Miyamoto Explains Why Pikmin 3 Works Best With Wii U

Legendary games designer Shigeru Miyamoto has sat down with GameSpot to talk about all things Nintendo related. One of the questions put to Shigeru Miyamoto was what’s one point of gameplay in Pikmin 3 that he can point to and say “that’s only possible because of what the Wii U can do?” Miyamoto replied to the question with the following answer:

“When I create a game, I don’t necessarily always try to approach it from the idea of leveraging every feature or every ability of that new piece of hardware. In the case of Pikmin in particular, the approach that we took was really less of an approach of how can we […] take advantage of what the Wii U is doing, per se, and instead how can we take what was that Pikmin experience and really make it a deeper experience for players.”

“So of course we’re taking advantage of the graphics and improving the play control and whatnot and I guess if you were to look at it more broadly, you might not necessarily say that it would be impossible to do it on another system. But I guess speaking plainly, the idea is really that Wii U is the best system to be able to achieve all of the different things that we’re trying to do with this new Pikmin game. One of the biggest features of Pikmin 3 is the fact that you have the map on the GamePad at all times and because Pikmin is a strategy game, it’s the type of game that you might play the same levels over and over again. Having that map–and the fact that you have the three different leaders that you switch between to command your Pikmin–and having the touchscreen on the map will allow you to change perspective or jump to a specific leader and quickly give orders.It makes it much more efficient for you to achieve the goals that you have strategically within the game.”