Reviewing Monsters: Pikmin Bosses

Last time we covered the common enemies of the first Pikmin game, this time we're covering the bosses! As with the previous part, I'm going to leave a little disclaimer that I know next to nothing about the game other than its premise and what I can find on the Wiki, so these bosses are definitely not in the order they appear in the game, and just a completely arbitrary listing!

Anyway, not much to say here. Here goes!




The Pikmin
Actually, I never talked about the Pikmin themselves, which isn't exactly fair. They are little plant-goblins that you, the humanoid Olimar, end up befriending and planting. That's how they propagate, with you planting these plant-creatures and they'll pop out like mandrakes of myth, with little humanoid bodies and either a leaf, a bud or a flower depending on how long you let the Pikmin 'cook'. In the first Pikmin game (which is what we're covering here) there are three types accessible -- red, yellow and blue. They look neat, make fun noises and are just cute enough to be endearing yet look just off to have a neat alien quality to them. The reds are fireproof and are the strongest in battle; the yellow one can float higher when you chuck them into the air because those ears double as pseudo-wings, plus they can carry bombs for some reason; the blue ones have gills (which resemble humanoid mouths) and can move through water.



Armored Cannon Beetle (Granitus chukkulinae)
Our first boss is the Armored Cannon Beetle, of the Granitus genus and the only member of its genus in this first game. And it's a pretty neat-looking creature, a vaguely beetle-like creature covered with a rock-like carapace, and with a huge cannon-shaped mouth that shoots out rocks. It sure does look pretty dang cool, like some sort of organic technology sci-fi spider-tank, only given a more naturalistic flair. I do like the little detail that on top of its massive dome is a little blowhole that allows the Cannon Beetle to inhale the air it needs to blow out the rocks it shoots out of its mouth. The Armored Cannon Beetle may be a fantasy game enemy, but it's a fantasy game enemy with a quasi-believable biology, dang it! Anyway, this one is pretty cool and threatening, and you defeat it by avoiding its rock attacks and attacking its weak spot, the soft turtle-like underbelly, while clogging up the blowhole.

Not the most impressive boss, as far as video game enemies go, but a pretty suitable stronger enemy for the whimsy 'mutated-nature' feel of Pikmin!


Beady Long Legs (Pseudoarachnia armoralis)
Oh, okay, this one is cool. The Beady Long Legs is a giant spider, or, well, a spider-esque monster if its genus of Pseudoarachnia is anything to go by. But instead of just being a huge arthropod, the Beady Long Legs looks more like a planetarium model of Jupiter sprouted a bunch of legs from its top, and it just looks like such a wacky monster that I totally believe that this isn't even an arthropod in the strictest sense. I do like the fact that it's just a bunch of legs with a main orb-like body suspended by it. Hell, even beating the Beady Long Legs isn't too hard -- the orb is clearly its main body and the weak spot, it's just that the Long Legs is so tall that only the yellow Pikmin can reach it.

The game's various lore pieces note that the Beady Long Legs are part of the 'arachnorb' family, and that they are a completely separate evolutionary line of insect-esque creatures, and the orb carries all of its internal organs with "no organs that would correspond to a normal head or abdomen". That is such a cool description! In the game where Olimar starts cooking every single enemy, eating one will cause "prolonged writhing and uncontrollable mirth", so it's flesh makes you high or something. A pretty cool monster concept, and one that the game actually leaves mysterious enough that I do wonder how this thing even works biologically. How does it feed? What does it feed on? Why does it go around stomping all of the Pikmin?


Puffstool (Aspergilla podronis)
The real-world Aspergillus genus is that of mould instead of toadstools, but okay. The Puffstool is a huge fat mushroom with buggy eyestalks and comically tiny little legs that let it waddle around, and unlike most bosses, the Puffstool will actually run away when your Pikmin army start to swarm it, which I imagine would be comical with those teeny tiny feet. The mushroom cap is apparently invulnerable, and you need to get the Puffstool to trip and fall to expose its fleshy stalk to Pikmin beat-up sessions. Of course, after being beaten down, the Puffstool will right itself up and unleash a cloud of spores... which will cause tiny mushrooms to grow on nearby Pikmin, causing them to turn hostile and attack your other Pikmin, so it's an interesting boss in that the Puffstool itself is just a damage sponge, but it will basically fuck up your entire party by mind-controlling parts of it. I do like the idea that one of the stronger enemies for a mostly plant-based game is a parasitic fungus.


