Written by Vixichrome and Luna Sugarstar
Oh the pains of being so deeply in love with a video game series that's had modest at best success. Pikmin had always struggled to reach wider audiences, whether that be because of the series seemingly being a little too "odd" for mainstream casual gaming audiences or the daunting premise of being responsible for the lives of dozens to hundreds of little dudes that can be brutally eaten, burned, and all sorts of other violent verbs. Maybe it's simply because the games have just had the worst luck only getting fresh releases on consoles that are underperforming. Whatever the case may be, it seems like even the bigger Nintendo fandom sphere just knows Pikmin for that funny space man from Smash.
We were nine when the first Pikmin released as a launch title on the Gamecube, and we were enamored by this bizarre setting from Nintendo that we'd never seen before. Between the unique hook of the gameplay and having all sorts of funny monsters in it, and of course the titular Pikmin being tantalizingly colorful and adorable.
This might sound like a bit of a review at first but bare with us, we feel like this context is important to understanding the scope of Pikmin. (This is also going to sound like major plot spoilers but trust us, it isn't, it's literally just set dressing for the series.) The Pikmin series takes place on a planet called PNF-404, better known as Earth. More specifically, a post-apocalyptic Earth so far flung into the future that all that's left of mankind are stray objects. The main character Olimar and the Pikmin themselves are actually roughly only an inch tall, so Olimar must utilize Pikmin to defend himself from the tinier wildlife on the planet's surface, mostly featuring things like bugs, slugs, and frogs. All staples for a good time here on our blog!
It's through this lens that a lot of the creatures throughout the series get their inspiration from; they're hypothetical wildlife for an Earth several million years in the future from now! But we're getting ahead of ourselves, dialing it back to Pikmin 1, we're going to be covering all of the ingame creatures in roughly the order you encounter them in. THAT SAID we'll be yoinking any details that come from future games such as Piklopedia entries from 2 and 3, since that's where the juicy details really start to come in.
The Pikmin
And of course, what better place than to start with the Pikmin themselves? The Pikmin are the multi-colored little men that you pick from the ground and they'll be more than willing to do the bidding of whatever portly cartoon astronaut with a whistle happens to do be around. These fellows look a lot like sentient plants, with bodies that very much look like root vegetables like carrots or beats. Behavior-wise though, they behave a lot more like eusocial insects like ants or bees; performing tasks in unison for the betterment of the colony, including using tools, tearing down obstacles, and carrying back the corpses of slain enemies to give their "Onion" home for the nutrients required to procreate more Pikmin. These little guys are elaborate carnivorous plants!!
These are the "Onions" in question, a term coined by Olimar since he somehow thinks this thing resembles an onion, but I guess you just can't trust a dude who keeps his eyes closed all the time. They act as both hive, shelter, and queen of Pikmin colonies. Their exact relation to Pikmin has been left vague, but if it's anything like bees or ants, Onions probably occasionally produce a special seed that will eventually grow to become its own Onion. It is interesting how much more traditionally plant-like the Onion is overall, with little stems for "legs" and a flower on top.
But back to the Pikmin themselves, they're easily the cutest and most marketable part of the game, with them being little flower people with tiny baby voices and being very simplistic on the features, most of them just adding a single identifying trait to go along with their color. The red ones are immune to fire and are better at fighting, maybe something to do with that pointy nose-like appendage it has. The yellows have huge parachute-like ears, thus are floatier and can be thrown higher and would be immune to electricity in later games. Finally, the blues can move freely in water and avoid drowning thanks to their gills. They have mouths to filter water much like fish would, but their actual gills have just managed to remain invisible. Obviously Pikmin are simply adorable little guys that could do a ton of harm, and it definitely feels like Nintendo struck gold with such simple yet iconic designs, setting them apart from other "massable mook" type of designs like certain other big-eyed yellow guys that would crop up years later.
The Pikmin haven't even changed much over the years, at best picking up some more expressive eyes that are a little less thousand-yard-stare-ey, but also their skin now has a bit of a fruit-like texture to it, like how red there looks a bit like it has apple skin.
Pellet Posy
Yes, amusingly enough, these count as creatures. Plants ARE still a life form after all! They're even amusingly included on the enemy rollcall in the first game's best ending. Pellet Posies are honestly probably the only design in the series we're actively not a fan of. Maybe it's absolutely ludicrous for us, Nintendo fans, to be upset about some pieces of foliage. But they do kind of bust the immersion a bit. The rest of the plants and things in the series are pretty naturalistic but these right here just, have numbers in bold font on them.
It's just... hard to buy, y'know? That this plant just grows out in the wild somewhere and manages to grow a pattern that just happens to look exactly like the number "5". The fact that these plant's nectar crystalizes into a solid pellet is neat, but that bit just seems like a step too far. It's very much something that's there solely for gameplay clarity, but we still feel like there could've been far more elegant ways to convey the number. Maybe having spots on them to corelate to how many Pikmin they'll produce instead of just blunt numbers would do better. Like sure, they do their job, but we don't have to like it.
Red/Spotty Bulborb
Yes, these creatures have scientific names, as the Pikmin series has its own rudimentary taxonomy and it's BRILLIANT AND COOL AND BOY it'd be even better if more games where the enemies were just plain wild animals did this.
These creatures are also fairly iconic to Pikmin, arguably being the "Goombas" of the series. Bulborbs are definitely another fine example of looking extremely recognizable while also being exceedingly simple. They're little more than a blob with a mouth and eyestalks on two legs. Even a design as alien-looking as this thing holds onto the idea that this is a creature that could've feasibly evolved from a modern-day creature. Because doesn't look a little bit like a frog, between its big mouth and bulbous eyes? It's like an amphibian that lost the need to be amphibious!
Red Bulborbs are nocturnal creatures, normally only ever seen sleeping during the day, which tends to make them easy pickings for your Pikmin army. But once awoken, they'll simply pursue and eat Pikmin until it's strayed far away enough from its resting spot, where it'll return and fall back asleep.
The design of course is simply adorable, with the funny eyestalks and amusing spotty pattern on its body. Its proportions being comical even very much lends itself to the frogs it possibly takes inspiration from, which can get awfully weird-shaped sometimes. Just ask pacman frogs!
Dwarf Red Bulborb
Breadbug family
Then there's a much more literal "goomba" creature, what seems to be the previous Red Bulborb's kids. But not so fast! Bulborbs are taxonomically classed as "Grab dogs", whereas these guys are classed as "Breadbugs". They're mimics pretending to be Bulborb nymphs to use the big guys as protection! It's absolutely INCREDIBLE to see the Pikmin series have such an unnecessarily well thought-out ecosystem for its fictional future-Earth. Mimicry for animals to pretend to be the young of other animals happens surprisingly often out there in the real world, so it's rad to see the nature game do it too!
Sheargrubs
Mandiblard Family
Ah, the first of many insects! The Sheargrubs are burrowing pests that hide underground and only unearth when tasty Pikmin are nearby. And they're absolutely adorable little maggot-like creatures, their main differentiating feature being that they have surprisingly large mandibles on them! They also have a dimorphism thing going on, with the purple males having larger mandibles and are capable of eating Pikmin, but the pink, soft-looking females are harmless and can't attack.
Iridescent Flint Beetle
Flint beetle family
Then there's these adorable guys. They also burrow under the ground, but are easily startled and are sent into a fleeing frenzy when Pikmin walk nearby. Pikmin are attracted to their iridescent elytra and go on the offensive, but this is futile. In order to attack them properly, they must be struck with a throw from above, at which point they'll drop their foodstores; nectar and pellets for you to collect. You can never truly kill them though, only bop them a maximum of 3 times before they flee back underground.
Design-wise it's adorable how it's little more than the extreme simplification of a beetle, just being a little ball on legs and having two cartoony eyestalks.
