Welcome to my RA blog!
Welcome to the RA Blog! If you're unfamiliar, Retro Achievements is a website that adds an achievements system like you would find on Xbox, Steam, or Playstation, to all your favorite retro consoles. Its kind of my main thing, and I figured it would be fun to do a little blog writeup every time I am done with a set. Not really a "guide" as my videos kind of cover that stuff, but more so just my thoughts on the set overall. Maybe it'll help you decide if you want to take on a set or not, or maybe you just want to read my ramblings. No matter the reason, this is where I'll be posting my thoughts.
Pikmin!
My very first RA game! I LOVE pikmin. If there are no pikmin fans then I am dead. Such a great game, and the first one isn't afraid to pull punches which is something I appreciate because Pikmin 4 is the easiest game ever and that makes me sad. The achievement set for this is pretty straightforward too. 30/44 of the achievements are progression, one for each ship part which you collect as the goal of the game and so those are basically free as long as you're capable of completing the game..
Hocotate Speed Demon was probably my favorite achievement. Pikmin is all about micro managing your little guys and doing things efficently. 12 days I think is a reasonable challenge. It's difficult enough that you do have to have some skill to pull it off, but not so much that you need to be a master. I actually got this acheivement in the same run as Allergic to Blue, which is the achievement for collecting all of the Forest of Hope parts without blue pikmin, so that was a fun extra challenge for me since I consider myself pretty good at this game.
The achievement's for getting all of the endings were the most annoying, mainly because in order to get the "bad" ending you have to just hit "end the day" 30 times in a row. And then for the "ok" ending you just collect most of the parts and then skip to the end of the day however many times it takes to reach the end. I get it, you do see alternate cutscenes so its achievements that lead you to some content you might have seen, so I understand why they're there. You can save a little time by getting all but 1 neccessary part for the "ok" ending, skip to day 29, and then make a copy of your save file. That way you can not get the last part to get the bad ending, and then load the other file and do collect it for the "ok" ending. Cuts down on the grind a bit.
Hardest achievement by far was Distant Spring challenge mode. Forest Navel challenge was also a bit difficult, but Distant spring you need to play perfectly. Honestly its harder then the 12 day speedrun. I learned a neat trick where you can get one of the pearls from the claim without building a bridge by just picking it up and dropping it over and over again, but even with that it was still very percise timing for everything. If you're new to pikmin you're gonna have to learn ALOT of pro strats, and even if you're experienced you still will have to do several practice runs.
I'd give the set a 4/5 difficulty simply for the Challenge mode achievements. Ignoring those its a 2/5. Really fun set though, and I REALLY reccomend Pikmin even if you aren't looking to master it.