Still an incredible experience.

The GameCube version was the first Pikmin game I ever played and I was incredibly captivated by it. Playing as two tiny dudes exploring a big world lush with greenery and strange menacing creatures. In my opinion, no other game has ever replicated that level of charm or sense of scale. I loved everything the game had to offer, the imposing boss fights, the fun treasures you could collect from giant everyday household items to Nintendo memorabilia. The Pikmin themselves are still as charming as ever, control better than the first game and hum songs while you guide them back to their base (or their doom). Even the multiplayer is fun.

This HD version is the perfect way to experience this game for the first time or relive the magic of this GameCube classic. It doesn't change much, if not anything at all so if you were expecting some QoL improvements or things like that, the price may seem a bit steep but it's still such a joy to experience and play.

Pikmin 2 is incredible, so much so that it not only eclipses even its predecessor, which I found to be astounding in quality, but also remains distinct and fresh despite having the same core gameplay.

Pikmin 2 does away with the overarching time limit in Pikmin 1, a decision I'm surprised some view as controversial, as an overarching time limit wouldn't really fit for Pikmin 2. In addition, this allows players to take all the time they need to soak in the world and move forward at their leisure, just as Olimar wants to do in the story. Speaking of, the world and visuals in general look fantastic, I haven't played the original version so I can't speak on the difference in quality, but this version looks really good.

Another divisive part of the game are the caves, which seem to be what make or break this game for most people. I quite liked it, having smaller challenges where you're encouraged not to rush and take things slow and methodical is not only fun, but also helps differentiate from Pikmin 1. The caves absolutely aren't perfect, the last two I'd say venture into the territory of annoying and tedious, but not for very much of them.

I absolutely adore not only the new pikmin types, namely white and purple pikmin, and spicy and bitter sprays, but the addition of a second captain on top of that massively increases the amount of approaches that can be taken to any problem. Should you bring in a bunch of the rather rare purple pikmin to steamroll some enemies? Or do you save them for fear of losing them and not needing them later? How many blue pikmin will I need for this cave? Should I only bring in a couple so I can bring more combat-suited types? This room looks tough, do I need to use either of my sprays, and if so which one? Pikmin 2 also does a better job of making all types of pikmin valid choices to bring into caves, which is something I felt Pikmin 1 struggled with mightly, as there was basically no reason to bring blues and yellows to bosses. Making it so you have to set up your pikmin team before you enter a cave ensures each type has a role.

On top of all of that, I'd be remiss not to mention what is probably my favorite part of the game, the treasures and logs! All of the journal entries and sales pitches are positively oozing with charming, and the enemy entries are just as amazing. The only real qualm I have with this part of the game is due to what I believe is the only negative change in this remaster, which is the removal of some product placement. Pikmin 2 is the only work I can think of that is hurt by the removal of product placement, but there is absolutely a little something lost by the absence of the duracell battery and all other treasures like it.

This is certainly not a perfect game, there are some definite and easily identifiable issues, such as how aiming and throwing pikmin doesn't always feel quite right, (also an issue I have with Pikmin 1) or how some sublevels in caves can be kinda bullshit. However, the few problems I have with the game aren't enough to hold the game back from being, in my opinion, one of Nintendo's absolute best. I really can't recommend that people try this series enough, its been one of the best decisions I've made in my gaming experience.

The core of Pikmin is excellent so this is still a good game, but most of the decisions made for the sequel really don't work for me. On the positive side, I like the addition of White and Purple Pikmin (even if the latter are a little bit broken in battle) which add a little more strategy to your daily loadout and what you need to take into caves. The variety of enemies also gets a little boost, with some expert planning required in order to limit your losses as much as possible, while the Pikmin themselves get a nice little improvement in AI and no longer feel like they have the IQ of a rock. Also the Piklopedia, treasure descriptions and Louie's recipes add a lot of humour and charm to the series, so much so that I think a good hour of my playtime was purely down to reading every entry and regularly chuckling to myself.

I don't mind the overall timer being taken away (even if I prefer it), but I'm not a fan of the cave system and there being no kind of time limit there at all. To me, Pikmin always needs some kind of urgency, whether that's an in-game day limit, needing to get your Pikmin to a safe space by nightfall or just through challenges and missions. Once you enter a cave, all that evaporates and the game becomes something very different, something more survival focused. Not necessarily bad, but not what I was expecting or hoping for. The first Pikmin was a shorter and smaller game, but I felt like I was exploring a world. Here, the overground sections felt like I was walking through a large menu to get to the next cave.

