Director Yuji Kando Has Played Pikmin 4’s Story Mode “Around 20 Times”

Pikmin 4 is big. We called Pikmin 3’s “hefty 30+ hour running time” in our review, and we weren’t alone.

This makes it even more impressive that Pikmin 4’s director, Yuji Kando, admitted to playing through the main story mode “around 20 times” to fix bugs in Nintendo’s recent Ask the Developer series.

Eiji Aonuma made a similar statement about Tears of the Kingdom in May, and while Pikmin 4 is dwarfed by that game, playing it 20 times is still impressive.

Kando also claims that the game’s many options kept him entertained because he always found a new way to complete tasks:

I’ve been playing the game to debug it and probably completed the Story mode around 20 times. Yet I never got bored playing it, because each time it made me think, “I should try this approach next time.” It never felt like a chore.

Given the number of times we’ve played the Pikmin 4 demo in the past month, this might be a good one for regular replays—20 times seems like a stretch for now.

Several development team members discuss the game’s new Pikmin, Dandori challenges, and Oatchi’s appeal in the interview. The full interview is here.