In fact, I found all the fruit. Rather than go off to the big oak tree and find (I presume) Olimar, I spent a few days wandering around the other areas finding the fruit I’d missed.
This involved quite a lot of journeying underground, as these were the areas I naturally avoided previously, with a tendency to get lost. It was only at this late stage in the game that I realised the utility of the Go Here function, where you can point to a position on the map and the party will head directly there. This was a godsend with the hidden entrances to underground areas, and also meant that the issue I had with the controls – that my characters would occasionally just stop moving forwards because the game didn’t think I was pressing up enough – disappeared.
There were only a few pieces of fruit that caused me issues. Two were in the tropical area, and required use of a metal box which acted like a seesaw with another metal box – and I couldn’t work out how to get to the second metal box to balance it. In the end it was pure luck that I threw a yellow pikmin over a vine onto a trampoline, and it landed on the box, letting me solve the puzzle. Another piece was at the top of a section which the game enforced a side-on camera for, where I had to work out the order in which to balance another pulley system. And the last was guarded by a big crab, who killed quite a few of my pikmin before I realised I had to use rock dudes to crack his claw.
So, with all fruit collected, I went off to the oak.
I’ve got nine powerups (which I know full well I’ll never use, because they’re limited consumables), I’ve got 67 days of juice left, and I’ve got about 400 of each pikmin type available. Bring it on, Olimar.