It's like Pikmin 1 if you stripped away most of what made that game fun and replaced it with boring procedurally generated caves which all blend together thanks to an alarming lack of mechanics or gimmicks among them. Submerged Castle and Glutton's Kitchen are somewhat fun though. I didn't really like the overworld gameplay either, mainly because it didn't feel nearly as rewarding to explore and find treasures when you can find more and overall more expensive treasures in the caves. I'm sorry but nothing about the gameplay loop works for me.

Pikmin 2 is fun, but it felt like a big downgrade from the first for me.

A lot of the good of the original is still intact. All the above-ground gameplay is fun, and has the same fun charm as before with some neat new gameplay changes and quality of life improvements.

However, the problems come in with one big change, and one big removal. That change is that there is no longer a time limit on days. While I'm sure plenty of people prefer this less-stressful approach, I feel that removing that framing device makes the game feel a lot less fun. In the original, timed obstacles were interesting. It was an important decision to leave pikmin at certain spots doing things like tearing down a wall while taking care of something in a seperate section of the level. It made multitasking and efficiency feel important. While you still CAN multitask, it's easier to simply bring the whole squad around at once since there's no reason to take risks anymore. The game IS still fun, but less so.

Now something I like a lot less are the caves. It often feels like I spend way more time down there than I do aboveground, which is a shame since I enjoy those sections a lot less. The lack of a timer until sunset removes yet another thing I really like about pikmin, and the randomly designed level design is often not interesting or frustrating. One example was when I ran into a mortar enemy on a small bridge. If I didn't deal with it, it was a major threat. But if I attacked it, it would shake my pikmin off into a pit. Basically it was impossible to not lose pikmin, which is a real problem when I'm on the 6th of 8 layers that constantly drained my resources.

I want to reiterate that I like this game, but compared to the original, if feels like very little of it was an improvement on the formula. I hope 3 can focus back a bit more and truly improve upon the first game's successes.

I really like this game. In my view the overworld is way better, than it's predecessor and has a lot more to search for. While exploring the overworld I had a lot of fun finding different brands. It's really clever advertisement. The new Pikmins are a nice extension to the old Pikmin crew and the dungeons were sometimes really challenging. The lack of time pressure you have in this game may take some of the challenge, but all in all it's a fun experience und you'll definitely have fun exploring the overworld.

It improves on some things that were in Pikmin 1 like some of the Pikmin AI mostly and it looks better but despite it being an incredible sequel, I don't think it lives up to the original game. I do like the dungeon system even though it is a little flawed thanks to the random generated floors, falling boulders, and not enough variety. Thankfully it seems like Pikmin 4 is improving upon the system. I do like the new pikmin even though nothing stands a chance against purple pikmin. But overall its genuinely still a lot of fun and I love it a lot even though I'd rather return to Pikmin 1 and 3 any day of the week.

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.

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.

The perfect real-time strategy game in my eyes. As a kid, I remember that I've spent several hours trying to figure out new ways to get everything done in fewer days but it's so easy to play Pikmin 2 wanting to produce as much Pikmin as you can in order to make everything so much easier as you go in caves - but it's the way that you realize how well you know every colour and their own traits that makes the whole game so much fun to play through.

This recent run, I've played the whole game deathless, as I've attempted so many times over the years. Not my first time accomplishing the game as such, won't be the last. But I think that I'll only want to keep playing the game over and over again to see if I can achieve that even faster.

Pikmin 2 is one of the worst sequels I’ve played that has received some degree of critical acclaim. For those not versed into the Pikmin series Pikmin 2 for Nintendo Gamecube is a sequel to the hit launch title that set out to address many of the contemporary criticisms of the first game by dramatically overhauling many aspects of the franchise’s overlying systems and presentation. In my view these changes to narrative tone, progression structure, and game feel don’t really coalesce into an overall completely satisfying package.

