Issue #66: Rooting for the Little Guy! – July/August 2023

Video games are made to make you feel victorious. They're at their best when, after playing them, a deep sense of pride wells up within you -- after you overcome an obstacle, or beat a big boss.

"Big" being the operative word there. One of the ways video games get to their goal of making you feel huge feelings is by putting you in command of characters who are seriously smaller than their opponents.

I mean, just think about a random assortment of final battles from various games you've played. The enemy you were facing was almost always towering over you, right? Nobody's going to feel too terribly accomplished if the credits rolled after stepping on a bug. It has to be toppling some grand tower of a foe to really hit that emotional high point!

. . . And then there are some video games that go another step further. We're talking games in which the heroes you control are physically tiny. Like, incredibly small, when compared to normal human scale. Characters that have to crane their necks up just to see the top of a blade of grass. Little guys!

It's just so natural to want to cheer for these underdogs, and to want to guide them to victory when games let us become them. With the release of Pikmin 4 just over the horizon -- the latest sequel in a series that's full of miniature heroes -- we've set the theme of this NF edition as "Rooting for the Little Guy!"

Inside you'll find tons of Pikmin coverage, from a full History of Pikmin feature to our final preview of Pikmin 4, reviews of the just-launched rereleases of Pikmin 1 and 2 on the Switch and a Retro section Lost in Untranslation article covering a trio of Pikmin games I'm almost certain you've never played before. We've also got a feature called Actual Size, where we're taking advantage of our print media format to actually print some pictures of various video game heroes at their tiny canon heights! All that and more packed into this simple, small stack of paper pages. It's kind of a big deal!