Huh, thought I posted about this before, but now I can't find it. So from the top...
I beat Pikmin 4. Well, "beat", but I'll get to that. All in all, I was fairly underwhelmed by it. It wasn't bad exactly, but I really didn't feel like it lived up to any of the previous Pikmin titles. It feels like there are too many gimmicky pikmin with limited utility. Especially when most of them break down to "Ice Pikmin destroy ice barriers, rock pikmin destroy rock barrier, yellow pikmin destroy electric barriers" etc. It's just duplicating the same puzzle over and over again with different colors. Also, they introduced flaming, electric or frozen variants of assorted enemies to attempt to force you to use the correct pikmin, but it's also late enough in the game where you can solo them with just your dog who's been upgraded enough to be immune to everything.
So basically I found the game easy almost to the point of being tedious. Also, the change in control scheme from Pikmin 1 & 2 really contributes to shallowing out the gameplay. You used to use the Gamecube's C-Stick to direct your hoard of pikmin. This was useful to have them hug walls, maneuver around obstacles, or swarm a foe. Now you can't do that at all, and their pathfinding has been improved such that a swarm of pikmin won't just flop over a ledge because you didn't tell them not to. But along with this change probably half the environmental puzzles of Pikmin 1 got thrown in the garbage. All the repetitive "Match the color of the door with the color of pikmin" puzzles seem to be over compensating for this shortfall.
What's funny is, when I really think about it, Pikmin 3 suffered from all these problems as well. However, Pikmin 3 had it's soft time limit where you had to scavenge enough food to survive each night. So while the puzzles became much more one note and trivial, you still had the challenge of min maxing your hoard of pikmin. Since Pikmin 4 has no time limit what so ever, it's even more trivially easy than ever before.
So anyways, I say I "beat" the game because I accomplished the main objective the game started with, it summarized how many pikmin I made and lost, the credits rolled, and then it introducted this post game that I think is as big as the entire rest of the game up to that point. And it might be better? Like the entire first half of the game might have just been a tedious extended tutorial, and now the real game is finally starting? The one I was chomping at the bit to play as a long time Pikmin fan? Still no time limit I don't think, but the levels feel a bit more devious and difficult. We shall see.
Win95/DOS 7.1 - P233 MMX (@2.5 x 100 FSB), Diamond Viper V330 AGP, SB16 CT2800
Win98 - K6-2+ 500, GF2 MX, SB AWE 64 CT4500, SBLive CT4780
Win98 - Pentium III 1000, GF2 GTS, SBLive CT4760
WinXP - Athlon 64 3200+, GF 7800 GS, Audigy 2 ZS