the best Pokemon game DON'T AT ME. (white notwithstanding)

I love how much ambition they had with this game. Beautiful sprite animation, an actual compelling story, and a region filled with completely new Pokemon.

What's most disappointing is that we'll probably NEVER get another Pokemon game like this ever again

im fully convinced that that 100 glow pikmin could defeat goku.

Pikmin returns with the unique psuedo RTS adventure gameplay, nailing a lot of makes pikmin fan; wandering through zones and dungeons as an insect sized commander
and troops looking for items and hoping nothing horrible happens to your funny little guys. There's also a bunch of extra gameplay modes that are Okay.

The core gameplay is pretty swell; instead of adding a fourth captains it is instead you and your giant dog; effectively two captains with one of them having different gameplay mechanics. The Oatchi stuff is pretty great and the game makes the most out of him; dungeons are designed around this Super Pikmin and all his unique mechanics and a lot of bosses just would not work without being able to ride Oatchi. Oatchi rules. what a nice dog thing.

The standard pikmin design still works; this franchise hits a weird point of my brain where I am trying to optimize and be as efficient as possible but its also hitting me hard with some seratonin. The game kinda memes about the first part too; it gives a name to the concept of Doing As Much As Possible In The Least Amount Of Time with "Dandori", which most of the alternate gameplay modes are named after as well. I have 0 complaints the games main overworld areas and traditional dungeons other than like maybe there could be more visual diversity (4 Grassy Areas, 1 sand beach area and a house).

However there's not one but THREE different gameplay types that show up alongside of overworld + dungeons. Outside of treasures there's also various casteaways that you need to find as well; some of which have turned into funny leaf people which requires convincing them to come back to your base through Superior Dandori Skills, and then producing a cure for them, these seperate system being mostly attached to the previously mentioned different gameplay types.

Dandori challenges I quite like: you are thrown into a zone with a particular amount of pikmin and you are tasked with gathering as much as possible under a timelimit. It captures the spirit of dandori the best; every second matters and there's a lot of ways of optimizing it; I looked up platnium rank videos for some of the Dandori challenges just to find completely different routes that I didn't even consider. They're fun.

Dandori battles are Not Fun. Like the previously mentioned challenges, dandori battles put you into a zone with a small amount of pikmin and your goal is to gather the most points in a time limit; but this time you're playing against another player and trying to outscore each other, with items and random point bonus sections. It's messy, hard to follow because half your screen is taken up by the other player's screen, interacting or getting interacted with your opponent is frustrating, trying to actually optimize in the spirit of dandori sucks when everything rapidly changes, the maps are uninteresting. The last two mandatory Dandori battles i lost and the game said Hey Do You Want To Skip This And It Just Gets Solved :) and i hit that shit so fast. Still counts for the 100% baby

The last is nighttime expeditions. Effectively a tower defense mode where you defend a structure from enemies and inreturn you are awarded with the resource that cures people that turned into leaflings. It's... fine. To compensate for enemies rushing you you are given the absurdly overpowered Glow Pikmin instead of your usual crew. It's not BAD but pikmin without puzzlesolving, Effiencymaxxing, or combat where your pikmin choices matter is pretty shallow and also very easy.

Anyways here's bullet points for when I think I've been writing something for too long and wanna wrap it up but still got relevant thoughts

- very easy, which is a silly thing to complain about with a franchise that isnt known for difficulty but the game really sets you up so even if you have a pikmin annihilation disaster you are allowed to rewind the clock with 0 drawback, as as I previously mentoined you're allowed to skip Dandori challenges/battles if you're getting owned. But also I used both of these features so maybe thats on me.

-Oddly clunky to control at times, mostly when it comes to trying to swap between Captains. Having to go into a menu to swap between captains really slows the game pace down. It's not that bad but when you're really trying to go hard it can get annoying.

- Really meaty game too. I clocked in at 30 hours to 100% which is crazy for a pikmin game imo. This game effectively has a mini Pikmin 1 in it.

-stop making me watch these damn tutorials

Good game. While I'm not in love with the alternate gameplay sections, Pikmin is just a unique playing game that isnt replicated outside of this franchise and man I just love doing the dungeons and going around the map collecting shit it's sooooo chill. I played a game for 30 hours and I'm thinking about just playing Pikmin 2 again.

I am aware that I tend to throw around the phrase "peak fiction" a lot BUT I SWEAR TO CHRIST I REALLY MEAN IT THIS TIME. EVERYTHING ABOUT KIRBY PLANET ROBOBOT IS PEAK.

THE STORY IS PEAK
THE CHARACTERS ARE PEAK
THE LEVEL DESIGN IS PEAK
THE NEW GIMMICK IS PEAK
THE SOUNDTRACK IS PEAK
THE BOSS FIGHTS ARE PEAK
THE EXTRAS ARE PEAK
ITS ALL SO FUCKING PEAK

This is the greatest 2D Kirby game ever made and one of the greatest 2D platformers of all time. Thanks for all the memories old friend...