The story is centered on Captain Olimar and his assistant Louie returning to the Pikmin planet in order to find treasures that can help him pay back his employer’s corporate debt. I usually say with Nintendo reviews the plot is simple but works as a vehicle for the gameplay and to an extent that is the case here but I can’t help but feel as though more could’ve been done. The first game had this unique sense of isolation to it that gave it a fantastic atmosphere and the day system synergized with the ship crash plot to give the game a tense mood. Not saying the more comedic tone of Pikmin 2 wasn’t a valid direction to take the series. Hell, if anything I think the game’s light jab at capitalism with the treasure hoard being IRL product placement in this (implied) apocalyptic planet and President character being this incompetent shortsighted oaf that doesn’t understand the concept of predatory loans is neat. I just wish the game had tied this theme of destructive consumerist capitalism into the gameplay loop more but hey its a mass appeal kids game they were probably never gonna go that far. To me the biggest fault in Pikmin 2’s story isn’t necessarily this shift in tone or even an inability to fully capitalize on its anti-capitalist themes but rather how it fails to use its gameplay in a synergistic way with its narrative. To get into this I will need to address overall game structure and how things have changed since the first game.

Pikmin 2 has four main additions to the franchise formula including Purple & White Pikmin, upgrades in the form of the both consumable spicy/bitter berry sprays & permanent upgrades for your space suit, and an additional captain for multitasking. All these tools are promising on paper but never really come together into a cohesive package of interesting choices for one simple reason: caves.

Caves are basically combat oriented dungeons where Olimar will earn much of the treasure to pay off his debt. This cave system does not gel with any other choice the developers make even on a baseline level. The way the combat in Pikmin 1 was set up (and that is largely carried over here) is you throw or swarm the Pikmin horde in a vague direction towards your opponent and avoid attacks aimed at your captain and Pikmin using a combination of movement and whistling. This has a level of impreciseness to it that meant your Pikmin lost in combat were effectively a resource tax you had to play around in the time limit system to ensure you gathered the 30 ship parts in 30 days. Since time doesn’t run naturally in the caverns and the time limit doesn’t really exist on a macro-scale (in other words there is no alt ending system) sans as a form of leaderboard tracking you effectively end up with very basic combat with little gameplay tension. Losing a Pikmin is less “ NOOOO NOT MY REDS!” and “more ugh time to grind more Pikmin”. Unless you run low on troops this game can devolve into the very tedious pattern of killing a ton of enemies and playing 52 pickups with the treasures left behind. Needless to say this creates a ton of dead air. The developers must have realized this at some point in development as this game has assorted layers of mass Pikmin grave creators like roaming enemies, falling bombs, and various flavors of instant kill attacks to create tension via low Pikmin counts close to boss areas. Some of it a player can counter play (as an example: boulders are usually telegraphed with sound effects and a discolored ground texture even before the drop shadow reveals itself thus giving you plenty of time to whistle Pikmin out of the way) but a lot comes off as artificial difficulty on a first playthrough. A lot of falling bomb rocks only seem to trigger upon trying to pick up a treasure for example. Pretty much the only two of these hazards that felt interesting on a decision making level were the boulder which incentivized playing with a smaller squad to scout out a location before tracking down the loot and the waterwraith, an Aliens: Isolation or Metroid Fusion style instant kill enemy chase sequence tied to a timer which forces you to grab the treasure quickly. These are the few moments in the game that really have any sense of tension. In short, most of these hazards feel less like engaging gameplay challenges and more like a resource threshold you have to clear by grinding Pikmin.

Speaking of grinding Pikmin, doing that for two of the species in this game is a complete pain in the ass that shows the reason a lot of these stylistic choices don’t go together. New to Pikmin 2 are white and purple Pikmin. White Pikmin can dig stuff out of the ground, carry things around quicker, and sacrifice themselves to most enemies for a massive amount of inflicted poison damage while Purple Pikmin are the muscle of the squad that can stun enemies in combat by being thrown and act as strength equivalents to 10 normal Pikmin in the context of the carrying weight mechanic. I do actually like the game play choices they ask of the player in terms of party composition (you have a 100 slots, how many do you want allocated to these just as perishable excess utility Pikmin vs tried and true puzzle solving Pikmin species?). The problem comes from the rarity of these two new species. Since Whites and Purples can only be grown via underground transferring of other species troops via Candypop buds. You end up with a large time sink for dungeon preparation. Want more white Pikmin as prep for those annoying Pileated Snagret boss battles or a poison barrier in the Awakening Wood? Better be ready to take a trip to the Subterranean Complex’s third sub-level with any extra red Pikmin you have several times over. Want 100 Purples for that time sink 1000 carrying weight dumbbell in Wistful Wild? Dear god your poor soul shouldn’t have decided to go for all treasures.

