El Direct sorpresa de Pikmin Day: detalles de Switch 2, sin juego nuevo

Nintendo dropped an unannounced Pikmin Day Direct on the morning of Saturday, October 31. In a presentation of roughly ten minutes, Shigeru Miyamoto declared that November 1 will be known as Pikmin Day from this year on, then walked through what is coming for the series' two most recent games. As Kotaku and GoNintendo both point out, it contained no new game announcements.

The date is a visual joke: Miyamoto's reasoning, reported by Kotaku and Miketendo64, is that three Pikmin standing side by side look like "11.1". The original Pikmin launched on the GameCube in the fall of 2001.

Pikmin 4 – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Dandori Academy

Most of the Direct went to the Switch 2 version of Pikmin 4, which Game Rant notes was first announced, with its November 12 date, in September's Nintendo Direct. Saturday's show kept that date and filled in what the edition adds:

• Voice commands for Oatchi, the rescue pup, through the Switch 2's built-in microphone — including praising him.
• Dandori Academy, a new mode about collecting treasure as fast as possible across a set of stages, with three difficulty levels, medals and online leaderboards.
• Weekend exams: according to Kotaku, you can practice a stage through the week, but the scored attempt is a single try on Friday, Saturday or Sunday.
• 72 Dandori Academy stages will be released over time rather than all at launch, per GoNintendo.
• A free demo on Monday, November 2, including a couple of Dandori Academy levels, ahead of the November 12 launch.

Pikmin Bloom caves and Hello Pikmin! shorts

The mobile game Pikmin Bloom gets a free Secret Caves update this winter, Miketendo64 reports: a raid-style mode where you send Pikmin underground to take on bosses and bring back treasure. Pikmin that fall in a raid are not lost; they need time to recover before you can send them again. The special maps that unlock caves can also be earned in Pikmin 4's Dandori Academy, the one direct link the Direct drew between the console and mobile games.

Miyamoto also introduced Hello Pikmin!, a series of animated shorts from Nintendo Pictures narrated by actress Fuka Koshiba, who also narrated the Japanese version of the Direct. According to Miketendo64, the shorts will be published periodically.

Why it landed flat for some fans

The word "Direct" usually means new games, and this one had none. LevelUp reports that Pikmin fans welcomed the news while the wider Nintendo audience was underwhelmed, with some saying it "could have been an email".

Underneath the format complaint, the Switch 2 Edition now has a concrete feature list and a demo date. If you are deciding whether to buy it, Monday's demo is the useful part: it is the first chance to try Dandori Academy before the November 12 launch.