I've been trying to get to this review, but every time I start it, I think about eating handfuls of delicious Pikmin and I get too distracted. I like to imagine myself lying flat on my belly with my mouth open, hundreds of Pikmin lined up and marching right down my gullet. As you can imagine, it's hard to write a review with such decadent fantasies dancing through my mind.

If I could, I would shrink myself down to Pikmin size, and like Captain Olimar, I would gain their trust. There are so many Pikmin that they would never notice one or two of their own missing. Rather than satiate myself on many Pikmin, I can gorge myself on one. A plump Pikmin roasting over an open fire, filling my nose with such smells, my ears with the gentle crackles and pops of its searing flesh... Ah, a delight for the senses.

By the time my many crimes are exposed it will be too late. My belly will have popped, come undone like some flimsy seam on an old overworn shirt, and they will have to roll my bloated form into the autopsy room. "Cause of death: overconsumption of Pikmin," they'll note. "At least the bastard died with a smile."

(Completed debt, game dropped afterwards)

Frustrating. Despite this being my least favorite Pikmin by far, I actually do see the gameplay vision, and the aesthetic is very charming! But this is simply not a game playing to its strengths, and filled with too many frustrations to list.

The most obvious change is that this game has no time limit. Pikmin 1's time limit was a non-issue if you were decently good, but its removal signals a shift away from time efficiency being the major driver. Okay, so what is the driver then? Well, the combat... kinda.

On paper, and to some degree in practice, this is actually a fine idea. Swarming controls strike a balance between immediacy and indirectness that makes positioning engaging, especially amidst the chaos that erupts while trying to aim thrown Pikmin, call stray ones back, and dodge attacks. Some improvements to the controls from Pikmin 1, especially around selecting thrown Pikmin, support this without hampering tactility too much, and the Pikmin 2 enemy roster is far more creative, challenging, and dynamic than 1's.

The problem is that the level design is consistently terrible at actually inducing these types of scenarios. Overworld stages are downgraded remixes of Pikmin 1 levels, especially embarrassing compared to Pikmin 3's Mission Mode. But the real meat of the game, the caves, is somehow even worse. This is some of the most dry, sterile procgen I've ever seen, almost deliberately placing obstacles to encourage slow, grindy, safe clears. Everything is mostly cordoned off into their own "handmade" rooms, so that you tackle enemies and hazards sequentially instead of simultaneously. Many "lock-and-key" effects like fire traps, poison traps, electric beetles, etc. are actually more flexible than they seem, but the player is given no impetus to ever use a non-matching Pikmin type save for rare, forced scenarios like Submerged Castle.

Speaking of Submerged Castle, shoutouts to the Water Wraith for being a fantastic (albeit very undercooked) addition, by reintroducing efficiency concerns in a natural and dynamic way that fits the style of the game and leaves lots of room for counterplay. Of course, this is Pikmin 2, so it's limited to this cave and never used again.

I have many more complaints, so I will phrase things a different way. The great version of this game as I envision it would do the following:

- Either revamp the overworld to justify its existence, or further minimize/remove it
- Generate caves that place varying threats in close proximity to each other, and everything in generally more dense and interconnected layouts
- Rebalance the game to avoid reloading floors and instead emphasize continuous resource management
- Allow most enemies to wander much further from their initial location
- Introduce a mechanic that incentivizes some efficiency, which will complicate treasure gathering and grindy playstyles
- Instead of creating sudden difficulty spikes through random events like bomb rock drops, use procgen, such as grouped difficult enemies, constricting terrain, high hazard density, etc.
- Vastly speed up the pacing of the game. Given the current quality level, half of the caves can be cut

If you put all this together, it almost sounds like a traditional roguelike or dungeon crawler! But this style of dense, systemically driven design is not something that Nintendo seems willing or able to make; BOTW/TOTK is the closest, and those games exist in spite of balance and structural issues.

What's shocking though, is how much the Colossal Caverns romhack resembles this, simply by squishing everything in the game into one giant, dense cave. Combat is more chaotic! Routing is more freeform! Resource management is more natural! It still falls short structurally due to its romhack status, but it's a testament to how much of the raw material is already present.

Ultimately, a disappointment. This could have served as a great example of seizing on the latent potential in a set of mechanics, almost like how classic Doom's combat was explored and developed, but Pikmin 2 is just too unfocused and inconsistent to make it there. Check out Colossal Caverns with a self-imposed time limit, it's fun!

While it definitely has the personality and charm of Pikmin, the moment to moment is still fun, there’s just so many choices in this one that annoyed the hell out of me and drag my opinion of this game down. Tutorial texts are frequent and intrusive, most of the maps are just recycled from the first game, I don’t like how much time is spent in the caves, I find them really bland and unmemorable in terms of art and layout and they deal in a lot of cheap bullshit, things like bomb rocks randomly falling out of the sky and nuking half your pikmin (if any purples or whites were among the casualties, I would just reset), not to mention the exploration is downplayed in favour of a more guided lock and key kind of progression which I don’t think really fits Pikmin. It’s fine, hence the score, but I really didn’t have the motivation to beat it before the release of Pikmin 4. Maybe I’ll come back to it at a later date.

they will NOT stop talking in this one (nothing they say is interesting either!!! wooooahhh! CAPITALISM! Corporate toiling!! shutup!!!! it's all too OBVIOUS). Sooo many boring text boxes over explaining EVERYTHING. When I first realized you can skip cutscenes, I mashed start every time an abrupt fade to black interrupted my gaming and never looked back. But I feel as if I should want to read that shit though, ya know? Kinda LAME when the musings from the Olimar tutorials/log entries and the moods they would invoke were some of my fav things about the original game but ooowell!

something incentivizing good play akin to my beloved 30 day fail state possibility is gone, purple pikmin and their DEADLY shockwaves own everything thought free, I'm not INTERESTED in just more color-coated themed obstacles counting as the utility for your various pikmin types, the caves are just LOUSY - oh man let's go off about the caves for a bit:

If something goes wrong in them - they auto save at the start of every floor - so there's not enough of a commitment to dis-insensitive just resetting and doing floors over again if too many of your guys die or something! It's toxic!!! What were they thinking........ That kind of knowledge sorta kills any excitement you're supposed to feel from the whole DIVING DEEPER and DEEPER thing, and just turns victory into an inevitable grind, wouldn't you say???

Ahhhh even ignoring that - the bulk of their boring ass gameplay is just snooze-inducing hallway clearing of enemies too. Without any of the fun from the giant map exploring or the multitasking or the timing your guys safely bringing the stuff back type gameplay that I'm ACTUALLY into. The 2 captains thing was a neat idea, but I feel as if I'm not in the proper levels enough to get actual interesting mileage out of it. I just often end up parking one guy near the goals of the shitty caves so I can do everything with one and then swap back over to the other when I'm done to leave the places SLIGHTLY quicker...

iiii'm just not feeling much with this one! I sure remember liking it more when I was a youngin', but oh! How my brain has changed. Maybe if you like more grind-y things you'd be into this one; it definitely smells to me like a would-be mystery dungeon ass game in those cave levels. Just don't think Pikmin "combat" and the crippled decision making present are interesting enough to carry in those settings. And the game keeps throwing me into them caves a lot, so.......... >:(

Obviously, the main difference between this and its predecessor and immediate successor is the caves. I think the caves are conceptually sound, but there's a few issues that had me leaning in favour of Pikmin 1 & 3 over this:

- The ratio is way off, with caves taking up a vast majority of the playtime.

- The lack of a timer in most caves means tedious, safe strategies are incentivised - some of the most dangerous enemies are actually pretty useless against your captains' fists, provided you have a minute to spare (which you do). The one cave that DOES have a time mechanic is by far the most engaging.

- The feeling of dread as you descend diminishes once you realise Pikmin don't need to be in your control in order to descend down a hole (they'll all just teleport to you). Leaving the cave via geyser thus doesn't erase much progress, as getting back to where you were will only take a couple of minutes' hole-hunting with your captains.

On the plus side, the enemy variety in this game is crazy, and the caves provide space for them which may otherwise have not been there. Pikmin 2 also features boatloads of character, leaning into satirical, often dark humour that builds on the tension created by the first game's conflicting tones. Pikmin is just a conceptual masterpiece, and that's always going to go a long way despite any individual game's flaws.

I liked this a lot, but of the two Pikmin styles I'm definitely more into the style of 1/3 than what I played here in 2. From what I understand, Pikmin 4 is another in the style of 2, so while I am sceptical I'm also keen on seeing this style improved upon.

Quantifying everything I love about Pikmin 2 into a single text review is, simply, impossible. Pikmin 2 is a game so personally aligned with me and my tastes that it's incredibly difficult to explain just why I like it so much. I plan one day to make a full video review explaining why I love the game, which I will definitely link here whenever I make it, but as is, I'll make bullet points:

>A major improvement over Pikmin 1 in gameplay mechanics, polish, and scale. The longest Pikmin and most content packed Pikmin game to date, with all the previous game's AI and bugginess polished out
>One of the most interactive, immersive, dynamic, and atmospheric soundtracks I've ever heard. Every single track in the game is specifically designed and layered to dynamically adjust depending on various contextual factors, such as time of day, the actions your Pikmin are taking, your proximity to enemies, treasure, specific items, your health, I haven't found a game with this musical dynamicism before or since.
>The atmosphere is thick, within the caves the music is abstract and cavernous, while each area theme perfectly represents the area they're assigned to.
>The caves are, in my opinion, the best aspect of the game. Allowing for pure, unfiltered challenging gameplay with no restrictions. Despite being completely randomly generated, there seem to be restrictions in place within the generator to make the caves feel designed. I've had multiple friends play the game and not realize the caves were randomly generated until they either reset in a cave floor multiple times, or I TOLD them it was, that's how good the system is. Being able to take your time to plan out a perfect course of action while traversing an underground complex, searching for treasures and using your knowledge of the game and awareness to max capacity to ensure no mass loss of life is enthralling and I can never get enough of it.
>The worldbuilding is immaculate. The previous end of day logs have been changed from personal captains diaries to emails, and while you lose the direct connection to a character and their thoughts like in Pikmin 1's desolate, hopeless atmosphere, you instead get a much wider look into Pikmin's world, as well as the background characters, such as the family members of the protagonists back home, or the President's wonderful tomfoolery with a stint involving some debt collectors. Beyond that, the worldbuilding of PNF-404 only doubles with the introduction of the Piklopedia, which gives full pseudo-scientific analysis of the various creatures on the planet, giving them biological explanations, family trees, predator and prey relationships, everything. The captains also all comment on the treasures they collect, which can often lead to introspection which results in some great characterization and more lore. The world is fully fleshed out.
>The game looks stunning for a GameCube title.
>The Submerged Castle is one of my favorite moments in any video game period.
>The game is actually rather challenging! It'll test you and your abilities, as well as your knowledge of the game. If you aren't careful, you could lose your entire armada in the literal blink of an eye. But the game dropping the full game time limit means that no matter how devastating a loss you face, you can ALWAYS bounce back and recover.
>the core gameplay, micromanagement, exploration, treasure collecting, all of it, it's an absolute joy and completely addicting to me, I can't get enough. I always find myself pushing the boundary of how ballsy I wanna be and how much I wanna try getting done in a day. If I really can make it to take cave on the other side of the map before this 10 second timer ends or not. If I can really perfectly clear this cave floor with no deaths. It's probably why, despite being somewhat long (15-20 hours), the game is still so replayable.
>Two unironically super fun multiplayer modes. While Pikmin 3 most likely has the better multiplayer content, that doesn't stop 2's from being great either. A fun versus mode, and a great Mission mode featuring 50 pre-set (?) caves that can be challenged in single player or co-op.

I could really, truly keep going. But I'll stop there.