In isolation I could deal with that, but with non-curated levels, random enemy placement and the occasional bomb falling from the ceiling with no warning, my enjoyment levels did start to take a slight hit. It hits its nadir when all of the above combine with having treasure nearby - not because of the gameplay of collecting them but due to the incessant and incredibly annoying chirping of the treasure radar. It's distracting mid-battle, and the ringing just won't stop even after that point until its deposited safely - the only way it will go away is by turning all in-game sound effects off which isn't a great solution.

But as I said at the start, this is still Pikmin. They're still a bunch of little guys working together in a big world to collect objects and dissolve bulborbs. The review sounds quite negative but I still had a good time playing through - I just don't think I'll be returning to this entry in the series much compared to the first and third.

I don't know. Mechanically, Pikmin 2 is the better game, but overall I think I enjoyed my experience with Pikmin 1 more.

At the beginning, I was really enjoying this game. The Pikmin controlled way better, the addition of another captain made management more fun (but fuck you Louie), and I loved the change from ship parts to real world objects. It really adds to the world building and I love all the little Nintendo easter eggs. I truly thought this was going to be my favourite in the series, but as I kept playing I quickly realized how much more the caves took a priority over the overworld in terms of core gameplay and finding treasures.

This was my main gripe I had with Pikmin 4 as I found the caves, while at first were cool, became stale pretty quickly. I would much rather explore the overworld than these damp, dark caves that all look the same. The RNG factor was also something I wasn't a huge fan of as there were a handful of times where I would have 50 of my Pikmin insta-killed by an enemy due spawning right next to it. Fuck you Gatling Groink.

But as much as I complain about the caves, it's still Pikmin. I love exploring this mysterious world with my army of colourful little shits. Now onto Pikmin 3.

It sure is Pikmin 2! Pikmin 2 is one of my favorite games ever, and being able to play it wherever I want is awesome. Upscaled cutscenes were a very pleasant surprise even if the difference is negligible to me, same with the updated renders. While I'm a sucker for the product placement in the original releases, I can't help but to enjoy inspecting the altered forms of the products.

Goes without saying, but if you don't like Pikmin 2, this remaster won't change your mind. Hell, I'm not really sure how much of a "remaster" it is, it's pretty much the same game. I love it, though.

Yeah, I can't say I liked this one.

There are parts of the gameplay that I like (whites/purples, actual bosses, two captains at once for improved multitasking), but it feels like a missed opportunity in that they didn't focus on more of the things 1 did well too (richer exploration and puzzle-solving).

Caves are cool in concept but get completely torpedoed by the procedural generation. Some floors have fixed layouts, but most of them don't, and the algorithm is far from advanced enough to create level designs on par with hand-made areas. And since the current floor design is randomized every time the game is closed/reopened, a simple soft reset can move the hole to the next sublevel from one of the far ends of the map to right near the entrance, which makes all of the effort put into navigating the floor feel disposable. They're blatant padding and I really hope that Nintendo plans on hand-crafting actual level designs for the caves in 4. The prospect of exploring massive underground labyrinths as a super tiny creature is really fascinating, which is why I was also let down by the aesthetics, which were (barring a few standouts like the subterranean complex) either super boring or completely out of place in the game's world.

I do appreciate my pikmin not committing suicide in droves every time I try to cross a small bridge though

3>1>>>2

die louie die


A step down from pikmin 1 in my opinion, the strength of the arcade-y feeling of 1 is lost here, instead trading it for the caves. The caves are fun, but they really do lose steam if they go for more than 7 floors, making them a bit of a slog to get through

Still pikmin though! The pikmin formula still clearly works.

When playing the original Pikmin, the most enjoyable aspects of the game were the exploration, discovery, and learning of how Pikmin operate in the world. Finding and collecting your lost ship parts so that you could escape before time ran out struck a delicate balance of time management and resource conservation skills. The knowledge and experience from the original Pikmin gave me confidence going into its sequel. This time, however, you have more at your disposal. You explore with two captains, there are dungeon-like caves to explore, new Pikmin to command, a large abundance of treasure to find, and a new cast of enemies to impede your progress. With there being no limits on how many days you may use to explore this distant planet, you are given more grace on how you choose to pace yourself through the game.