Oh and did I mention that Yellow (due to electric gates, negating some instant kill attacks and the strength of being more able to easily hit various bosses significant more easily with vertical mobility) & Purple Pikmin (stun locking enemies with throw) are overwhelmingly more useful then Red, White, and Blue Pikmin (all of which serve as very basic keys to certain treasures) further exacerbating this design choice to limit Purple growth to caves as it sorta naturally draws a casual players’s eye to this bad pacing for dungeon preparation. Sure players might optimize the fun out of everything (a common retort I see to poorly balanced gameplay systems online) and balance isn’t everything but I feel like it's safe to say that a spammable combat unit you get during the first dungeon trivializing combat is pretty different from say saving great scientists in Civ 5 to exploit that game’s research payout algorithm. Both are pretty gamey and take away player expression but one is much more likely to be noticeable and thus employed by a casual player playing the game for the first time. Maybe if Pikmin 2 didn’t employ cheap design tricks with its falling bomb rock and enemy spam that heavily incentivized unfun, optimal strategies like purple grinding I wouldn’t be making this review but I guess what I am trying to say is that it isn’t just a case of Pikmin 2 being unbalanced it's that the unbalanced aspects are actively brought to the four front via its sloppy dungeon design which in turn is informed by a lack of temporal consequences to Pikmin grinding due to the lack of a day system.

I could go into more detail on other new aspects of Pikmin 2 that reinforce this point with the bitter spray and captain punching upgrades but I’d just be repeating both myself and other folks in the online discourse surrounding this title. Instead I wanna turn my attention to another aspect of the game I think hasn’t gotten as much attention as a gap between the designer's likely intent and the final product: the shoddily implemented multi-tasking system.

In Pikmin 2’s pseudo-midpoint (paying off the debt) you get a mock credits sequence in which Olimar accidentally leaves Louie to fend for himself on the Pikmin planet. In theory this should be a needle scratch moment after the player has gotten attached to Louie as this helpful partner that helped you grow your corporate bank account via the multi-task function. In practice this ends up being a bit of a wet fart of plot point that sorta makes the true ending feel less like a Lethal Weapon like capstone on Olimar and Louie’s unlikely friendship kinda and more just abrupt due to how little you need to use the multi-task function in game. Over the course of my all treasures playthrough of Pikmin 2 I can only think of seven places I was heavily incentivized to use the multitasking feature:

1) The Valley Of Reposes multitasking tutorial.
2)The three berry grinding locations in Awakening Wood, Perplexing Pool, and Wistful Wild.
3) A stone elevator in the yellow onion spawn in
4)The Perplexing Pool’s “Massage Girdle” treasure.
5) A boss known as the Ranging Bloyster that requires constant switching to stun lock him into vulnerability.

Since Louie can theoretically just be chilling at your base or cave floor entrance 90% the game with little repercussions (and generally I’d say sticking to one captain or treating the captains as a universal party is the path of least resistance most of the time) you as a player never really develop an affinity for the second in command thus you end up with a kinda ineffective climax with the only interesting stuff being the implication that Louie might’ve been controlling the final boss to cover up his role in the company going into debt. The game doesn't really do much with this so I don't really have much to add to that other than it sorta being emblematic of Pikmin 2 as a whole of a bunch of good ideas that never really come together in the end.

Pikmin 2 isn’t all bad. There is some nice quality of life changes with Pikmin party management, some of the writing in the treasure horde is generally pretty funny, the arcadey challenge mode is a huge step up from the first game but it just didn’t take into account how much of the franchises appeal and structure of its core mechanics resided in its use of time scarcity to create tension.

A good sequel at first glance, but once you delve deeper into the game the huge list of bullshit shows and ruin your experience.