Let me give the only real criticisms I can give the game.
>On very, very rare occasion, the cave generation can fuck up and result in an incompletable cave floor. I've played the game 4 times and for god knows how long and never had this happen to me, but I've seen footage of it happening, so it's something to note.
>The balancing is a little out of whack. While the game is quite difficult, most combat encounters can be solved rather easily with the usage of Purple Pikmin. This can be alleviated by just not using them as much or keeping a limited supply with you, though.

I believe this to be the best game Nintendo has ever produced by and far, and I love literally everything about it. Please, please, play the Pikmin franchise. It's absolutely worthy of at least a shot. It's filled with personality, love, and soul, something that's a general rarity in modern Nintendo games.

Pikmin 2 is definitely a grower. At first I was seriously considering giving the game 2 stars, I was just so annoyed with it, but pushing through I started see what the hubub was all about.

First the bad.

I despise the narrative framing of this game. I get the whole anti-capitalism shtick it’s going for but I don’t think it is done particularly well. The debt angle opposed to the survival angle makes me feel like a parasite on the planet, taking advantage of the pikmin for my own personal gain, rather than working together. Which like...I get it, that’s what they are going for, but while Olimar’s curiosity in the first game I find infinitely charming, the constant disgust for nature from the rest of the cast in Pikmin 2 was exhausting and annoying. The letters received at the end of the days are so soulless, I derived very little joy from reading them. The ship’s constant bickering was deeply irritating and Louie’s dumb little meme faces just felt gross. I did not find any of it particularly funny or clever or interesting. It felt old and dry as soon as it was introduced and it sacrificed my favorite aspect of the other 3 games: the juxtaposition between the severity of the goal and the intrigue of the world. The debt has no stakes and the character’s intrigue is non-existent.

This game also starts that trend of needing to add a new pikmin type to every game. I think this trend might be bad actually. In the first game there is a really good balance between the three guys. Red fights good, Yellow throws high, and Blue can go into the water. They are very tactile to the environment and core aspects of the gameplay. The Purple pikmin being as strong as 10 pikmin is a pretty good addition but all the ones after that kind of stink. Like they don’t add to the gameplay in any meaningful way they are just little keys. Now instead of a generic wall you have a poison wall, or an electric wall, or an ice wall, or a glass wall. It kind of only makes the game experience worse and more tedious not to mention aesthetically incoherent. The electric walls are so jarring. The worst thing Pikmin 2 does is dedicate digging to the white pikmin. It’s way too important of a task to dedicate to a rare pikmin you only find in tunnels. The amount of time spent just watching 5 white pikmin dig - tedious.

Okay, I’m done pooping in my diaper. Now for the sort of good.

Boy this is like not even Pikmin. But also what even is Pikmin? I thought I knew what Pikmin was. I thought Pikmin was a game about multitasking and delegating tasks in big open areas but I guess not. Pikmin 2 gets rid of all of that and focuses on combat. At first I didn’t like this but the more I played the more interesting it became. Pikmin mechanically is very unique when approached as an action game. The war of attrition going into a tunnel and slowly losing pikmin as you descend is a very tense experience. I would approach tunnels so meticulously and on more than one occasion would reach the end with just enough pikmin to carry the last treasure. It was a wholly unique and deep satisfaction that only a game like Pikmin could provide. Not knowing how many floors the tunnels had made it very easy to get emotionally invested. You’d reach floor 7 with 40ish pikmin and think “surely this next one is the last one, I can’t take much more of this”.

The tunnels themselves work really well overall. While I think they trivialize the overworld, they also really create a threatening and cramped environment that compliments the combat. The large enemy variety was really cool too. Going deeper and deeper and discovering all the different little freaks. The deeper you go the freakier they get.

The procedural floor layouts were also pretty neat. You’d get a bunch of dead ends and empty tunnels but I like that crap. I like it when a game is inconvenient and kind of dumb. Dead ends feel very real. If everything leads to something it just feels like a game with programming and numbers but having the occasional dead end makes the tunnels feel hostile, not designed for life.

I also didn’t mind the cheapness in this game. I think it compliments the narrative framing. Some bullshit would happened and half of me was irritated but the other half felt like I deserved it. Olimar and co. are playing dirty so I don’t see why the planet can’t as well.

These tunnels, while a lot of the times very tedious, are so uniquely "PIKMIN". There is nothing else like Pikmin and more specifically there is nothing else like Pikmin 2.

Overall this game is weird as heck. I think I hate it. Some of that hate is why I love it. Some of the hate is why I hate it. I think it would be neat if Nintendo made a Pikmin 2 rogue-lite.

SIDE NOTE:
NOWITSREYNTIME17, if you decide to comment on this review please @ me so I can get that badge. Thanks.

maybe I'm just sour at the moment, but what was the point of this? why did we need to replace the puzzle solving and multitasking of the original with rote lock-and-key style challenges? all I did for hours on end was color matching: blue is water, yellow is electricity, red is fire, white is poison, etc. etc. etc. slowly moving around and disarming traps and then picking off enemies one by one until I could clear a path from the treasure to the ship. totally draining for me past the 10 hour mark especially when it came to the caves.

the real issue here is that pikmin 2 sidesteps many issues with the original instead of attempting legitimate improvements. combat, for example, was originally clunky and imprecise, especially on gamecube (I'm assuming the wii version is better). pikmin 2's solution is to attempt to trivialize it both by supplying the player with purples and adding the ultra-spicy and ultra-bitter sprays. for the latter there's the added annoying process of grinding berries for the sprays, which generally means keeping a leader near the berries waiting around for the pikmin to deal with cobwebs/knock off worms/harvest the fruit; a constant distraction while your other leader is doing the more interesting work. the purples as well add unintended annoyances by being both sluggish and rare, meaning that they die often and you rarely have as many as you would like. these are well-deserved drawbacks, as purples can butcher nearly any standard enemy in the game with no fuss, but losing too many and needing to fall back on your regular troops makes the return to clumsy combat all the more bitter, and it's not like mindlessly massacring hallways of enemies in caves with purples is exactly stimulating either. the day system as well is sidestepped by having the caves exist outside time. these areas totally remove time management for the player and in the process throw a lot of pikmin's natural strategizing out the window in favor of the aforementioned methodical dispersal of all noteworthy obstacles on each floor. some of these elements still exist in the main areas to the game's credit, but given that the levels have been scaled back in complexity from the original and that the day limit has been excised, it feels overly simplified. there were ways to fix this: perhaps make certain key items or enemies only show up periodically for a set of days, pushing savvy players to carefully lay out their day-to-day schedule to catch each event as it comes. that's an approach that has problems of its own, but could still attempt to realize the time management aspects inherent to the original while addressing common complaints.

the aforementioned level design changes are really indicative of the whole package here. the original game's levels felt explorable and flexible in the sense that the tools the player chose to use could vary while also having clear bounds. for example, it's not feasible on a first playthrough to tear down every breakable or bombable wall, so choices must be made via prioritization of objectives; no right answers, and it forces the player to follow their gut instincts and live with potential mistakes. the need for this planning in pikmin 2 is entirely absent. treasures in the overworld tend to be in much more obvious places, and enemy layouts are such that you're expected to clear pathways proactively rather than encouraging risky treasure-carry-paths around sleeping or slow enemies as in the first. as for gates, they all boil down to "match the element to the type of pikmin and then let them rip," and any gate that exists absolutely must be taken down if you're interested in the all treasure ending. presumably the debt repayment is meant to allow some level of player choice in how they pursue objectives, but the 10k coin threshold is so low that there's no impetus to do anything other than wander around and grab whatever is close. the caves just exacerbate the above issues, as the cramped spaces restrict freedom of movement and they are littered with cookie-cutter traps that will send you running back and forth to the starting area with different colored groups of pikmin in your wake. I could go on and on... I got tired of the caves very quickly.

controversial opinion, I know, but this one really seemed mechanically dead to me compared to the first, which already had plenty of issues on its own. perhaps improvements to the pikmin AI or controls could've smoothed things out, but adjustments are so subtle in these areas it's hard for me to give out points. that's not to say there aren't parts I like of course: the world is much more fleshed out in terms of both the denizens of hocotate and olimar's personal journal entries. his mixture of empirically-minded curiosity and existential boredom makes him much richer than he has any right to be, and the letters from home accentuate this, especially with their corner-cutting boss and the just desserts he gets while destitute and on the run from debt collectors. there are also still puzzles here and there I did legitimately enjoy, such as the block-weighing ones that required careful allocation of pikmin to each platform in order to elevate olimar to a higher platform. it's on a strong core, but I think it really misses the mark in trying to improve on the weaknesses of the original. I couldn't even push myself to get all treasures, as I'm writing this after finishing dream den and have no intention of doing much clean-up past that. that final boss was excrutiatingly boring... they really need to put HP indicators on each of his weapons, and killing pikmin with the water cannon off-screen is such a low blow. the fight music was terribly repetitive as well... I could continue on this tangent but I think it's basically clear this game didn't align with me like I was hoping it would after the much more unapproachable first game.

Fuck you Nintendo for releasing Pikmin 1+2 while I was in the middle of playing this emulated.

I imagine the biggest internal conversation regarding sequel development is in regards to changes. A sequel is always the best way to really assess what makes an original title work and what doesn't. Pikmin 1 had the benefit of being such a richly produced game I found it hard to imagine what could be done to improve on it while playing it for the first time a while ago.

Weird feeling to find out that Nintendo's answer, in 2004, seemed to be "not much."

Pikmin 2 really wanted to flip the core of Pikmin on its head, by going from a time-limited scramble for ship parts to a slower, methodical treasure hunt. Part of Pikmin's appeal, to me, will always be its ability to pressure the player. Controversial as it was, Pikmin's entire campaign was time-limited for 30 in-game days, each day about 13 minutes in length. So, in short, each Pikmin playthrough will last, at most, about six and a half hours, give or take. To stress it out, the player is put under two constant time limits, that for the day, and that for the 30 total days. On my first playthrough I missed the deadline at the last minute by having the last two crucial parts in separate areas on the last day. It was frustrating, but I still enjoyed Pikmin.

I was aware of how Pikmin 2 removed the 30-day time limit but I also wasn't aware of what else it did to flip up the core game loop.

i.e. fucking dungeons. A lot of this review is gonna be about the caves/dungeons, as they’re the new center of the gameplay in this sequel.

Pikmin 2 decides that, while time ticks away during the day above ground, four different entrances in each area can be found that lead to a unique underground cave. The now-overworld clock freezes as you're now dungeon crawling for the bulk of the game time. Within the first hour, the main essence of Pikmin's design philosophy is contradicted. Pikmin 1's yin-yang of problem solving and time management is disregarded as Pikmin 2 concerns itself more with scanning featureless floors of repeating geometry, relegating the Pikmin to color-coded keys instead of diverse pieces of a toolkit. Red Pikmin are immune to fire and can remove fire traps, Yellow Pikmin are immune to electricity and can remove electric traps, Blue Pikmin can swim and are mostly useless in caves. Every floor, no matter the layout or cave itself, plays out exactly the same: clear out the enemies and traps, bring the treasures back to the landing spot, proceed down. You do this shit for over 100 floors, and all they do is get bigger, more plentiful, and take longer to complete as the game progresses.

Call me jaded or reluctant to change, but I don't find the constant lock-and-key (as Pangburn beautifully put it) gameloop an effective progression from what I previously experienced as such a greatly imaginative strategic puzzle blend.

I think what can be said most about the dungeons is how pointless they are for something that takes center stage. As I stated, pausing the daily time limit for extended dungeon crawling segments completely eviscerates the need for the time limit at all, especially with how barren the above ground sections are now. What used to be the main environment of Pikmin 1, sprawling multi-pathed worlds and labyrinths with puzzles to solve and routes to optimize at every corner have turned into circularly linear gates to these cave entrances with not much to see or do when outside of them. There's some stray treasure out there, but with how little time you spend above ground the time limit may as well not be there. I repaid my debt in 25 days over 10 hours of playtime, twice the time I spent in 30 days within Pikmin 1.

I could write much more, about this game's psychopathic sense of difficulty in the late game, over-reliance on randomized hazards to artificiate difficulty (those fucking bombs that drop from the cave ceilings), the unsubtle requirement to reset the game every time you fuck up on a shitty floor layout to get a new one (as it asks you to save between floors as a loud and obnoxious wink), the timepadding of having to farm the new White and Purple Pikmin, etcetera etcetera. You think all those clips being posted on Twitter of everyone's Pikmin army being completely eviscerated by random hazards all being from Pikmin 2 specifically is just a coincidence? It sure as hell isn't. Sometimes I think Pikmin 2 is a work of pure evil.

Despite all its changes, with all of Pikmin 2's misguided and unthoughtful reimagining, the most subversive thing of all is that I don't flat out hate it. It can be trudging, monotonous, boring, but never completely joyless. It's still a wonder of world and sound design, and there are moments above ground that spark the same light as its predecessor. I think "misguided" really is the key descriptor for Pikmin 2, as the core of a good game is still there and felt. Though I audibly groaned at the return of caves in Pikmin 4, with an explosion of countless indie roguelikes in recent years a-la Enter the Gungeon and Spelunky with their innovative dungeon crawling systems in the name of accessibility and quality of life, I think there's no drought in inspiration Nintendo could take from. Pikmin 2 could be elevated as a footnote in Pikmin 4's potentially successful winning take on Pikmin-meets-dungeon-crawling, but for now, it's a clumsy effort to shake up a successful formula that didn't need to be changed.

Right after finishing the first game and loving it to pieces, I went straight to Pikmin 2. Before playing it I wasn’t aware of how divisive this game was in the Pikmin community, but now that I’ve beaten it 100% twice, I can definitely see why. It boils down to a single word: caves. Some people love how unpredictable they are due to them being randomly generated and the challenge they offer with its many enemies and bosses, and those are the very same reasons some people hate them, because let’s face it, it’s not that fun wasting your time bringing down a gate just for it to have literally nothing behind, or having bombs raining down on you from the ceiling out of nowhere.

While the main focus of the first game is exploration, the caves make Pikmin 2 be more focused on combat, because they make up for like 80% of this game’s content. The overworld exploration takes a back seat, so much that they didn’t even bother on creating new areas - other than the very first level, all areas in this game are reused from the previous game, but with some changes. So if you don’t like the caves, well too bad, this game ain’t for you. As for myself, I quite enjoyed my first run through the game. Exploring the caves the first time around made me increasingly anxious as I progressed through the game and noticed how unpredictable they were, uncertain of what devilish troll the game would throw upon me. I’d always be especially excited for the boss fights.

I’ll never forget my first clashes with the Empress Bulblax and her spam of evil larvae that can one hit kill Pikmin; the sheer surprise I had when this mechanical spider called Man-at-Legs started decimating my Pikmin squad with a freaking machine gun; and the nightmarish Waterwraith, crushing my Pikmin with its stone rollers in the most memorable cave in the game, the Submerged Castle, a cave with an unsettling atmosphere that forces you to use only Blue Pikmin despite it having hazards of every single element.

However, despite the randomized aspect being nice for repeated playthroughs, the overall magic of the first run is significantly reduced, especially because of how exhaustive some caves can be due to their long length and the overwhelming amount of bullshit. And speaking of length, Pikmin 2 is MUCH longer than the first one (AND third one!), so all that combined greatly diminishes the replay value of this game.

All that said, I still love this game. It may sound like I find this game vastly inferior to the first one due to all I said, but that’s far from being the case. I can understand why some people dislike it, but I don’t think it deserves all the hate it gets. I’m sure I’ll replay it again and again for the years to come, just not as much as the first game.

Peakmin 2. Combat isn't as balanced as 3 with Purple Pikmin and Ultra Bitter Spray breaking many encounters but the dungeon and world exploration is still some of the best I've seen in any game. The slightly random nature of the dungeons is a double-edged sword. On one hand, some layouts may be complete trash depending on how poorly the RNG decides to treat you. On the other hand, it makes this game insanely replayable. I also love the inclusion of the Piklopedia and all the detail put into Olimar and Louie's logs on each unique creature.

Not a perfect game by any means but will always be one I love dearly.

Recently, it has occurred to me that the harshest thing that could be said about any sequel is that it makes you "appreciate the original more". What initially may seem like a positive comment is anything but. In actuality, such a statement is essentially saying "This game took an imperfect original and failed to improve upon it so spectacularly that I'm left wondering if the flaws of the first one are really so problematic after all".

Anyways, Pikmin 2

Chapter 1 - Earth: The Final Frontier

The original Pikmin game was fairly coy about the possibility of this game taking place in our very own backyard, perhaps after some sort of unnamed armaggedon. The sequel, on the other hand, hardly waits 20 minutes to smack you across the face with mustard lids and toy gundams. Such a setting would be fine, cute even, if it ever actually amounted to anything. At risk of getting ahead of myself, caves (which I'll get into more later) are given a vague "Earth stuff" wallpaper, but it's not like they're actual locations, just a mish mash of junk. They more closely resemble those AI-generated images that look like a hoarder's bedroom at first glance, but if you try to focus on any details your brain will start dry heaving and saying hail marys. Above ground is given token dandelions, though I hardly remember the forest having so many electrified gates and toxin-spewing vents. Maybe that's more common in Japan.

Chapter 2 - Hocotate Pawn

So, what is it that possesses the blue-collar hero Olimar to return to the site of his 30-day nightmare? Well, MONEY, of course! The plot is novel, as Olimar and his junior Louie are sent back to Earth in order to scrounge up enough money to save their (presumably non-union) jobs. Hazard pay is, I imagine, off the table. That being said, "novel" feels like such a disappointing step back from Pikmin 1. For any of its faults, the first game shined in mood. Olimar was in a genuine life-or-death struggle, completely alone on an alien planet. There was a constant danger and he clearly knew it. Now, it's Olimar and his jackass friend playing junior Bargain Hunt. There is nothing pressing about the situation except the occasional nagging email from their boss. The development of his situation was funny, especially by the time he was becoming king of the woodland creatures, but it once again undercuts any sense of isolation.

