One of the things that's probably most important from that standpoint is the fact that because you're using the pointer now to aim, it gives you the ability to be more precise and aim at specific parts of the enemies' bodies. So, for example, when you're fighting a Bulborb, if you throw Pikmin specifically on its eyes, what happens is it will close its eyes and it will stop moving for a moment. That gives you an advantage. So you're able to aim at specific body parts so you have some enemies who maybe its the eyes that are beneficial to attack and others, maybe it's better to attack softer portions or towards the rear. And then the other thing along those same lines, with the rock Pikmin in particular, with them they do a larger amount of damage with specific points they hit. Which you weren't able to do in previous Pikmin games. And so, by carefully aiming with the rock Pikmin at specific points on the enemy's body, you can damage the enemy in that way. Because you've got much more precision in terms of your aiming in the battles it essentially just opens up a lot more strategic possibilities in the game.
The original Pikmin was designed in a way to make it very easy to navigate in a 3D space. If you recall, in that game when you had the control stick control, you were controlling essentially both the cursor for aiming as well as the character. With the addition now of the analog stick on the nunchuk plus the ability to aim with the pointer, what that does is it basically makes it so that you can be running away from something but still aiming and pointing and throwing Pikmin at it, which is going to be very handy for boss battles and things like that. So, certainly, the Wii Remote and nunchuk style is something that's probably going to be a little bit better for people who are more novice players, but maybe more advanced players might go for just the button controls.
And then, of course, [there is] the addition of the wing Pikmin, the wing Pikmin are very adept creatures that fly in the air, but also they're able to pick up objects and carry them through the air over obstacles. The addition of these new abilities opens up a great deal of strategy, so a lot of the gameplay then becomes you really thinking deeply about, "Ok, how many different Pikmin do I want to bring with me of each type?" when you're breaking up your teams. [...]
But also, because the map is so important in this game, while you're playing with the pointer you'll want to have access to the map and be able to use the touchscreen. We designed it with those two interactions initially in mind. But then, also, because of the touchscreen interaction with the map, we also thought there may be cases where people would prefer just to play on the GamePad and have button control with the map interaction. So you can do that, where you're playing on the TV, you have the GamePad in your hands, you're playing with button control. But there's also people who maybe just want to sit back, so we've also got Wii Remote controller support for people who want to play that way.
And when you're playing with the button control, it's fairly close to the Nintendo GameCube control style. So as people perhaps get better, they may graduate from the Wii Remote and Nunchuck to just the GamePad. And, of course, you can also play only on the GamePad off TV, where you have the TV turned off or turned on something else, and you're just switching back and forth between the gameplay and the map.
