Morning Save Point: Pikmin Day Direct, FF14 Ends Poetics, and More

Sunday morning, and Nintendo has made November 1 an annual holiday for the tiny plant people: it is now Pikmin Day. The rest of the weekend is quieter, but there is real news for Final Fantasy XIV players, a Persona 1 remake nobody will confirm, and Ubisoft finally saying no to more Assassin’s Creed remakes.

The big one

Nintendo made November 1 Pikmin Day in a surprise Direct on October 31, and Shigeru Miyamoto explained the arithmetic. The Red, Blue and Yellow Pikmin that debuted in the 2001 GameCube game read as three ones, and three ones is 11.1. Nine types of Pikmin have been discovered so far, and Miyamoto wants a lot more people to know about them. The show carried no new game announcements, which Nintendo had warned about in advance, but it did hand out dates. A free demo of Pikmin 4 – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Dandori Academy arrives on November 2 with the opening area, Sun-Speckled Terrace, and two Dandori Academy stages. The full edition launches on November 12, according to Nintendo’s own store page.

Dandori Academy is the exam mode the edition is built around: timed challenges where you send Pikmin out to collect treasure, such as fruit and vegetables, as fast as you can. Exams are held every Friday, Saturday and Sunday, with one attempt each and medals for your score. Oatchi, the space dog, now takes voice commands through the Switch 2 microphone, and all four mainline Pikmin games run on Switch 2 and Switch. The Pikmin Bloom mobile app is getting Secret Caves this winter, and the cave maps you need come from postcards and from Dandori Academy exams. Nintendo is also starting a “Hello! Pikmin” short film series made with Nintendo Pictures, with another episode tomorrow, one more in November, and one a month from December. The guest of honor was Fuka Koshiba, who knitted Red, Blue and Yellow Pikmin hats after losing them to a claw machine, and who is now the series’ ambassador.

The interesting part of this Direct is what it does not contain. There is no new game and no new campaign for the original Pikmin 4, so the Switch 2 version is an upgrade path plus a timed score-chasing mode, and Nintendo is handing out the demo early to sell exactly that. Dandori Academy is the first thing you can play on November 2, the exams run on a fixed weekend schedule with a single attempt each, and the medals are the hook. For anyone who already owns Pikmin 4 on Switch, the demo is a free test of whether the mode is worth the upgrade. For everyone else, the holiday is doing the marketing work a new game announcement would normally do, and it will land hardest with the players who grew up on the series.

Also happening

• Final Fantasy XIV says Poetics is going away. At Fanfest Tokyo, director Naoki Yoshida told the crowd “Poetics will disappear. Thank you, Poetics,” and said a different system will let players trade for gear for other jobs. He also confirmed that Black Mage’s Triplecast is being replaced, that housing items can be floated, and that bait becomes a list you unlock once and reuse forever. Evercold still arrives February 23, 2027 (PCGamesN).
• A Persona 1 remake showed up in leaked footage, and Sega has not confirmed it. About two minutes of video from a YouTube channel called P1REMAKE surfaced on October 31. Fans point to a summoning animation that matches Yukiko’s in Persona 4 Revival, and IGN has asked Sega for comment. The footage could be years old, a proof of concept, or a pitch video nobody greenlit (IGN).
• Petit Planet is coming to Switch 2 in 2027. miHoYo announced the Switch 2 version of the free-to-play life sim, while PC, iOS and Android launch on December 4. A “Launch a Planet” event where players design their own worlds opens November 1 (Gematsu).
• Ubisoft says no other Assassin’s Creed remake is in development. The fall franchise update, posted October 29, also says Codename Hexe, the darker single-player project, gets its next major update in 2027. The Netflix live-action series is filming in Rome, with Hannah Peel composing the score. Valhalla’s New Game+ arrives November 5 (Ubisoft).
• PlayStation Plus gets Dead Island 2, Tomb Raider IV–VI Remastered and Monster Train 2 in November. All three are playable from November 3 through November 30. October’s games, F1 25, Hunt: Showdown 1896 and Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2, can be claimed until November 2 (PlayStation Blog).
• Silent Hill: Townfall got a Hard difficulty mode. Konami’s patch 1.6.0, live on October 28, rebalanced every existing difficulty and scaled enemy hearing with the difficulty level. Your position now shows on the map in all modes, and PC players got DLSS Ray Reconstruction (Konami’s patch notice).

Out today

Sunday is a quiet one for new releases. The one event with a clock on it is Nintendo Treehouse Plays: Pikmin 4 – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Dandori Academy, streaming today at 9 a.m. PT, and Nintendo’s store page carries the listing. Nothing on our Release Calendar lands today. We analyzed our Release Calendar and pulled the confirmed dates below for the rest of the month:

The full November release list and our Release Calendar have everything else, with unlock times.

Deal of the day

Sorry We’re Closed is free on Epic until November 5. The survival horror game, normally $24.99, has been free since October 29, and it is one of the better things in Epic’s rotation. It is fixed-camera exploration through a demon-haunted London borough, with arcade-style shooting and a heroine who can see between worlds (Epic Games Store). Epic swaps in the next pair on November 5, Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms and Flotsam.

One more thing

Somebody spray-painted “SAVE MASS EFFECT” on EA’s Madrid office. The message was found on the ground outside the building and on the wall in front of it, days after EA announced it was closing BioWare (Kotaku). It joins a fans’ Times Square ad buy and a petition on Change.org that has passed a quarter million signatures. The Madrid office mostly works on EA Sports titles, which makes it a strange place to be picketing.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report