Chapter 3 - All the Time in the World

The time limit in Pikmin 1 was at once the bane of my existence, and its most essential feature. I was constantly fearful of inefficiency and working too slow, but it was a healthy kind of anxiety. Like a low heat stove, there was a constant simmering tension that merely asks you to avoid pissing around. Now, there is absolutely no urgency. Despite the plot explicitly concerning repaying late debt, the boss will presumably indefinitely hide out from the knee-breaking loan sharks until you're good and ready to proceed, Olimar and Louie free to spend all the time in the world prancing through flowers and singing hymns. Bizarrely, the game mysteriously retains the day-night cycle. Since there is no day limit, it's just an excuse for a recap of stats from the last arbitrary period of time and a chance for the boss to guilt trip you with the cigarette butts and half-eaten cheesecake he had to scrounge out of the trash for dinner. Previously, the end of a day was a further tick on the doomsday clock, that much less time to save your life; now, it feels more like that screen where the Wii would tell you to take a break and go outside.

Chapter 4 - The Louie Factor

Another new feature is of course the presence of Olimar's "he's trying his best" sidekick, Louie. Aside from the aforementioned total destruction of the atmosphere this creates, it does allow for some interesting gameplay opportunities, as Pikmin can now be set to two tasks at the same time - occasionally, at least. Since there's absolutely no automation, the only tasks you can set a captain to supervise passively is things that take a long time for the Pikmin to do, like destroying walls. That's not nothing of course; it's nice to not have to stare deadeyed as your Pikmin dash their brains out against a stone wall for 7 hours in a prolonged metaphor for their entire existence. Still, it would be nice to even have some basic captain commands (ex. "Return to the Onion with your Pikmin", "Go here on the map by the safest possible route", "Collect pellets near you"). Having two captains also allows for you to divvy up your Pikmin easier - still not as neatly as would be ideal, but definitely an improvement. Louie in specific is an interesting character, coming across less like Olimar Jr. and more like some sort of savage animal who's simply too stupid to be scary. He doesn't think about anything but food (which seems to rub off on Olimar somewhat), culminating in Louie's journal, an entire compendium built around one joke. I can't imagine reading the entire thing when it is, again, one joke, but the fact they put that much effort into it honestly does make the joke a lot funnier. To add to Louie's charming weirdness is the unexplained implication that he tries to kill Olimar, something which absolutely did make me laugh.

Chapter 5 - It's a Duracell World

Populating Olimar's new recurring vacation destination is a number of treasures for you to collect. These are Pikmin 2's equivalent to the ship parts in the previous game. There is absolutely a funny novelty to the idea of junk scavenged out of a dirty hole being considered treasure, as Olimar proudly displays rotten pickle chips and broken Hot Wheels next to Hocotate's Mona Lisa. The issue with this feature is a simple one: Pikmin 1 featured a total of 30 treasures to collect. Pikmin 2, a marginally longer game, features over 200. Despite this overwhelming amount of junk, each of which is worth a handful of pennies and a Subway coupon, the game still requires you to one-by-one carry them back to your ship for a little celebratory cutscene. Then, all my Pikmin gather around for a jovial applause and the Evangelion "Congratulations" scene because I brought back a feather worth literally 10 coins (reminder that the total debt is 10,000). It's impossible not to find it incredibly tedious after a while. There are only so many times you can laugh at the novelty of seeing a screw or a kiwi or one of the four(?!) Duracell batteries they make you collect. The most damning thing I can say is that, after defeating the final boss, I felt absolutely no impulse to collect the remaining treasures, in a game where such an exercise is ostensibly the entire point.

Chapter 6 - Meet the New Pikmin, Same as the Old Pikmin or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Purples

Like that story of James Cameron writing "Alien$" on a whiteboard, the inclusion of more Pikmin is an obvious step forward. Here, we have technically two new members of the Pikmin posse, though it's functionally three. The ability for yellow Pikmin to carry bombs has been removed, a mechanic that will not be missed. Instead, they focus on electricity, opening electric gates and giving electric enemies that fluoride stare when they try to zap 'em. The first fully new addition is the white Pikmin, whose primary function is to open poison gates and fight poison enemies - noticing a pattern here? It's like the whole games been recalibrated around making sure you have different keys for different doors. It could be argued that bombs were that too, but a) it's more explicit now and b) in these games, two keys feels very different from three. Hell, is it four? I don't remember fire gates in Pikmin 1, but that might just be the dementia. Beyond the poison immunity, white Pikmin also damage anything that eats them, something which will be very useful when Pikmin introduces the Divine Wind Pikmin and suiciding your units becomes a viable strategy. Thirdly, they can dig up buried treasures, a contextual "locked door" that seems to only exist to give you the double bird if you thought that "no poison" in a cave meant it was safe to not take whites, you oafish simpleton. Finally, they can carry items faster, an ability that's totally useless, since I don't really see any good reason to carry more than a few white Pikmin; you're not rolling out the White Ranger Recovery Squad to speed haul those Duracells, especially when there's, again, absolutely no urgency in this game. Further exacerbating that is the fact that whites and the secret third Pikmin are both fairly rare and not easy to replace. Ah, yes, that secret third thing: the purple Pikmin. Perhaps akin to Dr. Oppenheimer, I was initially naive to the awesome power I was meddling with. Rest assured, once their true potential dawned on me, I did indeed become death, destroyer of worlds. There's no reason not to roll up with a backing crew of these big boys. After getting cold cocked by a purple Pikmin air barrage, 80 - 90% of enemies fold like wet paper. These chunky fellas not only do gonzo damage, they can also stun enemies. That's not just those they hit, but also nearby enemies, their wife, pet dog, and those who happen to have run an errand in the same postal code. In addition, they seem to have basic homing abilities, so even my Olimar's crosseyed aim is enough to make bulborb pancakes one right after the other. It's not an exaggeration to say the vast majority of enemy encounters are totally trivial if you just bury them in purple Pikmin, including most bosses. Purple Pikmin being limited is not an issue because purple Pikmin simply won't die. If that wasn't enough, they can carry more than any other Pikmin, meaning you don't even need many for treasures.