Breadbug
Breadbug family
And hey, there's the "main" species of Breadbug! These creatures, rather than prey off Pikmin, instead run around stealing food like stray pellets and corpses and dragging them back to its home nest. Their blubbery fleshy hide makes them immune to most attacks, but direct strikes from above will hurt them a little bit. But what does the most damage is trying to take back whatever prey item it's trying to drag back to its nest and allow your Pikmin to overwhelm the Breadbug in sheer dragging power, sending it directly to smack its forehead into the Onion, damaging it greatly.
We love that you can tell at a glance that these things are not-too-far cousins of Bulborbs! With the same general body plan right down to only having two legs and being characterized with a big blobby shape. Simply adorable!
Fiery Blowhog
If Bulborbs are the "Goombas", then these guys are about the closest analog to "Koopas". The Fiery Blowhog is actually one of the extremely small amount of mammalian creatures on the planet, with its ancestor being up in the air a bit. Its common and scientific name elude to a pig, but the presence of a trunk and thick-looking, grey skin points a bit toward elephants and other pachyderms. Oddly enough, Olimar doesn't seem to agree this is a mammal, as he doesn't acknowledge the existence of them until an enemy from the third game.
Fiery Blowhog is another beautifully simple design, with a flask-shaped body and a trunk topped off with red lips that it spews fire from. Apparently it keeps a liquid inside of an organ within its body, and this chemical combusts on contact with oxygen when it spits it up. Neato!
Shearwig
A close relative of the Sheargrubs from earlier, this acts much the same way in that they hide underground and only rise to ambush unsuspecting Pikmin. The difference this time being they can use their wings to take off when they're in danger, then requiring you to directly land a Pikmin onto them mid-air to finish them off.
Their design is obviously not that different, just change them to green and give them wings. And sadly no good lone view of the model seems to exist, but they're adorable! Very much has the charm of a fly, if you find flies with mandibles the size of the rest of their body charming.
Wogpole
Wogpoles are about what you'd expect, little tadpoles with big eyes. Probably the most vanilla design in all of Pikmin, just given how little it's changed from its very obvious ancestor. They're not even particularly dangerous. They just flee at the sight of Pikmin and are, at worst, just kind of annoying.
Wollywog
Wogpoles will, however..... grow up to be something else a little later. We never see the tadpole form of these pale froggies, and it's not known if there's a point to that or if it's just kind of assumed Wogpoles look similar between the two species.
Either way, this frog is apparently a cave-dweller, given its pale complexion and stout figure. Frogs seem like a shoe-in for any game starring bugs or bug-adjacent fellows, but what's a shocker is their apparent lack of a mouth. Frog enemies are usually all about shooting their tongue out and swallowing things! It's odd how the lack of a mouth is never acknowledged by Olimar, either. Instead, it hops high into the air and crushes Pikmin under its body. Why? Just to be a complete agent of chaos, or just plain being an asshole.
Honeywisp
Here's a lovely little thing! This creature looks a bit like sea angels, an aquatic gastropod with a see-through body and a sweet, angelic appearance despite how brutal they look while on the hunt. Sadly, Honeywisps don't turn their face inside-out to reveal a mass of tentacles, but they do harmlessly float in the air, of all places. The apparently feed on nectar and carry in in blobs, which Olimar can throw a Pikmin at to knock it loose.
Honeywisps have such adorable faces, with the simplest facsimile of visible internal organs inside a translucent body and a cute face. Curiously, these critters also just sort of phase in and out of existence. They only appear when Pikmin are near, where they simply emerge out of nothing, float around for a bit, and then shrink back into nothing. Additionally, being hit with a Pikmin apparently causes their entire physical form to collapse, making a specimen virtually impossible to capture. Elusive little fellas!
Mamuta
The Mamuta is easily one of the series' most interesting creatures. This odd, adorable lump of a thing with a lob-sided head and asymmetrical arms is surprisingly docile, only going on the offensive if it's attacked first. Even more interesting is that it doesn't even kill Pikmin; when it slams its hands down with great force, it simply plants the Pikmin back into the ground, as well as instantly flowering them. What a peculiar behavior!
