Pikmin 4 has something I haven't seen in a first-party Nintendo title for years: a quality-of-life feature so good that every game should probably steal it. Just like in previous Pikmin games, there's a map screen with a cursor you can scroll around. But here, you can press a button anywhere on the map to immediately return to the game with your character facing in that direction.
The 'look this way!' button is not the kind of feature that makes for an exciting bullet point on a store page or a provocative moment in a trailer, but it's become a personal icon for what I've found so impressive about Pikmin 4. How many times have you looked at a video game map, returned to gameplay, and had to spend a few seconds reorienting your brain - and your character - to match what you just saw on the map? Those few seconds are nothing if it only happens once, but multiplied maybe hundreds of times over the course of damn near every game you've ever played in your life, it adds up.