Chapter 7 - The Earth Defense Force

Enemy variety is one area of improvement here, though the actual quality of the specific enemies is something of a mixed bag. Some, like the Careening Dirigibug or the Decorated Cannon Beetle can add a fun challenge, though become extraordinarily frustrating in the wrong situation. Others, like all the little Dweevils or the Jellyfloats, are not threatening at all, just annoying to deal with. The new bulborb variants are frightening suckers; the halloween-colored guys will pull an "omae wa mou shindeiru" on eight of your Pikmin before you can even react. As far as bosses go, they were unique and fun, though most were made fairly trivial by the purple Pikmin. The final boss, similarly to in the first game, is deeply frustrating to figure out, but once you do, he's a fun challenge. I probably prefer this boss to the first one, as your responses feel more varied, not just repeating the same hit and run until he throws in the towel. Finally, I can't not mention the Waterwraith, my new best friend, who turns into a Looney Tunes character after he loses his rolling pin. Replace his theme with Benny Hill for the same effect.

Chapter 8 - Addressing the Deep, Dark Hole in the Room

Finally, we get to caves, the foggy, wet hole at the center of this game. This is the part where I would normally say "it's a good idea in concept, but the execution leaves something to be desired". The issue, however, is that it's not a good idea in concept. In fact, I struggle to grasp how a team of developers decided the best evolution of a somewhat open world game about exploring and finding items scattered around a nature environment was a series of cramped, linear tunnels devoid of any discovery. Since these are such a major part of the experience and I have so many different things to touch on, this chapter will be broken into subchapters.

Chapter 8.1 - Pikmin's Baby Park

I really can't stress enough how much I hate caves. Let's start with the biggest, most glaring issue - the aforementioned linearity. Most floors are not strictly linear, to be fair, but that just means you're not TECHNICALLY forced to wade down the lane of the swimming pool because you're allowed to explore the hot tub to your heart's content. Every floor is a tiny area, mostly devoid of any puzzles, fun level design, or sense of discovery. They pretty much all boil down to a mix of fighting a bunch of guys (far from the most fun part of Pikmin) and clearing one of the many doors that you hopefully have brought the full rainbow to deal with like you're Captain Planet. Caves are, at first, fine, and by the end of the game, they're a merciless trudge. I feel like Alex DeLarge, having my eyeballs held open and being forced to watch increasingly elongated sequences of the same tunnels with the same enemies (mostly) and the same four kinds of doors until I break. The worst offender is Glutton's Kitchen, in which you "explore" an entire cave's worth of large, blank rooms where a crowd of bulborbs are holding a singles mixer to meet some nice breadbugs. These empty rooms populated by a bunch of basic enemies feel like the Pikmin equivalent of Mario Kart's Baby Park. Thankfully, it's mercifully short. Speaking of length, what starts at a compassionate 6 floors by the end of the game becomes upwards of an eyewatering 15. If you'll recall back to Chapter 1, I also alluded to how the artistic direction of the level design seemed to be "public park or public restroom after a tornado". Maybe I would enjoy it more if these were real environments, but they're not. I just remember bathroom tile texture over haphazard "baths" and randomly placed props, or something meant to resemble a sandbox or play pen if it was, as they say on Chopped, "deconstructed". I concede gameplay should come first, but environmental cohesion should probably be some sort of a factor, no?

Chapter 8.2 - Poison Vents to Nowhere

Much of these caves are procedurally generated, and by god can you tell. It's honestly atrocious. Spawning immediately next to a giant bulborb ready to make pik-kebabs and hazardous traps set up carefully to guard the cave's vast stock of dead ends are just a couple of the many wonders Pikmin 2 will generate regularly, the second one seeming to happen on essentially every floor. What is even the point of putting me through all these rooms if 90% of the dangers will spawn so haphazardly they're entirely irrelevant? The most important button map you need to remember to get through Pikmin 2 is your reset button. Don't like a level? Just reset it, and it'll be entirely different. There was one level where an extremely narrow bridge over a pond spawned off to the side, but after I was forced to reset the level, it spawned obstructing my path every single time. Since I refuse to play the Pikmin Shuffle with 100 little idiots, I just kept resetting until it would get out of my way again. So, we have a system that makes every level feel samey and terribly structured, and said system is easily abused, to boot. To add on to that, apparently some of the cave music is procedurally generated, which explains why some parts sound like cats remixing a soundboard of Weird Al songs.

Chapter 8.3 - The Great Bulborb Spanking Line

The degree to which these caves begin to rely on "fight huge hordes of guys" as their one and only challenge feels like if a movie director decided they'd done enough plot and made the back half of the film a series of disconnected scenes of people bowling. One right after another these dwarf bulborbs line themselves up, and one after another they get the goomba experience from my purple Pikmin air squadron. For most of these enemies, it's not difficult, it's not fun. By the time Cavern of Chaos has 54 bulborbs on one floor, it's hard not to imagine Miyamoto like Peter Venkman running his psychic tests at the beginning of Ghostbusters: "The effect? I'll tell you what the effect is - it's pissing me off!" Except by that point, I don't know if I had the enthusiasm to be pissed off, just totally drained. Who enjoys fighting grunt after grunt after grunt like this?

