I was honestly pretty surprised about this game. I enjoyed Pikmin 2 alot but i feel like I enjoyed Pikmin 1 more than this one? Some things I felt Pikmin 2 improved from Pikmin 1 were the addition of caves, new pikmin, the sheer number of collectables and Louie!! Some of my reasoning for thinking Pikmin 1 being better than Pikmin 2 was from how little you got interrupted, and the time restraint of 30 days. In Pikmin 2 you are constantly being interrupted by the ship, for a tutorial or when you get one of the many treasures, imo really screws with the flow of the game.

Each of the new pikmin were great additions but I kinda wish they actually had onions rather than rarely finding candypop buds. On my playthrough I had like 9 white pikmin and 25 purple pikmin which is incredibly low. They added 3 new pikmin, white, purple, and bulbmin. The white pikmin were really useful cuz of the new poison hazards, they are the fastest moving pikmin and they can deal alot of damage if they are eaten. The purple pikmin can carry 10 times more than every other pikmin, do the most damage and can wobble enemys. The bulbmin are very rare pikmin but they are resistant to all hazards, and I only got to see the bulbmin once :(

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.

Pikmin 2 is an all-around improvement to its predecessor, making it an excellent sequel. Almost all of my complaints from the previous game have been addressed -- Pikmin group better and are less likely to get lost when traversing, frustrating enemies seem to have been toned down making it less likely to lose a larger number of Pikmin in one go, and the day cycle is a bit more forgiving making the game feel more relaxed. I also greatly enjoyed the treasure aspect versus collecting ship parts, as it allowed for some wonderful creativity in naming the treasures. Pikmin 2 has certainly aged better than the first game and it makes me even more excited to play the rest of this series.

I'm giving this a low 4. It's great for the most part, and it really expands and switches things up compared to the first game. The subterranean levels are both great and annoying, as you're not timed, but if you lose to many pikmin, you're fucked and have to start again if you want to clear the cave completely. And also they don't have the same vibe as the above ground sections.

I love the green gardens, the lovely water effects and the overall presentation, but the subterranean bits are dark and bland. Which is why I assume they didn't go as nuts with those parts for the 3rd game, which seems to be a better balance of 1&2.

I did enjoy this a lot though. And it's neat that there's a nice bit of end game mopping up and new areas to check out as well. Having now played 1-3, I think this is probably the one I'd likely come back to the least, but I still had a good time with the funny wee guys, collecting every day objects and seeing what daft names they come up with, and generally battering anything that moves.

And accidentally drowning so, so many pikmin that I should not be allowed to play any more.

This is one of the all-time greats, but god, I have. So many questions. About their design choices.

First of all, I just want to say, god, I miss all the product placement in the Switch version. I think that's a big reason why this isn't getting a 5 from me. It just added so much flavor and flair to the world and the game to see what ancient artifact you plucked out to sell on Planet Hocotate that is something we use in our daily lives.

As for the rest. It's a great game! Great music, and it expands on the original game in a lot of great ways. The caves are such a great idea, adding so much more depth (HEH) to the world and giving you so many more places to explore. It allows more bosses without overly cluttering the world, and allows tight level design in each area while giving a pretty neat roguelite, procedurally generated dungeon crawler.

However, there are some elements of the caves that... don't feel great. In later caves there will be hazards that fall from the sky. Some when you're alone, some when you have Pikmin, and some when you move treasures. Sometimes this will manifest in 3 bomb rocks or 3 Volatile Dweevils trapping you in a corner of a small room and blowing you to hell. Or boulders will just drop all over you and absolutely ruin your day. It's offset by the fact that caves save at the beginning of each floor, but it still doesn't feel fun. Were it not for progress saving, a lot of these later caves would be absolutely miserable. It's a really neat idea and great core gameplay loop that is just sort of marred by this messiness.

