Can you complete Pikmin 4 without any Pikmin?

07.09.2023 - 08:37 / eurogamer.net / Can / Can You

Pikmin 4 is far from a difficult game. There's no time limit you need to worry about, most resources can be perpetually collected, and the game is extremely forgiving about your ever-growing Pikmin death toll.

It's easy enough to see Pikmin 4's story properly to the end, with the toughest challenges being its platinum badges for Dandori side-missions. (It can be particularly tough with some of the Dandori battles against the AI, and especially tricky in that one, very long cave.

Tom is going through and collecting all of the platinum badges, to which I say godspeed, but ever since I finished Pikmin 4 I've been thinking about other ways I could challenge myself in the game. At time of writing, the speedrunning record for getting Pikmin 4's true ending is just under two and a half hours, but it doesn't take advantage of any area skips — it's an exercise in Dandori mastery because there aren't really any major glitches to take advantage of to begin with.

My thoughts, then, began to wander to something extremely ridiculous — completely antithetical to the whole point of the game. Can you complete Pikmin 4 without using any Pikmin?

Before the game had even been released, some parts of the Pikmin community were discussing «no Oatchi» runs. From the demo, it was clear our new puppy companion was very capable of handling tasks the Pikmin can do, and there were some concerns Oatchi would steal the show from the titular creatures — a sentiment which Tom agreed with when he played a Pikmin 4 preview build.

By the time I got around to finishing Pikmin 4, there were quite a few reports from players in its community who shared their results of no Oatchi runs. Beating the game is possible without Oatchi, though he is needed to reach 100 percent completion. Tricks such as using bomb rocks and mines to clear ledges remove the need for Oatchi's jumps in a lot of places. Otherwise, it's mostly a case of grinding caves for resources to get items.

The number of attempts at no Pikmin runs is far less, unsurprisingly. The game hasn't been designed with playing like this in mind, of course, so everything from defeating enemies to collecting raw materials will take huge amounts of time when relying solely on Oatchi (and the little amount of damage the Captain can also dish out).

One player on the game's subreddit showed their results after beating the game without sprouting any new Pikmin or picking up wild ones found in caves, resulting in the use of a mere seven, which you must pluck in the tutorial, throughout the entire game. What the results screen doesn't show is the number of Glow Pikmin used and lost, as the game doesn't keep count of these. Glow Pikmin can only be used in night expeditions and in caves