Chapter 8.4 - Live, Die, Repeat: The Pikmin Killing Zone

The horrible little reality that only dawns with time is how vital that reset button really will be. In every cave, you can bring 100 pikmin max and you're unable to ever go back for more until the cave is completely cleared and all the curtains are washed. With that change, suddenly Pikmin become a precious commodity - the loss of just one can be devastating, in part because the game only gives vague hazard warnings before entering a cave, so you have no idea of the ratio of colors you should bring. Pikmin in combat being stupid, sometimes difficult to control, and sometimes the victim of random game bs wasn't really a huge issue before, but now? Every one is like a hot needle to the brain. I'll reiterate what I said in my review of Sea Salt: you can't give me wild, uncontrollable tools and reasonably expect me to act with a great deal of precision. I can't make a ship in a bottle with a sledgehammer, and I can't thread the needle of mecha-frog artillery strikes without a couple troopers getting blown to kingdom come. Even the basic grunts, as easy as they are, can sometimes get in a lucky shot. Between the level reset and enemy behavior, you just have to keep trying until you get lucky enough to lose next to no one, since you never have any idea what precisely you'll need on the next floor. The most egregious example of all four sections here is a floor that is an entirely straight line, crossing over itself just enough so that the higher points will block your camera on the lower points. Along this straight line is one decorated cannon beetle after another. There had to have been upwards of 20 total, all lined up, technically easy to crush with purples, but with enough of a random factor to screw it up intolerably outside of any control when one of them gamer rages and chucks the 20 blue Pikmin I need into the Great Beyond to meet Pikmin Christ. If I didn't have access to save states through my... Nintendo Gamecube I honestly might have quit the game right there. But that's the thing - in Pikmin 1, there's a button to reset the day when you make too many mistakes. In Pikmin 2, meanwhile, you just have to reset the console for every little slip-up. It feels wrong, like you're cheating, but they clearly expect you to do it. This does not seem really doable without it.

Chapter 9 - The End of Pikvangelion

This turned out larger than I expected, but Pikmin 2 elicited stronger emotions from me than many other games. Honestly, I really did gain a new appreciation for Pikmin 1 through playing it. That's why this game is more saddening than anything else. Not only to see it ruin so much of what made the first game not just good, but especially unique, but to see it being lauded for it. I can't begin to understand the critical response to this game, but its worst crime is making me dread playing the rest of these. Pikmin 4 is supposedly "Pikmin 2 2", which is about as effective at selling me on it as if you told me playing it would lock my fingers in a Saw trap I can only be released from by killing 10,000 breadbugs in the name of Hocotate Freight.

i came into this for the first time after 9 years thinking "man this's a solid 8/10!" i left it thinking "why did i ever think this was particularly great, let alone better than pikmin 1?"

this run was spurred in part by a conversation i had with someone else in the comments on this site, and in part because i really wanted to get to pikmin 3 but didn't wanna skip an entry. now i wish i had just skipped it and kept the happier memories from when i played it as a kid.

the first part of the game is pretty alright, just being a lesser pikmin 1 but still being solid because of what it's based on. the caves in the early to midgame are tolerable, too, since they're short and quick. it also helps give the game a little more direction, as the lack of stakes and the fairly weak premise give the player little motivation on their own.

i'll take a quick detour to go over caves. i think plenty of people have probably said this before, but the cave design often discourages multitasking and come across as lazy due to them being mostly created through rng. you're given two captains at once - perfect for multitasking! - but in any given cave there are often traps and enemies everywhere that mean you can't leave your captains anywhere but back at the ship whenever you want to "multitask". otherwise, you risk losing half of your platoon. it's just not a great time.

anyway, i'd say the game peaks in quality around the perplexing pool. the overworld is challenging but not ridiculous, and the caves are some of the better ones in the game.

however, it's when you finally relieve yourself of debt that the game takes a nosedive in quality and enjoyability. not only is the motivation for your collectathon dashed in a single cutscene, but you're now given an unnecessarily enemy-filled map with the worst caves in the game. if you don't already know which cave louie was in, you'll have to go through the absolute worst caves in the game for a process of elimination. long, boring, and full of unbalanced enemies or traps, these things were the bane of my run and cut my sessions short very quickly.

this would all be easily forgiven if the game allowed the collectathon to become optional after the first part of its runtime. however, to get the ending you need to get every single item from every single cave and overworld map. not only is this painstaking, but it also takes away from the open-ended nature the game seemed to take in its attempts to expand upon the first one. you can't just pick and choose high-value items to pay off your debt and then move onto the louie rescue. with pikmin 2 being significantly longer than 1, this becomes a lot more painful for casual players who wouldn't normally be completionists. no, 100% is an inevitability in pikmin 2, and it sucks.

i have a fair bit more to say about this game but i'm not in the mood to make another neo twewy tier review on it. the general story, atmosphere, stakes, and premise of this game are incredibly weak without even having to compare to pikmin 1, and as a sequel it does next to nothing to justify itself. its positives are almost entirely based on the fact that it's a mechanically improved version of pikmin 1 with reused maps.

i think this rating is pretty fair for the experience i had as well as for what i described in the above block. the game was pretty good for the first part and turned shitty in the second, had a solid base and was certainly functional. i didn't think it was good, but i don't think that it was bad or straight up unlikeable. i'd guess that people who think "more content = better" would get a lot out of this game, as would people who prefer saccharine nintendo comedy and wit to more hands-off atmospheric entries. it's definitely not a game for me. as a kid i trusted reputations deeply when judging things and thought more content was always good, which makes it pretty unsurprising why i had such a shitty time coming back to this game.

i'm hoping pikmin 3 is gonna be a better time than this one. i'd be sad to find out pikmin 1 could be the only one of the games i really like, as i thought once upon a time that this was a very me-core series. i'd really like to not have to deal with another animal crossing situation, but i guess we'll see.

I love love LOVE the product placement in this game. It was such a cute and creative way for the game to make a connection with the person playing. And seeing all the kinds of names Olimar would make up for them, being artifacts he is not aware of, was so pleasing and funny. Dr. Pepper isn't just a soda, it's a DROUGHT ENDER.

Besides that extremely charming aesthetic, I actually do not like this game very much. It plays and controls fine, but the level design just feels overbloated most of the time. I was already annoyed that the sense of pure survival and the calendar were completely omitted, but if the trade-off was having so so SO MANY CAVES with monotonous tasks? I'll take the original game's design any day of the week.