On October 26th Nintendo announced that the Pikmin mobile game is called Pikmin Bloom. They said it would release immediately but it didn’t come out in the United States until the next day. I’ve been playing it since then on iOS and I have a few thoughts.
A New Take On Pokemon GO
All of Niantic’s games are pretty similar. If you somehow have never heard of Pokemon GO, it is basically a game where you walk around on Google Maps and click on Pokémon on the map to do a catching minigame. In Pikmin Bloom, the level of interactivity is even lower than that. Unlike Pokémon Go, most of the gameplay can be done with the app closed.
Barely Even a Game
Pikmin Bloom is much more of an exercise app than Pokémon GO was. If you ever used the calendar or calculator apps from the DSi Shop it is kinda like that, but much more of a real game. Basically all of the progression comes from the game reading your phone’s step counter. It’s like the egg opening mechanic in Pokémon GO except it’s the whole game.
Grow Plants
Like a lot of other mobile games, Pikmin Bloom is about managing recourses and timers. The steps you take are used to grow Pikmin. You have to plant them and dig them out yourself, though, or your steps will just go to waste. Once you have these Pikmin they follow you around and pick up useful items. You can also send them out on expeditions like those missions on the cat board from Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate. You can take pictures with your Pikmin and throw balls at them that they eat. After you do this they give you flower points so you can walk around and automatically (when activated) plant flowers on walking paths.
What Do You Do With These Plants?
This part isn’t exactly obvious. The flowers you grow stay on the map for you and everybody else playing the game too. It’s not clear how long they stay there, though. The map also has giant flowers on it that seem to be in the same places as the PokéStops in Pokémon GO. When there is a lot of activity near them they bloom. The point of all of this isn’t exactly obvious. Maybe it is like Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise where there is no real goal except for unlock stuff and make your garden, or in Pikmin Bloom the map, look nice.
Should You Play It?
If you like Pikmin, Pokémon GO, or Nintendo in general you will probably enjoy this game at least a little bit. If you aren’t a fan of any of those but you already do a lot of walking anyway you might find this game interesting too. Playing it is an extremely small time commitment and for the time being the servers will be pretty active, so you may as well try it now before the game potentially dies and gets delisted like some of Nintendo’s other mobile games.