They apparently are knowledgeable enough to actually cultivate fields of plants, with it having a diet of seeds and fruit. This isn't even that far-fetched from real life; ants have been masters of agriculture long before humans even humaned! Ants are so smart they can even farm mold by leaving organic matter in damp places to encourage the mold they like to eat to grow!
Curiously, the Mamuta itself has an odd texture to it that isn't elaborated on in either Piklopedia entry, other than a suggestion from Louie that it's apparently inedible, but nonetheless "tastes like chicken" somehow. The texture seems to suggest the creature has a stony skin, but it's conveniently not appeared in Pikmin 3 to make its HD debut where we could get a better look at its skin. Curiously, the marking bands on its arms look weirdly similar to the markings on the Onion. Just what is going on with you, Mamuta?!
Goolix
The Goolix is another odd creature, seemingly being a giant amoeba! The creature is made up of some gel-like membrane that is apparently water-like enough for Blue Pikmin to survive in it and attack its two floating nuclei, allegedly containing the creature's nervous system. Of course, this thing probably isn't a giant single-celled organism but it's nonetheless interesting to see something imitate one. Even its method of consumption is similar; envelop Pikmin into its body supposedly to digest them. It's a shame it's an enemy only to appear in the first game, it would've been neat to see it elaborated on.
And no, there's no canon scientific names for some of these critters. The Piklopedia was a feature introduced in 2 and returned in the Deluxe re-release of 3, so the creatures that appeared in Pikmin 1 and never again are just kind of left behind in that regard.
Pearly Clamclamp
Another enemy that is not only oddly vanilla but is oddly cartoonish. A lot of Pikmin enemies have that tinge of stylization to them, but Pearly Clamclamp is sort of just straight up a cartoon clam, complete with opening wide and having its foot appear more like a tongue. Despite the lack of any obvious organs, its primary strategy is to lure Pikmin in with its tantalizing pearl, an object worth a lot of Pikmin if obtained, and chomps down on them if they remain inside for too long.
Burrowing Snagret
Snavian family
And here's the series' one and only avian creature. Strange, given you'd think birds would be the obvious adversary to tiny ant-like plant men, but we digress. The Burrowing Snagret is a hilarious idea for a creature, presented as a cross between a snake and a long-necked bird. As the name implies, is does the opposite a bird would do and hides below the ground, emerging when Pikmin are near and will begin picking them off one by one with its long beak. A scary creature indeed! There even is the detail that the Snagret only has feathers on its face, seeing as its long neck features the really uncomfortable texture of bare bird skin.
But what really makes the Snagret weird is what lies beneath the ground. For one thing, in order to hide this fact for the time, when the Snagret was defeated, its body would explode for some reason, just leaving a severed bird head for your Pikmin to carry home. Rated E for everyone!
While we would rather save major redesigns for older enemies for an eventual Pikmin 3 creature review, we do feel like THIS is worth highlighting here. You'd think the Snagret was merely the neck of a larger bird creature, or that it ended off with a snake-like tail. Instead, it's essentially a bird's neck and head hopping around on a single leg. Freaky! While this reveal technically didn't happen until Pikmin 3, Pikmin 2's Pileated Snagret is the same way, so it was reasonable enough to assume the two had the same, bizarre anatomy.
Armored Cannon Beetle
This beast of an bug is one of the biggest enemies in the game, only really being outdone by the actual bosses. It stomps around, and at the sight of Pikmin, it'll inhale air through the hole on its head before firing a boulder out of its siphon-like proboscis. Its exoskeleton is also too thick for Pikmin attacks to hurt it, so instead you can toss a Pikmin into its "blowhole" to lodge its inhaling, causing it to open its elytra to reveal its much softer abdomen, giving the Pikmin a chance to attack.
Design-wise this is actually one of our favorites in the whole series, with it really looking tough and cool in black. Having a separate breathing apparatus from its mouth is also neat! If we go by the description of the larval forms in the sequels, they ingest ore, which is what allows them to fire boulders in the first place! It's just such a shame they've never appeared in the series again thus far, only said larval forms appear. They deserve a Pikmin 3-style glow-up!
