The Confusing and Convoluted Lore of the Pikmin Franchise, part 1

For a game where cute little plants follow you around, sing little tunes, and bring become your best friends no questions asked, the lore surrounding the Pikmin franchise is quite dark and extreme. Hidden behind its cute and bright facade lies a post-apocolyptic earth, an ancient Japanese spirit who intentionally maroons spacecraft, and a unholy amount of mutated creatures your must fend off. excluding the creatures, most of the elements of Pikmin's lore is subtle and only visible to those who look for it. For those who played the game and weren't looking (how Nintendo intended you to play), here is what hides behind the scenes in the first game, Pikmin.

Our story starts with Captain Olimar, an average joe who works for Hocotate intergalactic shipping company. one day on a delivery run, Olimar is passing by some strange, unidentified planet, the planet we know as Earth. Then suddenly, he is hit seemingly out of nowhere by a meteor, and is sent plummeting to the surface. This is the intro cutscene of the first installment, "Pikmin". As the game begins Olimar (the player) wakes up next to his spacecraft, only to discover all of its parts had been lost in the crash. The air on the planet is toxic to Olimar, and he only has a 30 day supply of breathable air stored in his spacesuit. Olimar begins exploring, in hopes to find intelligent life or maybe pats of his ship, and stumbles across a strange oinion like plant in the ground. he approaches it an it immediately springs to life, spitting out the very first red pikmin (at least that we see). They received the name pikmin from Olimar, as he noticed they looked almost identical to the pikpik carrots he eats back on his home planet. Over the next 30 days, with the help of the red, blue and yellow pikmin, Olimar manages to collect all the parts to his ship and escape the planet, returning to Hocotate.

So, what clues do we get from this game about the lore? Well first, it is very evident even from the first installment that something intentionally caused Olimar to crash. As you begin to rebuild Olimar’s ship, he will give a small description to each part you find, and one sticks out from the rest, the laser cannon. The description is as follows “I've found the Nova Blaster! This emits a dazzling burst of light capable of destroying almost anything! I'm not exactly sure about this, but the promotional brochure claims that its blasts can travel in the currents of space-time, smashing through stars and into the rifts of space. This is a weapon of such incredible destructive force that it can blast stars into tiny pieces... It has a strange allure” (Olimars notes, Pikmin 1). This makes you wonder, why didn’t he obliterate the meteor that crashed him on the planet in the first place, his ship has hyperspace technology but no self defense mechanism? This reveals that someone or something caused him the crash, as if the laser cannon can destroy stars, it can easily destroy a small meteor, unless it wasn’t a meteor or perhaps controlled by some entity. Another bit of lore to point out is that this is Earth long after humans are gone. For one there are remains of our civilization all over the place, glass bottles, boxes with our numerical system on it, tin cans, animal skulls and much more. As of yet there is no explanation as to what happened to humans, but by the looks of all the strange creatures we encounter throughout the game, is easy to suggest that a nuclear fallout occurred, resulting in everyone going underground, or leaving the planet, or both. however for now we will save that discussion for Pikmin 2.