When playing a sequel it’s always nice to see good things return, but what you are truly looking for are the new features that are being introduced. Pikmin 2 does a great job exposing you to new features in tandem with the original features of Pikmin. For example, you start with a small colony of Red Pikmin. You are then taught the basics of collecting flower pods and enemy carcasses to bolster your forces. This naturally translates into the new goal of this game. Instead of fixing your ship, you are looking for treasure. Having two captains to control allows you to cover more ground within the small time window that you have for each day. I do wish that there was a way to send an inactive captain to specific places. That being said, the ability to coordinate the two captains worked fine to serve the challenges presented. Many obstacles from the first Pikmin game return. Throughout the different environments that you get to explore you will encounter obstacles like the breakable walls and the extendable bridges. Walls that require bomb rocks, interestingly enough, do not make a return. New obstacles include poison emitters and electrical lines. While poison can be recovered from, electricity instantly kills all of your Pikmin except for Yellow ones. There are only a few treasures to be found on the surface, the abundance of treasure needs to be uncovered in the game’s largest feature: caves.

Caves in this game are the focal point of exploration. Pikmin 2 successfully takes the original experience of Pikmin and pivots it in a completely different direction by introducing this single feature. Once you gain access to a cave, the day timer freezes so you can explore at your own pace. Upon descent, you are greeted with a labyrinth of randomly generated floors. Your game saves in between each floor, so if you’re given a bad floor layout you can reset the game for a more desirable outcome. This comes in handy later in the game when there’s a chance for you and your Pikmin to appear immediately within range of enemies. These floors are littered with all kinds of treasures, enemies, and traps, so it is up to you to strategize your approach. Caves demand you to play more thoughtfully as you cannot repopulate your Pikmin whilst exploring them like you can on the surface. Some of the caves do have flowers that can give you a few extra Pikmin, but enemy carcasses are turned into money instead of additional forces. Aptly preparing for a cave excursion is essential and the game gives you enough knowledge of what to bring beforehand. Each cave gives you a preview of what elements will be present within. This gives you a chance to decide what type and how many Pikmin to bring.

To aid your search for treasure, you enlist the help of several different types of Pikmin. Six types, to be exact. You have your original roster of primary color-themed Pikmin; Red and Blue Pikmin retain their respective immunities to fire and water while Yellow Pikmin lose the ability to pick up bomb rocks in exchange for immunity to electricity. You can still throw Yellow Pikmin higher into the air than any other Pikmin. New Pikmin types include Purple Pikmin, White Pikmin, and Bulbmin. Purple Pikmin do twice as much damage as a Blue, Yellow, or White Pikmin and are also ten times heavier and can lift with the strength of ten Pikmin. White Pikmin can find treasure buried underground and dig it up, are immune to poison and are poisonous to hostile creatures. Bulbmin are parasitic Pikmin that have taken over Red Bulborbs. You obtain them by killing the leader of the group. They are immune to all environmental hazards but are slower and weaker than regular Pikmin. Although Bulbmin cannot journey with you out of a cave, they make for a nice disposable supplement for your forces. These unique attributes open up the game to more challenges by combining returning hazards with new ones. You can now encounter poison/electric gates and much heavier items to be carried back to your ship. The main thing to note here is that the new Pikmin types don’t have onions. To get them you have to sacrifice your main forces (or Bulbmin) to convert them into these new Pikmin types. This makes White and Purple Pikmin intrinsically more valuable. By adding three new Pikmin types, and limiting your access to them, the game can create a new atmosphere of interesting challenges and resource management.

Locating and collecting treasures is your primary goal in Pikmin 2. The entire reason you have returned is to collect treasure so you can pay off your boss’s loan that was taken to cover a lost shipment. The treasures you find in the original release are directly related to things we have in real life (i.e. a Duracell battery and a bottle cap that says Sprite on it). Some of these items are mundane garbage to us, others are fun or interesting. You get a whole range of treasures. One of the caves yields only confectionaries. The best part of this is that your ship names and describes each of these treasures. I often found myself getting a good chuckle from some of the names given to the treasures. Naming a queen chess piece “Priceless Statue” and the king chess piece “Useless Statue” was probably my favorite example of this. The unfortunate thing about the remaster is that all of the third-party brands were removed from the game and replaced with generic fictional brands. While the game is still enjoyable, I found this diminished my appreciation for the treasures. Things that had a generic label ended up being less interesting to me and so I was less likely to look at it in my treasure catalog in between days.

