Pikmin: The High Cost of Defeating Emperor Bulbax
When I typed the word “defeating” into the title, Google Docs changed it to “dating.” I can’t even make this up; it literally did that and now I can’t breathe. I now imagine an alternative universe where the goal of Pikmin is not to “defeat” the various monsters of the world, but instead it’s one large dating simulator where Olimar has to woo and seduce Grubdogs. I don’t know what role the Pikmin would play in this dating simulator but I’m sure if you gave me some time and money I could make a pretty solid game.
So, what exactly is Pikmin?
The first Pikmin game is the story of an intergalactic explorer named Captain Olimar. During a routine flight his ship is struck by a random meteor hurtling through space and crashes to the planet nearby which resembles Earth. When Olimar wakes up his ship has been destroyed, the machinery of the engine and life-support systems scattered across this world. Olimar begins to explore this planet, hoping to find some means of escape and he encounters what can only be described as an alien object: a large red plant that leaps into the air, lowers three legs for support, and spits out a single seed. In a manner of moments a small stalk has grown bearing a single leaf. Compelled to harvest it from the ground, Olimar grabs the stalk of the plant and pulls the plant from the earth and encounters yet another alien.
A single red Pikmin stares at the man in wonder. It has a sharp pointed nose and it cocks its head to one side.
Not gonna lie, the first time this happened I was a jaded teenage boy and even I went, “Omg, it’s so cute.”
Olimar will later discover yellow and blue Pikmin, and utilizing each of their unique attributes he will steadily explore the planet, discover the 30 missing parts of his ship, and direct up to 100 Pikmin at a time who follow him to take parts back to his ship or fight various monsters.
While I was researching for this essay I read a number of reviews that argued that Pikmin was a Real-Time-Strategy game, RTS for short. I’ll be honest, that description made me stop and think for a moment, mostly because I had never thought of Pikmin that way. Pikmin’s narrative always seemed to be a purely adventure/exploration game similar to a number of classic sci-fi movies I had watched on Turner Classic Movies growing up. My ignorance here was certainly because I have usually just played games rather than deconstructing them to figure out how they work. Though another reason for my surprise was because I spent a lot of time playing RTS games growing up, usually Rise of Nations or Stronghold Crusader. These games involved growing crops to feed a population that would be used to gather more materials that could be spent creating armies to fight opponent NPCs. They were games that centered around a central base or location rather than exploring a world as a moveable, playable protagonist.
If I look at one example that dominated most of my early teenage years, stronghold Crusader is a perfect example of an RTS. It involves creating a functioning economy using npc peasants that can be assigned farms, businesses, and general menial tasks that in turn help the player build castles, assemble armies, and lead assaults against other npc leaders or other players through online play. Like Pikmin, troops require resources in order to acquire; Stronghold Crusader requires money and sometimes armaments, Pikmin requires currency in the form of numbered pellets and/or the corpses of defeated monsters. Each of these games requires strategy in terms of how best to navigate acquiring resources and conflict.
I have finished playing Pikmin once.
But I have effectively beat the game at least ten times.
The reason for this convoluted victory is simple: I feel too guilty making a “complete” playthrough of the game because truly finishing it is a death sentence for hundreds of Pikmin all in the name of a goddamn piggy-bank. I understand the importance of MacGuffins, and I am not immune to the allure of the “completionist” route, but something in me twists when I think of sending my Pikmin into this fight.
There’s a cruel irony in this admission because it’s coming from the man who sent 800 spearmen in Stronghold Crusader against the Caliph to see, “How they would do.”
The final level of Pikmin, a grassy region ominously called “The Final Trial,” is seemingly devoid of any and all enemies. It’s largely just filled with various obstacles like unmade bridges and rock walls that need to be blown up or knocked down. It’s only when stepping into the large sandy coliseum that the true test begins, as a clump of plants explodes out from beneath the dust and the massive beast known as Emperor Bulbax appears.
Now I was a scrub who had a guidebook so I was aware that this fight was coming so I knew how to prepare for the fight, and generally what would happen. What I did not expect however was how many of my Pikmin would die in this fight. I had, when I first entered the arena, somewhere around 900 Pikmin, when I left the stadium the first time, I was down to 400, or less.
Emperor Bulbax is one of the most difficult boss fights I have ever played in a video game as of this writing. The difficulty springs largely from the fact that, well, Bulbax is rather large. Bulbax is a Grubdog, one of the iconic enemy npcs of the game, and comparably, he’s the largest of the species, at least in terms of the first game. This size is a daunting endeavor in and of itself, but the problem is the coliseum you fight him in is finite, and while there is room for maneuverability, his primary attacks are to lick Pikmin up using a large sticky frog-tongue which can close the distance pretty quickly, or else to leap into the air and slam down upon Olimar and his troops. The first test of this fight is one that the player has been unknowingly working towards throughout the entirety of the game: how can you maneuver around and/or through an obstacle without dying or completely losing your Pikmin.
The second test is the actual target itself. Bulbax is vulnerable in one location, his face. Whereas every Grub-dog in the game has been vulnerable exclusively on their back and rump, Bulbax throws this system away by making his face the primary target thus complicating how best to attack him. First-time players will most likely assault his back discovering to their horror that the mess of plant matter and moss protects him from assault, and by this point in the game the player knows that attacking the feet will only result in dead Pikmin.