Not to mention that there are some cave floors where the best option is to go up to enemies and punch them to death with your captains isn't fun. It doesn't feel like satisfying. I understand I can use Pikmin and it'll take far less time, but the risk-reward isn't there. Why risk a bunch of my little guys and need to spend a day or two building up my numbers again when I can spend 10 minutes slowly punching stuff to death after I get the combat upgrade?

Combining that with the massive nerf to swarming and the sheer strength of Purples, to the fact that they're the best to use in all but a few situations, and it's a very messy game. A messy game I LOVE, but a messy game in terms of balance of gameplay.

At least the Pikmin AI is SO much better and I don't have to worry about them just all flying off a bridge, thank god. That was one of the roughest parts of 1.

It's also a very lovely game, the areas are all remixes of the areas from 1, save for the first one, and the way they recontextualize these old locations in a new way, with new landing sites, new terrain, and new enemies, through the passage of time since returning to Hocotate and coming back is fantastic, and I think was the best choice they could've made! The way they're all themed to seasons rules.

Also, the way the music changes instruments depending on the captain you're currently controlling? What a brilliant and fun idea that gives some variety as you swap between captains to get stuff done during the day.

Although purples are overpowered, I do like what they and white Pikmin add to the game overall! With the basics of fire, water, and electricity (finally added in this game, lol), extra carrying strength and really fast speed + digging are cool extras!

It's just a wonderful game with wonderful creatures, a wonderful gameplay loop, and some fantastic additions. Even for its problems, it's still an incredible Pikmin game, and even though I was too bad to beat it as a kid, I'm happy I finally was able to go the distance.

Going into Pikmin 2, I was feeling hopeful and excited. I enjoyed the first title quite a lot, and by what I've heard everyone say, it seemed like this one was just going to be that but better. So naturally, I couldn't wait to play my way through it! However, when I finally finished the game, I found myself liking it significantly less than its predecessor, to the point that I honestly can't see any reason to replay this one over the original.

But before I tear into this game, I'll praise it for the stuff it gets right.

The controls and general interface feel way more refined and optimized, they took a lot of what was done well in the first game and enhanced it this time around.
I was particularly a huge fan of the Piklopedia, which allowed me to look at all my treasures and monsters I fought. That helped give the game a real sense of completion as I played through it and got to fill out all those blank spaces.

I also really liked the new pikmin, the purple and white ones. The first three still work together really well, but the new pikmin add a whole new level of strategy to everything (that strategy usually just being "throw purples at it until it dies!" but you know).

And I finally have to compliment the adjustment to the Pikmin AI. While they're still not perfect, I didn't have to worry about them falling off a fairly large bridge and drowning anymore. I still had moments of frustration here and there, but for the most part, I felt like I could rely on my Pikmin to do what I wanted (most of the time).

Okay, with that out of the way, now let's get to the stuff I don't like...

There are two massive changes to Pikmin 2 that change the general formula quite a lot from the original game: the removal of the thirty day time limit, and the introduction of caves. Both of which, I have incredibly mixed feelings on.

I never really know how to feel about time limits in games because my initial reaction to them is always immediate stress. Having to make decisions while having a permanent fixed amount of time just reminds me too much of real life and makes me feel anxious when starting a game. But then, when I actually play through the game, that stress fades into enjoyment. There's a reason Persona 5 Royal is my favorite game after all.

This was how I felt with the time limit in the original Pikmin. It stressed me out at first, but once I got the hang of it, I learned to love it. And in Pikmin 2, I ended up missing it. A lot.

In the original game, you had thirty ship parts in total to collect, and a thirty day time limit composed of twelve minute days. Because of this, levels had to be designed so that even players who weren't particularly skilled at the game could still get at least one ship part per day. So one ship part within twelve minutes. This is what made getting multiple ship parts in one day such a thrill. I don't think I ever got more than two in a single day, but just being able to do that once was a rush. Its one of the reasons I ended up liking that game so much.