The setting isn’t entirely dissimilar to the first Pikmin game. Although your adventure takes you to new locations, you are still visiting the same planet so that makes sense. While the first Pikmin had more explicit theming, this charm isn’t realized so well in Pikmin 2. You have four locations like before, but only two of them feel truly defined. The Valley of Repose is an oblong-shaped snowscape. Lacking much detail, you’re left pursuing the few obstacles that are laid down before you in this introductory area. Awakening Wood is a more lush environment. You find the Blue Pikmin onion here despite them being locked behind an electrified gate. This area is more square and features only a few challenges. The Perplexing Pool was the most interesting environment for me. It features a central land mass that’s surrounded by water. You find the Yellow Pikmin onion here. This area had the most interesting challenges that demanded the use of multiple types of Pikmin. Finally, the Wistful Wild is accessed only once you’ve cleared the debt owed by your boss. This area felt more plain. You see very little opposition between you and the caves. The lack of bosses on the surface undermines any sort of challenge that you may face since all of the creatures are decently manageable. I found these places to be much less memorable than its predecessor. It feels like the environmental innovation was spent more on developing the caves. This would have been fine if the caves were less procedurally generated. Because of this, only a few caves are truly memorable.

What’s more interesting than the environments, are the creatures that inhabit them. Some returning creatures are Bulborbs/Bulbears, Burrowing Snagrets, Blowhogs, and many others. Pikmin 2 almost triples the amount of creatures that you will encounter throughout your journey. Notable additions are the various types of Dweevils, Wollywogs, and some new variations of the aforementioned returning creatures. Each of these creatures have unique behaviors and ways of impeding your progress in the game. Anode Dweevils steal treasures and wear them as protection. Swooping Snitchbugs make a return and are often paired with the new Bumbling Snitchbug. Bumbling Snitchbugs grab and throw your captains around which can get pretty annoying when you’re trying to retrieve your pikmin from the ground. Seeing many different enemies is a marked improvement upon the cast that you got to enjoy in the first game. Many of these enemies have great designs and are fun to read about in the game’s new feature, the Piklopedia. This catalogs every enemy you encounter and gives you information on each of them. Given entries based on the perspective of both Olimar and Louie, also provides a fun spin on the information gathered for each creature. This can be helpful if you are struggling to figure out a good way to tackle a particular creature.

You also encounter several bosses as each cave has at least one. They are usually found at the end of the cave and some are encountered multiple times. The Empress Bulblax is the first boss you will encounter and is easy. When you face her again you are given a much stricter challenge as she’s constantly reproducing Bulborb Larvae that can eat your Pikmin before dying. I’d say her encounter in the late game is more forgiving than in the mid-game but that’s because her mid-game encounter is poorly designed. Sloped hallways would be okay if your Pikmin were able to consistently climb them without fear of the Bulborb Larvae. The Emperor Bulblax makes a return and is seen a few times as well. Not much has changed except you can’t use Yellow Pikmin to throw bomb rocks into their mouths like before. You’re left to try other strategies with them. My favorite boss was the Water Wraith. The Water Wraith is encountered in the Submerged Castle, which is only accessible with Blue Pikmin. The cave has all types of hazards along with a unique gimmick. The boss drops in on you if you take too long on any given floor. This applies pressure for you to hurry to the end where you’ll be given the proper tools to defeat it. This was the first cave that challenged my ability to manage my time and resources properly. With proper strategization (and a few choice resets of certain floors) I was able to avoid the Water Wraith altogether for a few floors. The boss itself isn’t that tough once you gain access to its weakness, but the challenge it imposes on you is what makes it so effective. The only other boss that elicited a strong response was the Man-at-Legs. This was a Beady Long Legs equipped with a machine gun. Although terrifying at first, once you have a chance to think rationally the boss isn’t too difficult to handle.

Fully delving into what Pikmin 2 has to offer gave me a lot of thrills. Despite the environments being less fleshed out, I still enjoyed searching for the treasures both on the surface and underground in the caves. The inclusion of three new Pikmin types was a welcome feature and well implemented. I ultimately found Pikmin 2 to be a more engaging game for me. I still appreciate the original Pikmin and its simplicity but Pikmin 2 has so much more to offer. I did find that towards the end of Pikmin 2, I started to feel a bit of fatigue with the longer caves. One cave is effectively a boss rush and another cave just has tons of grueling floors to tackle. Then once you finally reach the bottom, you have an extremely tough final boss to face. The Titan Dweevil is perhaps the most challenging aspect of Pikmin 2. This boss forces you to play to the strengths of your Pikmin. It was a much more challenging boss than the Emperor Bulblax in 1, and it was more thematically interesting as a final boss. The seamless introduction of new features balances well between innovation and stagnation. The accomplishment of collecting all 201 treasures felt satisfying. By the time I had completed all that I wished to accomplish, I was ready to put the game down and play something else. Pikmin 2 gave me just enough content to feel satisfied, if not a little bit more.