Puffstool
This walking fungus is yet another of our favorites from the first game, being a fat sentient mushroom with comically tiny legs and a funny, stilted walking animation because of it. And the presence of ADORABLE eyestalks is always appreciated. And is it Miyamoto's influence making it so this monster vaguely looks like a Goomba?
Puffstools are cowardly, and will simply run away from Pikmin and trip and fall upside-down when attacked. After it gets back up, though, it'll spread its spores around it, turning any Pikmin unlucky enough to be nearby into...
Mushroom Pikmin! Purple Pikmin before Purple Pikmin! And they're just as adorable as regular Pikmin! The dreary eyes combined with a zombified, pupil-less look really hit home that this Pikmin's being controlled by a parasite. Which isn't even that fantastical of an idea, it's just Pikmin's version of a cordyceps fungus! It's a shame you can't keep these guys, they're cute, but they'll also attack Olimar and other Pikmin, but shaking them off will snap them out of being brainwashed.
Beady Long Legs
One of exactly two whole bosses in the game, it's a creature taller than any other, standing on its titular long legs which all support a single sphere for a body and nothing more. Beady is one of the biggest anatomical anomalies of the series, with the captains being perplexed by its very existence. While clearly designed after a Daddy Long Legs, or Harvestman, its scientific name suggests it's not actually an arachnid. Well, of course, since it doesn't have eight legs, but it's a pretty usual stylization thing to give arthropods less limbs than they should. Instead, it's apparently some other "evolutionary line of insectoids" according to Olimar.
What's especially peculiar is its complete lack of any facial features, with no eyes or mandibles of any kind on it. As well as the bizarre, waxy skin texture it has, and that perfectly spherical body that is in no way segmented into "head" or "abdomen". It's apparently here that all its internal organs are housed, but upon defeating the thing, its head splits open like a party ball to drop its contents of... pellets and any ship parts/treasures/fruits it happens to have on its person. In fact, this exact body structure and texture makes it look like a giant, faceless Scuttlebug from Mario 64. Spooky!
Spotty Bulbear
The cousin species to the Bulborbs, here's a Bulbear! Characterized by being larger, scarier, and more fierce eaters than the Bulborbs, they're not entirely just a palette swap. They have a much rounder face, and big lips to warf down more Pikmin with. In the first game they behaved more or less the same to Bulborbs, but in both sequels they ditch their nocturnal hunter shtick to become much more active, wandering around a given area until they find Pikmin to chase down and eat. This makes them one of the scariest and most difficult common enemies in the game! And as if that wasn't enough, depleting their health merely incapacitates them. If you don't harvest their body before their HP reaches full again, they'll revive and continue the hunt!
Puffy Blowhog
The Fiery Blowhog has a cousin too, the airborne Puffy Blowhog! Again, it's so neat that some enemies just get to be different species of each other! Makes the ecosystem of this fictional planet feel so much more realized! Puffy Blowhogs inflate a "floatation bladder" with an internally-made hydrogen, allowing them to float off the ground.
And instead of spitting fire, it blows gusts of air that send Pikmin flying. But it apparently uses this function to blow through leaf litter and then feasting on the bugs hiding underneath! And to escape its own predators, it can also apparently collapse its floatation bladder to send out enough air to send it flying around like a sputtering balloon. It's so neat how what's normally just some amusing death animation is actually a well-thought out escape mechanism for the creature!
Design-wise it's also easy to see where this creature takes its balloon inspiration, with it being especially balloon-shaped. Loving how it has little flippers in place of legs as well, and the cute peering eyes. It's apparently also electrified, the pulses of which can be seen as waves of light on its skin!
Swooping Snitchbug
Huzzah, more bugs! These bugs may look like they shouldn't be able to fly, but they actually flap their feather-like antennae to lift off the ground! Which isn't very realistic, especially when its whole "thing" is carrying stuff, but it's FUN. The Snitchbug is an adorable little bug with a big fat body and just a single pair of arms, which it uses to swoop in and snatch up Pikmin before throwing them into the ground, apparently with enough force to re-plant them. They're just around to be a general nuisance, but they're a cute nuisance!