Burrowing Snagret (Shiropedes anacondii)
Okay, this one is... an interesting one. The Burrowing Snagret is a fusion between a snake and an egret, and it sure is an interesting pair of animals to fuse, particularly for a mainly Tremors-style subterranean serpent. Most combinations of snakes and birds tended to go for a more airborne creature, something like a Couatl, or at least an imposing Cockatrice or something. This specific combination -- a bird's head on a snake, and then making the whole thing a creature that attacks by burrowing -- is so freaking bizarre. The way you fight it is appropriately video-game-y, where you have to trick the Snagret into bursting out of the ground, miss its prey and have its beak get stuck to the ground and leaving it vulnerable to your gang of leaf-pixies to beat up its weak bird head.

I do absolutely love how the game notes that you can distinguish the Snagret from the Snarrow by the hue of its feathers and tail markings, and apparently the Snagret and Snarrows have a huge overlap in prey and territory. To date, the "Snarrow" has never appeared in any single Pikmin game.


Goolix (Binuclei siphonophorus)
The Goolix is a gigantic amoeba of the Binuclei genus, and it behaves like an amoeba, just blobbing along the way and drowning any Pikmin unfortunate enough to be in its path, with only the blue ones among your army of leaf-critters being immune thanks to also being partially made out of water. It's ultimately just a giant amoeba enemy, not really doing a whole ton with the concept other than presenting us with a large one. It is rather unique mostly because all the other creatures in this game are some sort of animal or plant, instead of a microorganism. 

You basically have to swarm the Goolix's nuclei, and apparently the blue nucleus is easier to damage but you need to take a longer time to do so. The brown one is more vulnerable, taking more damage over a shorter period of time, but you have to sacrifice Pikmin to lob onto that specific nucleus.


Emperor Bulblax (Oculus supremus)
Of course the Bulborbs have a boss monster, and it's the Emperor Bulblax, the Oculus supremus. The Emperor Bulblax is the final boss of Pikmin, and it sure is a huge, mutated Bulborb! Trading in the adorable cartoon reptile face for a flabby one that's a cross between a slug and a pug, the Emperor Bulblax has bizarre proportions with a massive goopy green body that is overgrown with moss and mushrooms, and two tiny legs that really don't look like they can support his majesty's royal weight. Its main feature, though, is its frog-like prehensile tongue, allowing it a reach that its lesser kin doesn't have access to. I'm not sure what that half-melted green goopy part of his anatomy is supposed to be. Is it just partially goopy slime, or is his body just covered with a slimy biofilm mass of moss and mushrooms?

The Emperor Bulblax is yet another one of the enemies in this game that buries itself in the ground to ambush prey, only allowing its two slug-like eyestalks to pop above the soil in order to look for prey, before unleashing its tongue to nom on whatever passes through. Also, y'know, it's pretty dang huge, and it's just such a shame that the massive gluttonous grub-dog has eaten the last part you need to fix your ship, because, well, you have to bring down this massive emperor to beat the game. The vulnerable part of the Emperor is its face, and you beat him by tricking him into eating bombs instead of Pikmin.


Smoky Progg
We have another boss to talk about, though, and this one is pretty dang cool. The Smoky Progg is a secret boss and one of the toughest ones in the game, requiring you to gain access to a certain area before Day 15 (it is a timed game, after all), and crack open an egg, at which point the Smoky Progg is unleashed and it's... it sure is a pretty strange creature, a massive egg-like ghostly mist monster with two spindly arms and glowing pink eyes. It's a simple monster trope, just a formless mass of mist or smoke or whatever with glowing eyeballs, but it sure is effective, and the stark difference of the Progg with the rest of Pikmin's enemies, which all tend to be animal, plant or fungal based is pretty dang striking! The Progg doesn't even have a Latin scientific name, which makes it feel a bit more inhuman!

The Progg also behaves strangely, bursting out of its egg and making a beeline towards your home camp, the landing site, uprooting any Pikmin sprouts it passes through and unleashing a cloud of gas that will suffocate both Captain Olimar and his Pikmin buddies. It's a pretty dang hard enemy to kill, and interestingly, Olimar speculates in-universe that this is a malformed larval Mamuta. Mamuta being those mysterious rock-dudes that will help upgrade your Pikmin into Flowered Pikmins, and are also the only other non-organic-based monster in the game. So it's basically a mutated smoky fetus of a rock golem? Okay, sure, why not. It's basically an eldritch abomination and the safest way to get rid of it is to not fuck with the egg at all, or to completely destroy the egg in a single strike, but you'd then miss out on the rewards. It's a pretty neat, creepy mystery monster that still fits pretty well into the game's art style. I like him.

And that's all the Pikmin enemies! That was fun to do. I might actually do this a bit more with a bunch of other games, there's just something neat going into these monster reviews blind and reading about these wacky creatures for the first time. Now if you'll excuse me, I'll have to borrow a Nintendo Wii and a Pikmin CD...