Has the core gameplay that makes Pikmin fun, as well as a lot of cool additions that had a lot of potential, but sadly it's weighed down by the caves.

These things are fun for like 2-3 floors at a time, but aside from the tutorial cave, they're 5 floors at least and can go up to 15. So, instead of these things giving you a break from the time management, they completely overshadow it and make it so you're only spending 20% of the game doing the thing pikmin is known for. Most of them aren't terrible, but they severely overstay their welcome

I believe in Pikmin. I am certain that human life will end through nuclear war or ecological negligence, and someday a funny little man will land here on a spaceship and pluck doting vegetable guys out the ground to fight mutant spiders and frogs. I think the setting raises interesting and prescient ideas about the nature of survival and social hierarchies. It's the central reason I have such a problem with Pikmin 1 receiving a staight-to-VHS comedy sequel.

Having survived the first game by the skin of his teeth, Olimar arrives home and is immediately sent back to Pikminland because his boss is skint. I hate this miserable coda. I hate that his longing to see his family again is put on hold to chase money. I hate that earth is immediately seen as a place to mine for resources. I think there's a kind of dark satire about capitalistic greed in it, but I do not enjoy this part of the fantasy. I feel sick.

Pikmin 2 isn't a game about survival anymore. There's no time limit, except the daily clock, which seems more of an irritation here than the structural grounding it served as in the original game. The game's more willing to kill off your Pikmin now, because you can just go farm more. Olimar and Louie can stay here as long as they want, and seemingly, the only reason to rush is to complete the game with a score you can boast about. There's still the familiar Pikmin gameplay, but that's largely relegated to the overworld sections. The bulk of Pikmin 2's content is found in the caves; RANDOMLY GENERATED dungeons with a series of floors to excavate treasures from. Pikmin 2's quite antithetical to 1's carefulness. The Pikmin are fodder now. If they die, tough luck. Fuck your wasted time. Go find some more and try again. They probably don't have souls, right?

I've got as much distaste for randomly generated content and roguelikes as anyone, and it's a big sticking point with the game for me. It's tempting to lay it on too thick. In reality, Pikmin 2 is generating content from a fairly well-crafted library of pieces. There's still humanity in the product. Some cave floors are clever and creative. One uses a toy train track to create a central barrier that Pikmin can walk on top of without falling off, but they can walk under the drawbridge. It's cute and smart, even if it does undercut the game's setting pretty dramatically. Random elements generally come in the form of enemy and item placement, and it never creates anything unplayable, even if there are a few too many dead ends and groups of explosive nightmares.

This review follows the new Switch release of the game. It's an awkward thing. I became a Pikmin fan through the original Wii U release of 3, and the New Play Control versions of 1 and (to a lesser extent) 2. To me, pointer controls are just how Pikmin is supposed to play. I'm aware there's GameCube folk who think being able to aim all over the screen messes with the intended balance, but it's just a much more deliberate aiming system than wobbling a cursor based on where your character's facing. I think 4's implementation of a lock-on system was a decent compromise, but Nintendo's already come up with the solution to this problem. Going back to the classic controls feels like playing an FPS on the Dreamcast. There is motion control support in here, but it's the airyfairy implementation from 4, where you can manipulate your cursor within the character's throwing range, and it doesn't feel any easier or more intuitive than just accepting the rudimentary 2001 standard.

In an act of curious apathy, Nintendo have chosen to base the widescreen implementation on the Wii version's clumsy presentation. While gameplay and cutscenes are presented in a native 16:9 aspect ratio, menus and text are consistently stretched to fit the dimensions of modern TVs. As the traumatised Captain Olimar is sent back to PNF-404, I'm being dragged back into the horror of friends' 2004 living rooms to suffer wrong-looking Simpsons.

I'll admit I've had a better time with Pikmin 2 on Switch than I did on my initial Wii playthrough. Knowing this is the one I didn't have much emotional attachment to helped warm me to the idea of the Pikmin gameplay grab-bag. It's a shallow pleasure, and I'd be callous enough to suggest its biggest fans have shallow appreciation for the games' setting. That said, previous releases of the game featured licensed products as its "treasures", and I've always felt a bit of a thrill from their subversive implication. The human race is dead, and the only remaining evidence of their civilisation is capitalistic waste. The Duracell batteries and Haribo bags are, understandably, not in this new version, I'll always have a bit of respect for Pikmin 2 for how it egged corporations into painting themselves as the problem.