This is what I think about Pikmin 2, an innovative sequel that brings a lot to the table but at the same time ruins what made the original great. My opinion of the game drastically changed once I got to the post-game of the basic ending, once you get there you get a whole new map to explore and welcome to bullshit city, this part of the game made me realize how flawed the Pikmin's AI is, it shows how dumb they are and once you get into a dungeon of that last stage.

The early game till the end of the base plot of the game is a ton of fun, it brings a lot of cool ideas such as two new Pikmin types with one of them being somewhat useless, the purple Pikmin, and the white Pikmin which is a bit too useful for treasure hunting and his race being only available in caves is really annoying in all honesty.
They gave us a new captain to control making this game also a COOP game! But the main reason they gave us a second playable character is to multitask so one can take a group of Pikmin and the other takes another group to avoid wasting time, but here's the issue with this, it's useless since there's no urgency to do anything fast unlike Pikmin 1! Guess Louie would've been more useful in the first game.
One big change that can seem unnoticeable is how most enemies have a lot less health than Pikmin's 1 enemies making them feel less like a damage sponge and making encounters less long, but it came as a tradeoff, they are also way more brutal and there's a lot of one-hit kill enemies or just ones that eat Pikmin really, really fast like a bunch of big Bulborbs in the caves.

So would that game be an upgrade to the original or just a downgrade? It's a very difficult question, both games do work as standalone releases and none of them just feels like it'll replace the next but the "superior" game would be Pikmin 2 as it's not 2 hours long like Pikmin 1 and there's no time limit, no bombs for yellow Pikmin making these atrocious stone walls in Pikmin 1 gone forever (thankfully) and the overworld maps just feel more balanced and better to explore, for the most part... Do they actually expect me to go there with my yellow Pikmin to break that electric fence past the wooden bridge? Don't they know how hard it is to move Pikmin on a small surface surrounded by instant death threats around them?

So what about the post-game? I'd love to tell tales about them but the last stage is just bad! Well, the overworld isn't but anything in the underground sections just sucks dude, even when they were easy in the early part of the game you kinda just slog through them but you never really have fun, they all look and play the same, the main factor is either "Will it be too easy or just filled with bullshit".
I love the idea of earning a unique item that gives Olimar new abilities after beating the boss of the cave but like I said it just feels the same, it goes on for too long and I wish they were each only like 5 or 6 floors long.
But in the case of the last world, it just shows how badly designed they are, bullshit one-hit traps everywhere like bombs with the 1 IQ all Pikmin share they all urge themselves to go hit something that you didn't order them to or just flock themselves to something at the wrong time like bombs right when they explode and in an instant you just lose like 50 Pikmin out of bad luck and level design.

So if anyone wondered "Is Pikmin 2 difficult?" for the most part it isn't, it's just filled with bullshit at the end.
But at the end of the day, it's still a fun game and beating the game doesn't require finishing all dogshit caves.

