Augmented reality mobile Pikmin due in 2021

If you were still waiting for Pikmin 4, you'd better put your hopes in the drawer. There's a new Pikmin game in the works, but it's more of an augmented reality Pikmin GO than anything else (half the people who've talked about the game have already made that lame pun, so I'm going with it too). Mobile ports of Nintendo licenses are legion, and for the most part achieve some success. What about Pikmin mobile and what release date can we expect? We look back at the announcements from Niantic and Nintendo.

Niantic and Nintendo collaborate on Pikmin mobile

You'll notice that Niantic and Nintendo are a bit of a life and death partnership when it comes to augmented reality. Following the success of Pokémon GO, which has been scolding players for weeks because of its updates, the two entities are trying again with thePikmin mobile app. Announced last March on the official Nintendo France Twitter, the augmented reality game will give you the opportunity to discover the existence of Pikmin in the space around you.

To pre-register for the Pikmin Mobile App, simply fill out the form in the tweet. The game was in the test phase in the Singapore region since 30 March 2021.

As Shigeru Miyamoto explained:

"Niantic's augmented reality technology allows us to experience a world where Pikmin secretly live around us."

All about the gameplay of the Pikmin App

So what will Pikmin mobile actually be about? Although the gameplay hasn't really been revealed, the basic concept seems simple enough, as is the case with most AR (Augmented Reality) games. With each step, you generate energy. This energy, called Step Energy, then allows your Pikmin to grow and flourish. You cultivate the Pikmin seedlings with the Step Energy. You can then name them and feed them with nectar to vary their colour.

When walking with the Pikmin, you can leave petals behind or find fruits tospeed up their growth. According to the forum threads from the Singapore tests, there are seven Pikmin species available: blue, purple, white, red, yellow, rock and winged. In campaign mode, you can plan expeditions to have your Pikmin collect seeds for you from areas you have already surveyed. At the end of these expeditions, you'll have access to little postcards of the coolest and most important moments of your Pikmin's expedition. Note that there is also an area of the interface dedicated to your walking summary for the day.

That's about all we know about the game, except that Mii characters will also be integrated into the experience to some extent according to the Nintendo fandom site.

August 20th, 2021 update: 3 screenshots of the Pikmin mobile application have been released. I had to add them!

As for the release date of Pikmin mobile on Android and iOS, it's hard to say. Nintendo has issued confirmation in a statement dated August 5, 2021. In the statement, Nintendo says it is maintaining the game's release date for the end of 2021, despite the difficulties encountered by Pokémon GO in recent weeks.