Some people think Pikmin 2 is the best in the series. Who am I to say otherwise? Maybe you'll love it. I just hope I helped you understand why I really don't.

i never made it through pikmin 2 before in the several attempts i made in the past but even bad pikmin is better than a lot of other games.

it's very much a love it or hate it game in the series, while lots of people like the randomized dungeon additions, i always found them tedious. but i think you have to get over the fact that even best case scenario you're probably going to lose a few pikmin sometimes. that said, you can restart each level of the dungeon and the roll of the dice might make it more favorable this time. or worse.

pikmin 4 is my goty (sorry totk) and once i 100% completed it i still had the pikmin bug so i went back and beat pikmin 3 for the first time then beat pikmin 1 for my fourth time then finally arrived at this one, my most fearsome foe.

and i stuck with it and i gotta still say, "bad" pikmin is still hella fun.

edit: okay i take it all back after getting all the treasures... this game is just straight up tedious. i hate when games think just adding more stuff is the way to make it harder. i mean it does, but in a cheap way. last boss was not fun. mostly glad i'll never touch this game again. i beat every mainline pikmin tho. time to try hey! pikmin.

prior to playing pikmin 2, i had only heard undying praise for it. i knew that it was a fan favorite--not a single peep about it being known as hit or miss. i absolutely adored pikmin 1, so needless to say i was overjoyed to continue experiencing these wonderfully unique games, unaware of the fact that this is the most divisive title in the series

initially, i was intrigued by the lack of the time limit that shaped the first entry's gameplay loop, but i soon realized that the absence of this feature gave me no motivation to keep moving forward--something i found to be an essential part of the first game. however, i don't think that adding a time limit to any or all parts of the game would magically improve it, as the lack of one goes hand in hand with the problems i have with its core design

where pikmin 1 chose to combine micromanagement with skillfully crafted level design, pikmin 2 takes a bold 180 and introduces dungeon-crawling. the caves are an interesting addition and quite exciting at first, having some structure but being largely characterized by random elements. nevertheless, their soulless nature quickly shows itself.

speaking as a big fan of roguelikes and games with roguelike elements, the randomness of pikmin 2's caves feels more like a shallow attempt to change the gameplay loop for the sake of change rather than a well-thought-out, meaningful shift that (better) suits the gameplay. pikmin 1 resonated with me because it has such elegantly crafted level design. both games allow for multiple solutions to the same problem but random enemy placement and level layouts feel at odds with the groundwork that the first game laid out.

the caves, especially the later ones (namely the dream den), drag on for far too long and are a great example of why i think that quantity hardly equates to quality within games.

the strong focus on caves robbed the overworld of its charm, and the lack of a time limit took away my incentive to collect (albeit cool) treasure, at least past the milestone of repaying the entirety of the debt.

towards the end of my playthrough, i was constantly audibly frustrated and desperate to move onto 3, a sharp contrast to my experience with the latter half of 1. the final boss was especially exhausting, as i beat it on my first try but it dragged on for what felt like hours

i think that the dynamic music, addition of boss music, and improvements to quality of life are all great. i love purple and white pikmin they are so soooo silly but pikmin 2 is probably the most disappointing game i've ever played because i had such high hopes for it after becoming completely enamored with 1. it polishes up some jank and adds some neat new stuff but it also strips away what makes the first game so engaging to me

i respect this game's attempts to innovate on the pikmin formula, especially when so many game series prefer to play it safe and fear taking risks, but new doesn't always equal good/better. i can kinda see the appeal of this game's design and its chaotic nature but i guess they thought it was new year's eve because they totally dropped the baaaaaaaaall

The caves single-handedly ruined my enjoyment of Pikmin 2. They started out as fun diversions from the regular gameplay, but once I realized most of the game’s content is in them, they began to drag. The later caves amplified this feeling as they were much longer and kept recycling the same enemies and hazards without iterating on any type of challenge. Some asshole also decided to make enemies, bombs, and rocks fall from the ceiling in some caves. This alone would be enough to convince me these were thrown together just to spite players, but I believe there’s a bigger issue at hand: the player is not pressured in an engaging way.