Which leads us back to the final test of this fight.
There is a sure way to easily Defeat Emperor Bulbax, and that is to throw a yellow Pikmin holding a bomb rock in front of him. The gluttonous slug will lick his lips, suck the little Pikmin up, swallow it down, and then the bomb will go off putting the monster into a temporary stupor allowing you to throw a number of Pikmin on his face to drain his HP quickly. This is, in terms of the guides consulted, the easiest way to defeat Emperor Bulbax, however I’ve listed it as a test to the player because the trial of Pikmin is not simply finding all the parts of Olimar’s damaged ship, it’s also navigating the death of the individual Pikmin themselves.
When a spearman in Stronghold Crusader dies there is a “death scene,” meaning the program’s code produces one of several possible mortality animations for that individual sprite. These would typically be grotesque and remind the player of the mortality of their units, but honestly speaking these never really bothered me. I suspect I just became inured to it since the game was largely built around fighting and killing enemy opponents. In one game alone against four NPCs my troops killed somewhere around 30,000 enemy soldiers. It’s difficult to be disturbed by death when it’s happening with such regularities.
So why my hesitation to lose Pikmin?
Probably because they’re cute. They’re like really sweet little dudes.
And also because they have souls.
That isn’t a cheap gag, Pikmin literally have souls and the player knows this because they can literally see them. Unless one is skilled, or a psychopath, it’s almost impossible to go through one run of the first Pikmin game without losing one Pikmin either to an enemy npc or natural element like fire or water. Losing one member of your army wouldn’t have the same weight that it does however because after the Pikmin is crushed, burned, eaten, crushed, or drowned they will produce a small whimper that on its own would be guilt inducing. But then, not a second later, a ghostly sprite emerges from the scene of the event in question that vaguely resembles a Pikmin. It matches the color of whatever Pikmin you were using. The shape wobbles up out of the scene of the disaster making another little whimper that sounds and then begins to vanish almost as soon as it emerges. And then it’s gone. The game has just informed you that that Pikmin is dead, and you just watched its soul pass on to the next world.
I stopped playing the game the first time this happened. I tried to reset so that the Pikmin wouldn’t die, but sure enough I lost another, and another, and I just had to keep going. But the guilt never faded. Unlike that Pikmin’s soul.
The fight against Emperor Bulbax in an unintentional moral combat (que the house music) because there really isn’t a way to emerge from that fight without losing Pikmin. The part that Bulbax has swallowed isn’t even a part Olimar requires in order to launch and that fact only furthers the moral conflict. Some players of course won’t have this struggle at all. Pikmin is a video game, and therefore a simulation, and so nothing is technically “real.” They’re just figures on a screen. I understand this mindset because I had this mindset in plenty of other games. But Pikmin’s visual and narrative tone shifted this usual mindset. The challenge of the game for me was no longer, what’s the quickest way to victory, but rather, what’s the least damaging way.
While researching for this essay I found an article on Polygon by Ana Diaz who seemed to share my moral conundrum. Her essay, I Can’t Stand It when Pikmin Die, is a wonderful examination of Pikmin, and the last three paragraphs of her essay perfectly summed up my own sensation of playing the game. She says,
Why I thought that a Pikmin dying over and over again is more humane than one dying once is beyond me. But I never questioned the system. I wanted to believe my brother. Still, this added lore helped me resolve a tension that exists within the game internally. On one hand, we don’t want to care about Pikmin. We need to see them as disposable soldiers because we can’t get hung up on losing a single character out of hundreds. Again, they need to be the equivalent to an insect.
But on the other hand, we need to care about them enough so we don’t lay them to endless waste and can’t progress through the game. So the developers create incentives for us to protect them. More Pikmin means more fighting power, after all. But I always found the emotional incentive to be much more powerful. The gut-wrenching feeling of seeing one die is the best reason the game designers could give us to protect them and thus, progress through the game.
In a medium where characters die over and over and it’s become so banal and invisible, there’s something special about caring a little too much.
Defeating Emperor Bulbax is difficult because he’s honestly a tough boss. But as this whole effort has shown, the reason why I hesitate to even face him is not because of a fear of failure. I hesitate because, by the time I’ve arrived at The Final Trial region I’ve spent a lot of time with the Pikmin. They’ve selflessly offered their time and bodies just so that I can survive long enough to escape the planet. And while I detest this word, it’s the most fitting to observe that it isn’t fair.
Pikmin as a game manages to create a Real-Time Strategy that actually allows the player to empathize with the figures that are being moved and ordered about, something that is unusual in that game genre. Some players found Pikmin too cute for their liking and returned to their more militaristic strategy games, and I can’t blame them because I played several of them myself. But Pikmin challenged me in a way that none of those games did; it asked me to consider if a trial was worth the cost of life it would take to win it.
At least once, the answer was yes. And I did at least have the solace of watching a cutscene where, as Olimar lifted off into space, the Pikmin looked around and began to attack a Grubdog on their own. The meaning of the scene was clear, the little guys would be fine on their own.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
11.6.2023
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