comes down to is how perfectly you can hit the lanes and that’s where a lot of the strategy is. I don’t think there are a lot of other games like that.”