The inability to reproduce Pikmin underground initially seemed like a good stressor, except you can take as much time as you want with these often brutal challenges. When combined with the game saving every floor, the caves had a lethargic pace where I would reload my save file when losing more than a few Pikmin. I had no idea how long each cave would be, so why not reset when things inevitably go awry? Annoyingly, Nintendo did not include the save reload option from Pikmin 1, requiring me to close and reopen the game every time I wanted to try again. The randomly generated map and enemy placements often made treasure rage-inducing to acquire, so much so I had to take a week-long break before completion. The Submerged Castle was the only cave I found enjoyable and challenging. Being forced to use a specific Pikmin to eliminate obstacles and collect treasure before an invincible foe showed up was an excellent change of pace and brought back the first game’s urgency without feeling unfair. Its five-floor count also ensured it never overstayed its welcome.

The above-ground sections were fine, but they felt like a means to a miserable end with the abundance of caves. I can only hope they are better in Pikmin 4. They’re a good idea, but I hate the execution here. Definitely a one and done experience.

Sublevel 10 of the Dream Den is total bullshit. I still enjoy this game, but the nostalgia can't save it from some really weird and sloppy design choices. I'm just going to list them as I think of them. Purple Pikmin make combat feel pointless as they can just stun and kill enemies so easily. There's also really no reason for them to be able to carry the weight of 10 other Pikmin because there's rarely a situation where you actually need them to carry stuff. There was one item that required 100 Purple Pikmin which was kind of hilarious, but that just means you have to watch the slowest Pikmin carry the heaviest treasure all the way to your ship. It's not even far, but it takes a whole quarter of a day. It's honestly faster to let other Pikmin carry things most of the time anyway because the Purple Pikmin are so much slower than the others. Why do the Pikmin have different speeds at all? It's a nightmare having to wait for leaf purples to catch up with any other Pikmin. Why do the White Pikmin have the ability to find treasure underground when you just get a device that tells you where everything is anyway? Why is there a cave where you HAVE to bring only Blue Pikmin, only for you to need Purple Pikmin to fight the boss? Some of the caves don't give you any warning before enemies just start attacking you right away. Seriously, sometimes it feels unavoidable. You don't get a second to breath when you enter some of the sublevels. The randomly generated cave levels are also just kind of poorly laid out at times too. Sometimes there'll just be walls to break down that lead to absolutely nothing. Sometimes the treasure will be right next to you. Sometimes it'll be at the other side of the whole level. Towards the end of the game I just started solo fighting enemies because it was so much faster than dividing my Pikmin up just to do one obstacle, then again to get through another obstacle, and so on. The difficulty in this game is so all over the place. I didn't lose a single Pikmin one of the final cave bosses in the game and I only lost 1 on the final boss. Some of the other bosses earlier in the game however I lost nearly 30 Pikmin to in one battle. There's a cave where that's just a gauntlet where you fight almost every single boss you've encountered to that point on each sublevel, but then the final boss in that cave is so easy. The later levels also just start throwing so many mixes of elemental obstacles your way with no sensible way to approach them. Going back to my first sentence of this entry, Sublevel 10 of the Dream Den is one where you 100% NEED Blue Pikmin to get the treasure because the Pikmin have to carry it across water. You also need to fight every other enemy in that level with the Blue Pikmin and it throws so many at you at once to the point where you're inevitably going to lose some of them. But of course you need at least 15 of them to carry the treasure at all. It's also the only area of the game in the later stages that I can think of where you absolutely NEED a certain type of Pikmin and a certain NUMBER of the type of Pikmin to get the treasure. If you're even 1 short, you need to either restart that level, or go back to the surface to get more blue Pikmin. It's so frustrating, especially when it's so close to the end. It's honestly hilarious that I avoided the first game for so long because I didn't want to feel stressed out having a time limit only for this game to stress me out WAY more than the first game. I'm honestly not sure if I like Pikmin 2 as much as the first game. I think the first game is at least the better-designed game. Pikmin 2 is ambitious and tries a lot, but a lot of it really doesn't work as well as it should. I still enjoyed it and I honestly got a bit teary-eyed having finally collected every treasure in this game and closing the book on this super nostalgic game for me. Having played everything in this game though (aside from the Challenge Mode, fuck that), I really don't think it holds up quite so well now. I'm honestly really excited to finally play 3 and then 4, because I can see a lot they can improve on.

I've played 1 and 3 over and over and over again, over the years. And I've been meaning to play 2 again for a long time but was always afraid of doing so because of how often I heard (and remembered) how full of shit the game is.

I was correct.

