Back in January it was reported that Nintendo would be bringing at least two Wii U exclusives to the significantly more successful Nintendo Switch. Today, the company confirmed that Pikmin 3 is coming to the console/handheld hybrid as Pikmin 3 Deluxe on October 30.
The updated port will include new difficulty modes, side-stories and missions featuring characters Olimar & Louie, as well as all the DLC from the original game on Wii U. While the game’s official site doesn’t say much about these new difficulty options, it does say that the addition of lock-on targeting and optional hints are at the very least part of them.
Check out the announcement trailer below:
In other news:
- Fall Guys’ Servers Are Being Bombarded, So PS4 Account Creation is Disabled
- Microsoft Kills Ugly As Sin Xbox Series X Branding on Game Cases
- Setsuka Makes Her Return to Soulcalibur 6 as Its Next DLC Character
Pikmin 3 may be one of the last Wii U games to get ported to Switch, but it was among Nintendo’s earliest first-party games on the device, having originally been slated to launch alongside it in November of 2012 before being delayed until the following summer. While it’s good to have Pikmin 3 on a system where more people will actually play it, it’s kind of wild to think we haven’t had a new mainline Pikmin game in seven years. A 3DS spin-off called Hey! Pikmin came out in 2017, but it didn’t see the same generally positive reception of its console counterparts. Maybe one of these days we’ll see a Pikmin 4 on Switch if Pikmin 3 Deluxe takes off.
With Pikmin 3 finally on Switch, there are only a few of Nintendo’s Wii U mainstays that haven’t been ported over, including the original Splatoon, which might be redundant given Splatoon 2’s success on the Switch, Star Fox Zero, which could probably use a complete rework away from the Wii U’s motion controls if it ever does make that jump, and probably most notably Super Mario 3D World, which was the closest thing to a mainline Mario platformer that ever came to the system in its roughly five-year run. However, there’s been reports that Nintendo has been working on an initiative to bring several Mario games to the Switch as part of the series’ 35-year anniversary in 2020. News of this was probably meant to come out during Nintendo’s E3-adjacent Direct presentation, but that was reportedly delayed out of its typical June window due to the coronavirus pandemic interfering with development of various projects, requiring the company to take some time to assess the status of games before showing them to the public.
The delay of those Mario announcements has made the Nintendo mascot’s 35th birthday feel a little lowkey eight months into the year. While there were a couple cool new things like Paper Mario: The Origami King and the introduction of the Super Mario Lego line, Mario hasn’t been doing a whole lot of jumping and “wahooing” this year like he normally does. While it’s unlikely that a new platformer is going to be coming out this late into the year with minimal promotion, those remasters might at least give people something to be nostalgic about.
