While I love the game, the lack of options regarding controls and QoL changes is a big misstep in trying to appeal the game to a broad demographic

I don't want to come off overly negative, as I've had a lot of fun playing the game all weekend. I'm about a quarter or so through the 4th area and I can safely say this might be my personal favorite game of the year. There's a whole lot more I can say I love about the game overall. But as I've progressed through the game, I can't help but feel like the lack of options is really holding the game back.

In the demo I was initially really disappointed with the lack of traditional, always on pointer controls that were available in Pikmin 3 Deluxe, but I quickly got over it as I realized the new auto lock basically just did the precision aiming for me, and the gyro that was there still felt pretty good. In a way, I do think the new controls feel nice and snappy and easy to use, but the more I've played, the more I feel like they also take away a lot of feeling of the control and flexibility. Getting into later parts of the game, I just feel like I'm struggling a bit to aim quickly and precisely between targets. Not only did I feel I had more control with normal pointer controls, having good aim was part of the depth of the gameplay. It felt a lot more satisfying. The gyro that is there can still feel nice for things like the whistle or aiming for things out of range of the auto lock, but it does feel odd how much auto lock seems to discourage me to aim for anything on my own. I feel like I'm fighting against it most of the time whenever I try to use gyro to throw.

They also have the new QoL feature of providing a delay after through the maximum amount of a certain Pikmin/maximum amount to carry an object. Again, this is a nice feature for avoiding accidentally using the wrong type on an enemy, or easily picking up an object, but it feels a bit clunky when trying to assign extra Pikmin to an object, or overwhelm the target with everything you've got. Spamming should be a risk reward scenario. There's a chance I could throw a wrong type, or throw more than I needed, but again that's part of the depth! It's my own fault if I don't pay attention to how many I'm throwing, it's the whole point of them making a sound each throw. Not to mention, the charge feature basically already does this automatically all at once. I feel like manual throwing would make more sense if it was for more deliberate, risky decisions like this. As it stands, it doesn't felt that useful compared to just using charge on most things that don't require specific timing, throwing, or impact damage.

The rewind feature and lack of time limit already makes the game feel a lot easier, but I'm mostly okay with those as it's clear the game was designed around them. Rewind is basically just optional checkpoints that you don't have to use if you don't want to anyway. But in combination with these changes, it does feel like they're focusing a bit too much on appealing to new casual players when I feel like a lot of a core audience, new or old, would enjoy some of the extra depth if it was optional.

The new QoL features are great for new players and I'm fine with them being on by default, but I can't get over how even better the game could be if they just let you toggle some of them off for some more traditional options. I feel like in almost any other game, this would be a no brainer. With them clearly pushing Pikmin 1 and 2 with almost none of these adjustments (and comparably being a lot harder), Pikmin 3 with all of its control options, and literally changing their logos to make them all the same, it just makes it a real headscatcher how incongruent this game feels to them on the same system.