Reading through the reviews for Pikmin 4 yesterday, one thing became abundantly clear: this game is big. You could play through the original Pikmin in a swift couple of hours, and even Pikmin 3 didn't pack the longest playtime out there, but we specifically mentioned the "hefty 30+ hour running time" in our review, and we were not alone.
This makes it all the more impressive that in Nintendo's recent Ask the Developer interview series, Pikmin 4's director, Yuji Kando, confessed to having played through the main story mode "around 20 times" in order to iron out any bugs.
You might remember Eiji Aonuma making an identical statement on Tears of the Kingdom back in May, and while Pikmin 4 is suitably dwarfed by that behemoth of a game, playing it through 20 times is still nothing to scoff at.
What's more, Kando states that the number of options in the game meant that he never got bored while playing it, claiming that 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.
Considering the number of times that we have played through the Pikmin 4 demo over the past month, we can see that this might be a good one for regular replays — 20 times seems like a bit of a stretch for now though...
The interview also contains insights from several development team members on the game's new Pikmin, Dandori challenges, and why Oatchi is such a good addition. You can find both parts of the interview in full here.