Amazing sequel. I was initially bothered by its change of tone. The original felt so real and strengely adult thanks to Olimar logs. Thankfully, Pikmin 2's humor makes up for it completely. Every night I looked forward to each email you get from your boss or family, even some good ol' spam.

Gameplaywise, I like the caves. Perhaps they're overemphasized, as they're more than half of the total play time. That said, I like how brutal and cuel they can be some times. They can be very stressful, but that ensures they'll be memorable.

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.

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

I vibe a lot with what this game does, the removal of the time limit in exchange for tougher dungeons with limited Pikmin count. For the most part it all works for me.

UNTIL you get to Wistful Wild. Here the game more or less runs out of new things to throw at you and instead makes dungeons as gruelling and lengthy as possible. Combine that with some uneven difficulty and balancing and sadly this game just falls off towards the end and becomes a chore to play.

This definitely has the blueprints for the best Pikmin though, as long as 4 is halfway challenging it might just be the perfect version of this formula.

Every Pikmin game is distinct from one another. Some people don't like the caves in pikmin 2, some do. Playing it for the first time with this up-res port, I fall in the latter. It exchanges the 1st game's time limit for harder difficulty and collectible treasures. Some of the final caves are no joke if you're going for 100%! I love the new Pikmin types with purple and white, purple is definitely OP in some areas. The game looks gorgeous for one of the final GCN games, the the Pikmin AI was HEAVILY improved over the 1st. With this, I've beaten every Pikmin game yet, and I'm extremely excited for 4. Support the series!

Fixed a lot of my problem with Pikmin 1's Pikmin AI but this sequel just takes 1 step forward and 2 steps back.

I think the no day limit compared to 1 leads it to be a much slower paced and focus on collecting treasure instead of collecting ship parts leads it to a 100% is no longer necessary and the player can complete as much as the game as they want. (I know it wasn't technically necessary in 1 but it was, despite how they framed it). And as stated early the Pikmin AI is much more intelligent than 1 is, to the point where I question why that same pathfinding wasn't implemented into the Switch port of 1. They'll drown less and are much easier to calm down when they do drown.

The dungeons I'm pretty mixed on. On one hand, I like the risk-reward aspect of it. You have a limited amount of Pikmin, but the dungeons are basically the only way to find high value treasure quickly and you can get unique Pikmin from them. On the other some of the most unfair challenges come from these. Mostly bombs random dropping right out of the sky. The dungeons are also randomly generated. Its not too bad as each floor of a dungeon tends to have a pattern to it but it can just lead to a situation where you just want to redo the RNG. One time I got a bomb dropping bug on the other side of a wall my Pikmin needed to break and the bombs hit box just went through the wall. That was annoying.

I think the game was almost a good step in the right direction that kind fell ever so slightly short, in RNG that was ever so slightly more annoying than Pikmins 1 Pikmin AI. That being said its still was overall enjoyable.

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.

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

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

this game feels like a double edged sword to me. on one hand the removal of the time limit makes the game a whole lot less stressful, the new pikmin types are fun, and game is honestly just funny as hell sometimes. On the other hand, the lack of a time limit means I have less motivation to get things done, which leads to an overall slower pace. also, the caves, while good in concept, are way too long and tedious. The core pikmin gameplay is still intact and magical, as per usual, but I personally feel like this game is an overall step down from the original.

Significantly longer and more challenging than the first game, but to its own detriment. Some of the content in this game - the caves in the third zone especially - are the best of the best content in either of the first two games. But by the end of the game the charm wears off, and it's a whole lot of tedium and resets forced by bad luck and bizarre design. The final boss is an insanely spongy mess, more a test of patience than a test of skill, and when I finished the game with all treasures collected I had been ready to be done for at least 6 hours. 18 and a half hours is too long for a Pikmin game, too long for any game with so little variety in the things you're doing.

All that complaining aside, it still has a lot of charm. Great enemy designs, some excellent boss fights, and occasionally you hit a peak like the Submerged Castle where the game design really locks into something and you have a majestic, tense, challenging, and rewarding experience. Pikmin is Pikmin, and Pikmin is good. Just, maybe not this much of it.