Yellow Wollywog
And here's the other froggy we were talking about. It's simply a slightly tougher offshoot of the Wollywog, meant for a more above-ground setting with a more vibrant color scheme and even more of a lump for a body. Funnily enough, these would go on to become more series mainstays than normal Wollywogs, with them appearing in 3 and Hey Pikmin while the Wollywog gets to enjoy retirement.
Water Dumple
That's right, one more species of Grub-dog! This time, it's an aquatic species that has a slug-like appearance and scoots toward Pikmin before trying to take a bite of them. Its design is overall simple, even moreso than their terrestrial cousins, but it is curious how they're portrayed as eyeless, and aren't even acknowledged as such by Olimar. Perhaps when you live in shallow puddles, all you really need for sensory is the ability to detect movement in the water.
Smoky Progg
And here's one of the whole series' most infamous creatures. If you reach the Distant Spring before day 14, you will find an egg south of base. If you disturb it and don't break it outright, this thing will hatch out of it and then B-line for the landing site, where it will then wreak havoc by going from Onion to Onion and sending out a roar that uproots any Pikmin in the ground before simply walking over them, instantly suffocating a killing them under the mass of muck that is its body. It's presented as a "Superboss", a very dangerous foe who gives a big reward in a golden pearl-like object that yields 100 Pikmin.
The thing itself is such an anomaly, being one of the creatures that appears in this game and then never again, and looking so viscerally unnatural compared to pretty much everything else in the game. Its appearance is almost ghost-like rather than any naturally living creature, just being a pile of living green sludge with glowing eyes, two legs, while the rest of it is just a smoky trail of poison. The canon explanation behind its existence is that it's actually a malformed Mamuta larva, maybe having something to do with forcing it to hatch prematurely.
So many theories of this creature suspect it of outright malevolent intent, as if the one true force of evil on the planet. Possibly even repeatedly reincarnating as the future "Wraith" enemies. We don't really buy that, though we do admit the "Mamuta larva" thing seems like an awfully convenient hand-wave, moreso like they realized the two enemies were like opposites; the Mamuta planting Pikmin harmlessly and the Progg uprooting Pikmin in order to kill them.
It could also somewhat be a reference to the paradox frog, a species of frog whose tadpole form is MUCH larger than it is as an adult. It's ultimately hard to tell since we don't know what a non-malformed Mamuta larva even looks like, but the fact that something seemingly stony could potentially start life as a gaseous mass certainly adds another bizarre wrinkle to Mamuta's weird and questionable taxonomic origin.
Emperor Bulblax
That just leaves the final boss, a super-sized giant Bulborb cousin that very much looks toad-ey compared to Bulborb being a frog. Bulblax here rests underground, apparently at rest so much that its hard hide has grown moss and even a few plants and fungus! This moss cover even gives it extremely effective camouflage! It also has a very cool, flabby face with huge lips that give its face a lot of definition in a neat way. Its legs are even notably thicker than Bulborb's, and all this topped off with the teeniest little eyestalks in proportion to the rest of it!
Its main mode of attack is that tongue it has - it's the most frog-like of all the Grub-dogs! Its adhesive tongue can be whipped around to scoop up gobs of Pikmin into its mouth. It even licks its lips if Pikmin attached to it are too close to its mouth. It also can start leaping into the air to crush Pikmin underneath it. This is easily the most deadly of the Pikmin series' final bosses simply with how it's able to kill an entire army in a single attack.
All in all, the first Pikmin is up there as some of the coolest, most well-realized sets of video game creature designs out there. We can't praise enough how cool it is that there's taxonomic thought put into these things! Even if the scientific names can be jokey some of the time. But it's only something that would get emphasized further in the sequels, which have even better creature designs that this game does, believe it or not! We will most definitely be covering Pikmin 2 and 3 some day, and maybe even Hey Pikmin's creatures, though we may have to get around to actually playing that game first.
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