In some ways, this game has frustrated me more than any other purely because it hurts to not love it like I want to: Completely and utterly, without fault. Pikmin 2 is possibly the most flawed in the mainline series, yet it is absolutely my favorite. Not to say it is a bad game by any means, but it does have significantly more blemishes than 1 or 3. The pacing, balance, and game mechanics are the most lopsided in the series' history. Nonetheless, I grew up with 2 more than either of those (Pikmin 3 wasn't even around until my mid-teens) and that has a great deal of influence on my choice to put it in my top 10. When I think of gaming-related childhood memories, Pikmin 2 is what comes to mind. I am not going to pretend I don't still love the hell out of this game, just as I am not going to pretend it doesn't frustrate the hell out of me. This dumb, broken, and unbalanced game still lands in my top 10 out of sheer attachment despite being all those things to the 10th degree.
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First and foremost, the cave system is deeply flawed and not integrated well into the game's time mechanic. What made the first Pikmin so good was the stressful time management and that's been kind of replaced with more intense resource management instead. The caves are long endurance tests that limit your ability to create new pikmin or withdraw more from the onions. Rather than individual battles being stressful because of their impact on your efficiency, exploring a cave's various dangers is stressful out of fear that you will lose pikmin in a place you cannot get more. This is kinda fun and, on paper, it could be a good substitute for the now (near) irrelevant time management. Unfortunately, a lot of the caves are a slog to get through. Enemy placements and other game mechanics (like falling rocks) are often unfair and sometimes just plain cruel. This, along with the floors being randomly generated, sucks a lot of potential fun out of the caves. Plus, enemies have been significantly weakened in comparison to the first game, perhaps to compensate the player's inability to simply add more pikmin to their squad from the onions. It tends to make combat less exciting and more bothersome, especially in the longer caves. However, I can't deny the appeal of a cave system. As a child, I always wondered what was on the next floor—what hideous monster would I have to fight? What if it was a scary boss that could kill every last one of my precious pikmin? No other game has given me the sense of wonder that Pikmin 2's caves did when I was a kid. Some unknown danger was always lurking, but my curious self had to know what deadly creatures awaited me! While I, as an adult, can acknowledge the shortcomings of the cave system, I also can't ignore the excitement I had for them for so many years in my childhood. I was even kind of disappointed when 3 didn't bring caves back. EDIT: PIKMIN 4 IS BRINGING BACK CAVES AHHHHHHH I HOPE THEY'RE GOOD
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Secondly, yeah..... This game is only the "hardest" by default because of the amount of bullshit it throws at the player. The game is challenging in the worst ways possible. If pikmin are lost, chances are it wasn't enemies that killed them. Usually, it's the hazards that result in deaths. Combat itself is beyond trivial. The purple pikmin break most encounters, the enemies have been nerfed in both kill power and health, and the bitter sprays turn the tables in your favor so hard that it isn't even a question of skill. If you abuse the systems of Pikmin 2, the game collapses under its own design. While this game has the most challenging enemies and game design on paper, the game is significantly less challenging than the first Pikmin game if you are taking advantage of what tools you are given.
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While this game is the most flawed entry in the mainline Pikmin series, it still remains close to my heart. The game's locations are often whimsical and some elements, like the Piklopedia, offer a greater sense of world-building. Boy oh boy, is the Piklopedia one of the best bestiaries in video games or what?! Pikmin 2's status as a top 10 game for me hinges on the existence of the Piklopedia. 90% of the game is dumb bullshit but AYE IT'S WHATEVER BECAUSE I CAN THROW CARROTS AT THE ENEMIES. Also, the Empress Bulblax never woke up, no matter how many hundreds of carrots I threw at her, and that made me upset as a child. Being able to toss Pikpik carrots at all the bizarre creatures you've encountered was more than enough to make it worth going into the Piklopedia after every day, but additionally having Olimar and Louie's notes on each beast is a ton of fun. In general, I feel more attached to this version of PNF-404 than the ones in either 1 or 3. I remember every location to the finest of details and I could spend many a day absorbed into this world's depths.
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In short, Pikmin 2 is easily the most flawed of the main series. I can't say I even enjoy it the most these days. However, between my long-term attachment and my strong affinity for the best aspects of this game, I can't help but love Pikmin 2 so darn much. I'm sure many of its fans feel similarly and that is why it's retained its status as the fan favorite in the series.

I wanted to like this more than Pikmin 1, but some parts of it are so frustrating that they bring down the experience for me, mainly in the caves. While I do like the added stakes of going down into the caves with a limited squad of pikmin, the amount of unfair bullshit the game throws at you starts to get to you after a while. Doesn't help that some of the caves are quite long (the later ones are upwards of 10 floors).

That said, it does improve on the original in some ways, namely the pikmin ai is less stupid and the addition of purple pikmin and white pikmin add some variety to the gameplay along with the sprays.

I think this game could've been a few hours shorter and it wouldn't have detracted from the experience really. I clocked in 25 hours after getting all 201 treasures (didn't even touch the challenge mode will probably do that later). That's like 3 times longer than pikmin 1.

If the caves were a bit shorter and had less unfair shit in them this would be an amazing game because the core gameplay loop is still fun, just feels kinda bloated.

cannot see how this lives up to the original or 3 tbh, its so utterly frustrating at times that it straight up becomes not fun and more like a grind, especially when collecting every treasure

still tho i think its worth playing despite being my least favorite in the series, most of it was solid great fun but the flaws are glaring enough and the game overstays its welcome long enough to make me want to revisit it less, ESPECIALLY when talking about completion

7.5/10 or smth nobody cares about the number

Pikmin 2 is a disappointing sequel, and it's one I'm surprised to see retain such a positive reception over time, despite Pikmin 3 greatly improving upon or straight up removing most of the new things it attempts. There are definitely things it does right -- enemy variety has gotten a big boost, the new upgrades you can obtain are nice, the humour and charm are on point, and it’s still visually impressive -- but there are just too many mistakes made here to that prevent it from being on par, let alone surpassing, the vision of its predecessor.

One of the less discussed but still important changes comes in the way the overworlds are structured. Pikmin 1’s level design was hardly revolutionary, but it was clever in how it put the player in the middle of an interconnected sandbox and encouraged them to create their own journey by setting off in any direction. In comparison, Pikmin 2’s levels tend more towards linearity. There are usually one or two routes to take after landing in an area, and paths tend to branch out rather than intersect. You can see it when looking when comparing the layout of Pikmin 1’s Forest of Hope to Pikmin 2’s Valley of Repose. The design isn’t always like this, and the game is at its best when you’re able to open up the map and solve the meatier puzzles, but it’s a subtle shift that hurts the flow when combined with the even bigger changes made.

The caves of Pikmin 2 are where you'll spend most of your playtime. It's also the source of a lot of the dissonance between what is trying to be recreated from the first game versus what is trying to be innovated here. The caves themselves are visually dull/repetitive and lack atmosphere compared to the worlds they are placed in. Additionally, the absence of the time limit and a connection to the overworld make them feel out of place in a strategy game about exploring uncharted lands. They could have been a cool way of connecting and expanding the world (say, by opening up cross-map shortcuts between caves or other areas on the map), but instead they make the overworlds feel like a glorified level select for a bunch of linear level gauntlets. Hell, you could move the caves to an actual level select screen and replace them on the map with treasures, and the game wouldn't play that differently.

The bad news is that these caverns don't feel that great to play in a vacuum either. Aside from some memorable moments like the infamous Waterwraith, most of these mini challenges range from forgettable to frustrating. When the game doesn't boil down to matching the right Pikmin to the right objective one by one (purples for killing enemies, everything else for their respective element), it's bringing out the worst of the combat and controls. These were weak points in Pikmin 1 as well, but it was mitigated by the game giving the player the time and space to engage in combat on their own terms and having fewer enemies overall. In comparison, Pikmin 2's crammed, monster-filled corridors open up a lot more opportunities for clunkiness of the camera, AI, party movement, colour switching, aiming, etc. to rear their ugly heads. Trying to play past mistakes (or just plain BS) becomes annoying since caves have limited chances to obtain fresh Pikmin (especially purples and whites), and it's not like those mistakes matter all that much anyway -- the game has no day limit unlike its predecessor, so it's almost always easier to reset on a tricky floor of a cave instead of grinding for new Pikmin later.

Speaking of that change to the day limit, it doesn't work well. The tedium and lengthiness of the caves probably contributed to the decision to scrap it, but the end result is the loss of the fantastic momentum/pacing and incentive to play for perfection the limit offered in exchange for underwhelming dungeons. It’s emblematic of Pikmin 2’s core problem: major additions that can’t stand on their own and mess with a formula that already works.

So like I was playing this game right, and I use a nintendo switch controller to play emulated games y'know. I've been doing this for like 5 years. And the game that does my controller in? Pikmin 2. I'd say like every gamecube, wii, ps2/ps1, and n64 game I have ever logged on here I've played with that controller and Pikmin 2 is the one that breaks it. Funny thing too is that I was so close to 100%ing it, like I had 2 dungeons left in the game and the doomsday apparatus left to collect before finishing this game and then my controller just stops reading up inputs. God did not want me 100%ing pikmin 2 but have my word, I will do it.