Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Youtube animator Wooden Turtle has done Pikmin animations before, and we’ve linked some of them here: The Groovy Long Legs Experience, and Cooking With Louie #1 and #2. They’re fun riffs on Pikmin’s lore and backstory, and this week’s video is another of those.
In Pikmin, the game’s backstory was communicated mostly through Olimar’s Log, which was a situational message given at the end of each game day that reminded and expanded on its events. Pikmin 2 kept the idea but changed the messages to emails from Olimar’s employer, called Sacho. In the opening, it’s revealed that the freight company that he owned and Olimar works for undertook a gigantic debt due to the loss of a cargo of highly-expensive Pikpik carrots that he was responsible for. (To find out what happened to them, you have to finish Pikmin 2 to 100% completion.)
In Pikmin, you have a strict 30 day time limit to get enough parts of your ship to return home. Pikmin 2 has no time limit. You can take as many days as you want to collect treasures, and the number of days it requires is more like a score. To keep the pressure on the player, as the days reel off, you receive a series of increasingly frantic email messages from Sacho, who as it turns out unwisely covered the debt with an organization called “All-Consuming Black Hole Loan Sharks.” Their means to insure repayment are ruthless, but in fairness to them, you should know what you’re getting into from their name.
Sacho is forced to go on the lam to escape their wrath, and for a time lives beneath a bridge and befriends the animals there. But you don’t need me to tell you of those events: they’re animated in Wooden Turtle’s latest production! It’s eight minutes long:
