Pikmin 3 is due sometime in Spring, but producer Shigeru Miyamoto feels that it should have ideally launched alongside the Wii U itself. He’s also said that The Legend of Zelda Wii U is a long way off.

Speaking with Time, Miyamoto explained Pikmin 3’s long development schedule “If you look back at the launch of Wii, we were able to prepare a game like Wii Sports, which at the time was clearly a new game, and launch that alongside a Zelda game.

“With the Wii U, we took a similar approach by launching Nintendo Land as well as a Mario game – though we’re working on Zelda for Wii U, that’s going to take us a little big longer.

“From my perspective, I think ideally it would have been nice if we’d been able to release Pikmin 3 closer to launch, but the Wii U – though it shares the Wii name – is obviously a brand new system, with new chips and graphical capabilities.

“It can do a lot more, and in the process of developing a lot of the features and functionality, the resources required to best utilise those features drew on some of the same resources that might have been spent developing games, thus we weren’t able to bring quite as robust a line-up initially.”

This new technical capability should allow Nintendo to do some neat things with Wii U further down the line, as teased by Miyamoto, “We still have new things to learn about how to leverage the features and functionalities of Wii U in ways that create fun and interesting new ways to play, including new gameplay systems.

“As we become even more familiar with the hardware, we’ll be able to do more from a software standpoint. That’s an area we’re currently devoting resources to.”

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Last week, Miyamoto spoke about Pikmin 3 in great detail, and discussed how he hopes the Wii U GamePad will make the game rather special indeed. Check out what he had to say here:

Pikmin 3: Wii U GamePad makes for a deeper experience than the originals, says Miyamoto.

Thanks ONM.