Sadly though, I never really got that same rush while playing Pikmin 2. Part of it is just because there are two-hundred and one ship parts, but I think the main reason for it is because of the big shift in level design. Without that time limit, there's no reason to design the levels with guaranteed player progress in mind. There's no real downside to a player not getting any treasure in a day, other than a personal sense of disappointment, so there's no reason to make sure players will get one piece of treasure in a day. That leads to much larger and sprawling levels that, by the end of the game, become a chore to traverse. It never got too terrible, but it also never really felt as good as traversing the levels in the first game.

But of course, that only applies to the surface levels, the caves are where the meat of the game takes place. And boy, I have so many problems with them.

First and foremost, I just don't really like the caves as a concept all that much. Going through the floor to find a few pieces of treasure takes out a lot of the adventure that I came to love from the original game. I think the idea can work, exploring caves is one of the big video game setting and tropes after all. But the way its done here just doesn't click with me the way I hoped it would. It made the adventure feel far more linear and far less interesting.

But honestly, that isn't even my main problems with the caves. No, what really made the caves so annoying to me was the frankly just absurd difficulty and the baffling RNG.

Pikmin 2 is hard. There is no doubt about that. But the way it is hard is what drives me crazy. The game ramps up the difficulty by repeatedly either placing enemies on an incredibly small piece of terrain, or, putting an absolutely absurd number of enemies all in one room. It just gets to a point where it really stops being fun. Having to deal with an annoying frog that jumps around, while all your pikmin are being blown down by a flying fish, and a flying jerk picks you up and flies you away while all your pikmin die is nothing but frustrating. In late game, my two main strategies were to either pump my pikmin with red juice so they would deal more damage, or, and I kid you not, just leave my pikmin at the starting area and run out with just Olimar and literally punch everything to death. It was genuinely easier to just punch so many enemies to death instead of throwing my pikmin at them just because of how invincible Olimar becomes by late game. I wish I found this strategy out sooner, I could have made so many caves a breeze.

But then of course, there's that aforementioned RNG. Now, I don't know if the cave layouts have pure RNG or if the game only has a select number of layouts that each floor can be (If I had to guess, it would probably be the latter). But either way, the cave layout RNG is just hilariously strange. There are some layouts that are just outright, no question about it, easier than others. For instance, there was one floor where the single treasure of that floor spawned right next to the spawn point. The reason that this annoys me so much is because it makes the already frustrating difficulty of the caves feel even more unfair. But on top of that, it also gives the player an unfair way of cheezing through the caves.

Since the game saves after every floor of a cave, you can just up and reset a floor if you're having difficulty with it, and chances are, you'll probably end up having an easier time because of it. There were so many floors where I just reset the game to get an easier floor layout, and I don't feel any regret for doing that at all. I especially did this when I had to run through caves a second time. Why try the floor seriously when I can just reset until the game decides to but the next hole somewhere I can easily reach?

It's just a system that I think could use a lot of improvement. I know these come back in Pikmin 4, hopefully they're way better implemented there.

Okay well, now that I'm done pointing out all my problems I have with this game, I can say that I... honestly don't hate it. It does a lot of individual things that I do hate, but as an overall experience, I think it's still pretty fun for the most part. It's still great to run around with your pikmin, picking stuff up and growing your little army. And I really enjoyed the additions of purple and white pikmin, they changed the game enough to feel warranted. And I loved the improvements to the UI, AI, and general control.

But man, those caves and the level design just really bring the game down for me. To the point that I can't really say there's any reason to play this one over the first. At all.

Oh well... onto the next game!

8,5/10

Jogo bom da porra.
Não dava um puto e esse jogo me trouxe algo muito genuíno.

A mecânica a la dungeon crawler que tem nesse jogo é interessante e bem feita, curti a minha experiência.

Não é tao casual como alguns me falaram, foi uma boa surpresa.

Hei de jogar os próximos.

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.

