Introduction

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New! Exclusive video footage of playing Perfect Pikmin, days two through nine, is available right here.

Pikmin is a great game. By now you've probably bought it and recovered enough parts to save Olimar from oxygen asphyxiation. Congratulations.

Maybe you've even replayed it a few times to improve your score.

If you're really hardcore, maybe you've tried the nine day challenge: getting all thirty parts in just nine game days.

However, before you get too proud about all you've done for Olimar and his family, take a moment to think about what you have done to the Pikmin. Sure, you've bred thousands of them, and taught them some neat tricks, but you've also slaughtered hundreds of them to save the life of an alien who doesn't even breathe the same type of air!

Murderer.

I'm here to tell you that it doesn't have to be this way. You can save Olimar, and do it in nine days, and not kill any Pikmin.

I call this Playing Perfect Pikmin. Thirty parts. Nine days. Zero deaths. I did this for the first time on March 29, 2002. With this guide, you also can do it.

This is not for the casual player. However, with reasonable gaming skills, this guide should let you achieve this goal in fifteen to fifty hours of play. It took me longer than that, but I learned a lot while doing it.

If I can invent better ways of killing the Puffstool and dealing with day seven then this challenge should become even easier.

This guide can also be used to do simpler challenges, like the nine-day challenge (don't sweat it if a few Pikmin are killed) or getting all the parts with zero deaths in any amount of time (take an extra day on each of the big areas, and suddenly it gets ten times easier).

After discovering the techniques documented in this guide I've even found that I can do the Pikmin nine-day challenge in one try (no saving or retrying days allowed), finishing the game from start to finish in an evening.

I wrote this guide to help anyone else who wants to try the Perfect Pikmin challenge, but it's also helpful for me when I try reproducing this crazy feat.

Work your way through the days listed on the left. The monster guide is referenced by the days as needed, or you can browse it on your own. The monster guide contains critical hints on how to kill the monsters without loss of Pikmin life.

This is a work in progress - if you notice errors or omissions, let me know.

Thanks to Russ for some useful tips, and for challenging me to do better. Thanks to Helen for useful tips and support. Thanks also to all the Pikmin experts at GameFaqs.com, for their crazy ideas.

This guide was written by Bruce Dawson.

Good luck.

On to day 1.

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