Good post. Pikmin is a bizarre franchise that can't really be compared to anything else. Maybe that's why I love it so much. And I definitely agree about the stress. The first was actually too much for me with the time limit, that's one reason why I vastly prefer 2.
I don't agree it can't be compared with anything else, but nowadays it certainly stands as a rather unique combination of separate elements found in other current games. I think there used to be more games of this style in 90s (like the old Army Men games, etc.) but we don't see much of those anymore.
Regarding the time limit, my initial instinct was, like yours, that it was an artificial way to make the game hard. But after playing Pikmin 2 I actually felt that without that sense of urgency the game was missing something. It goes against the spirit of the game if you have as many days as you like to accomplish a goal. The game can then be played as more of a management sim and less of a tactical game, and it loses some of its appeal in the process. I found myself playing Pikmin 2 at a much more leisurely pace, I could afford wasting complete days on growing back Pikmin that had fallen in battle, or replenishing other supplies with little consequence. To be blunt, gameplay became boring for me when I played it this way.
In most RTS games this issue doesn't come up because there is always an enemy player on the map, who is expanding at the same time as you are and can attack you without notice. This effectively forces you to treat time as another limited resource that must be carefully managed. Pikmin doesn't have that element so unless some other form of time constraint is enforced, I feel like the game is diminished. The emphasis then moves to the combat and it becomes more like playing a 3rd person adventure than a strategy game. At least that's how I felt. I do agree that with the first two games they have yet to find that perfect balance of difficulty and reward, and that maybe there should be difficulty levels to accommodate newcomers as well as a more intense play-style.
I can totally relate to that post
In addition to the points you make about resource stringency, one of the interesting things about Pikmin is that having a bigger army is not always better. In fact, a large group of pikmin can be harder to command than most armies in modern RTS games, and the amount of area you have to worry about is bigger as well since the pikmin spread out and basically have 1HP (with protection against specific environmental or elemental effects).
Swarming/attack moving works against smaller enemies because you'll kill them before they react, but big enemies such as Snagrets and adult Bulborbs have specific weak points that mindless swarming doesn't work well against. In fact swarming against big enemies is a great way to lose a bunch of pikmin at once! Hitting the weak points for those enemies (heads/backs) requires aiming your throws so that your pikmin hit them right, and throwing is a very bottlenecked way of commanding pikmin. So basically you can't just rely on having 100 pikmin and running everything over all the time, you have to work on your aim and find out what elemental or methodic weaknesses can be exploited.
Excellent points, both about managing your army and about combat being more hands on than regular RTS games. In fact, like I said in my reply above, the combat in Pikmin actually reminds me much more of combat in Zelda games than it does RTS games. The fact that battles are based on motor skill and reflexes and not just strategic/tactical planning makes combat also much more prone to errors, and the fact that mistakes made in combat come with a huge price in the form of lost resources and lost time needed to replenish them are what give Pikmin its trademark difficulty in my opinion.
Pikmin 1 was hard as fuck.
Then I learned how to swarm. Game turned to easy mode. Never mind the 30 day limit, it doesn't even matter at that point.
Sounds like I have yet to master the swarm. I need to get my Wii back to my apartment so I can get some hands on time with the NPC Pikmins.