Me standing outside your house with a bomb is also a trap, it’s to prevent you from having fun

This is one of the most polarizing games I’ve ever played. Even going into it, I knew this game had a reputation, but I still went in with an open mind. My objective was to collect all the treasures (and beat every dungeon by proxy). It ended up being one of the most annoying experiences in gaming ever.

To start, there are a lot of ideas here that I think are fun and make for an interesting challenge that I wished carried over to the future titles. But the remaining chunk of garbage? I’m hoping it never sees the light of day ever again.

The good? The bosses. With the exception of one boss (Empress Bulblax and her disgusting Larvae spawn), I feel every boss was fun and always had me trying to think about how to tackle them while suffering very few casualties. They all fill me with the fear and anxiety that any good horror game wish it could instill onto me. Huge highlights go to Water Wraith and Man-at-Legs. I think the inherent flaws of the game rear their ugly head when it comes to literally everything building up to the bosses.

The dungeons… This is unfortunately a concept that will not have been perfected until Pikmin 4. What we have here is, at first, a harmless means of getting treasure in secluded areas away from the Daily Timer… then you experience the latter half of the game’s dungeons. Nothing but horrible floor layouts with some of the cruelest enemy design ever and gotcha traps that only the “I love when games do that!” crowd enjoy.

I think what harms this entire concept is Purple Pikmin. There is no feasible way to replenish Purple Pikmin in this game without needing to revisit one of the game’s worst dungeons (Subterranean Complex) at a semi decent sub level every single time. It wouldn’t be so bad, however, if you’re going after every treasure in the game, you NEED a minimum of 100 Purple Pikmin to achieve that goal. Playing the game normally does not net you that much at all, meaning that you already have to repeat dungeon visits numerous times. It’s BECAUSE OF THAT that I restart my game if I lose even a SINGLE Purple because I am not trying to waste anymore time than what the game is having me do to remain “comfortable”.

“Don’t bring Purples then”, why would I not? They’re the best Pikmin in the game, no contest! This game is already asking a lot of me by tippy-toeing across every dungeon floor so I’m not blindsided by some gotcha moment that could cause me tens of casualties at once, so you’re asking me to not use the Pikmin that can take out enemies in seconds because if I don’t they’ll still kill tons of my Pikmin with ease???

I hear this game is as hard as you make it, which I agree is true, but the way it wants you to play sucks the fun out of everything. Whereas the first game asks that you slim down on time management for an exciting tense experience, this game says slow WAY DOWN because you don’t want bombs and rocks dropping on your Pikmin because you decided to play the game just a tad too fast or didn’t spend your in game days doing nothing but grinding Bitter Spray.

May Gatling Groinks never have a happy day in their life.

The only reason this game isn’t lower than 2 1/2 stars is because the rest of the game is still Pikmin. Refined from 1 mechanically and introduces so many cool elements that made the game more exciting to play. But man. The only reason I even beat this game was because I knew Pikmin 3, a better game, was right after this.

I found the Rogue-style caves to be exhausting, not necessarily in a bad way but the survival aspects made the treks feel arduous.

White and purple Pikmin are cool inclusions although the fact that they live in the ship and can only be gotten from flowers feels... sloppy?

I found a lot of the puzzles in the game to feel a bit busy worky.

I love the premise of "just find treasure we broke". The two captain system feels a bit under-utilized and the puzzles it is required for are kind of annoying?

I enjoyed this a lot while playing it but reflecting back I'm finding it to be messier than Pikmin 1 and some of the ideas feel a bit undercooked. I also thing it suffers a bit from "more is more" by the time we got our 10,000 coins (we is my obsessed four-year-old) we were pretty exhausted with the game. We enjoyed our time but didn't have much appetite left for "post-game" including any more taxing spelunking adventures.

Core Pikmin gameplay is still wonderful here but this doesn't feel like an all-timer like the first one. I'd rather that replayable 5 hour experience to this big fat 20 hour one. Still pretty happy to play through this one if nothing else just for my chunky purple buddies.