I don't know if I can bring myself to dislike Pikmin 2 because at the end of the day it's still Pikmin. It's just the least good Pikmin. Purple Pikmin make combat so trivial most of the time, but at the same time you're having to play the game like you're walking on eggshells because enemies and bombs will just drop from the ceiling unprompted. Some of which will ONLY trigger around Pikmin that are carrying something. Like I swear this game is specifically designed to make the player upset, the fuck is up with that.

As such, the difficulty curve is more like a difficulty stock market line graph. Just shooting up and down for arbitrary reasons. A cave will be a slog to get through but then the boss at the end is completely trivial. Several enemies like Bulbears and Gatling Groinks are disproportionately dangerous but also made a joke so long as you have an ultra bitter spray on you. It's just a mess.

An exhausting game that's carried by the fact that it's Pikmin.

Os Horrores da Guerra 2: O Inimigo Agora é Outro

Em questão de gameplay ele é muito melhor que o antecessor, o controle e gerenciamento dos Pikmins melhorou muito, ainda mais com a adição do Louie. Os Pikmins roxo e branco também ótimas adições, principalmente se eles forem usados nos combates.

Mas o que mata esse jogo para mim são as cavernas, já que elas são um dungeon crowler ao invés do gerenciamento de tempo e recursos, no começo elas são legais para dar uma diferenciada loop padrão, mas ela rapidamente ficam insuportáveis, porque além delas não se diferenciarem muito uma das outras, elas são enormes com andares sem fim. Quando eu cheguei no dia 12, eu basicamente já visto tudo que esse jogo poderia oferecer.

Não é um jogo ruim, mas as cavernas são uma parte tão grande do jogo, elas determinam o seu aproveitamento.

Oh boy



Yeah I did not like this one nearly as much as 1, I will say that it has improved in multiple areas, in fact I’ll list them right now.
The AI and general controls feel better and less clunky, like how the pikmin follow you more closely don’t get lost from the group as often as they did in the first game, the enemy variety has been expanded, I like exploring the worlds and seeing how these areas have changed since the first game, the story and characters are all actually pretty funny, with how the President is basically in debt to loan sharks because something ate some food, and also the dialogue you get with a bunch of different characters after the days are done, it’s all really charming and fun, I was really enjoying the game up until the debt was fully paid………..then the game got worse, now let me explain why I liked this game a lot less than the original.

You can probably guess why I like it less, one simple five letter word that brings this game down for me and many others…….caves.
Now at first, I actually liked the caves, at least when they started out they weren’t overly difficult and didn’t overstay their welcome, but then I started to worry cause the caves appeared a lot throughout the game, I was thinking this was just gonna be like 20-30% of what the game would be and the rest are just exploring the worlds………nope, it’s about what 60-70% of the game is, just going through these caves that are all randomly generated, and kinda detract from the game’s world, like it’s just little dark tunnels with no connection to the world’s theme, all randomly generated in ways.
Now I could forgive them not looking great if we didn’t have to spend too much time in them……..well, some of these fucking caves can go on for a while, the early ones are nice cause they only go on for like 4-5 levels and are generally over quick, but later in the game they go up to 7, 8, 9 levels, and particularly in the wistful wilds, they go over ten levels, which is just fucking crazy, not to mention that they get way harder as the game goes on, and not in a fair way, more in a “let’s put all these fucking enemies in here with bombs and rocks falling from the ceiling while we have electricity gates all around, which instantly kills any non yellow pikmin”, it’s fucking insane, and not in a good way………but I still got every treasure, still fought the final boss which was actually really cool, but was made unnecessarily difficult because of the gauntlet of a cave you gotta go through before, so I only had like 60 pikmin left, which could all easily be wiped out by the electrical attacks………..but I did it, saved Louie, and went for the final treasure, the weight………which needed 100 purple pikmin to carry it, so I went back and got that and got them to carry it, and I watched them carry it. Slowly. Watching. Them. Carry. It.
The speed of the carrying here felt like the developers just laughing at me, all this agony, all the pikmin lost, and this is what I get………..then you learn that Louie was actually the reason why the whole game happened, it’s like great, I should’ve just left you on the planet.


Look, this game is good, but it just feels like an overall downgrade from Pikmin 1, I think if they had tone down the caves and made them more easily digestible (or not randomly generated) and made them more like the theme of the world above, it would’ve improved the game tenfold.
It’s a game that’s great in short bursts but it sadly really overstays its welcome.


Now onto Pikmin 3