When playing the original Pikmin, the most enjoyable aspects of the game were the exploration, discovery, and learning of how Pikmin operate in the world. Finding and collecting your lost ship parts so that you could escape before time ran out struck a delicate balance of time management and resource conservation skills. The knowledge and experience from the original Pikmin gave me confidence going into its sequel. This time, however, you have more at your disposal. You explore with two captains, there are dungeon-like caves to explore, new Pikmin to command, a large abundance of treasure to find, and a new cast of enemies to impede your progress. With there being no limits on how many days you may use to explore this distant planet, you are given more grace on how you choose to pace yourself through the game.
When playing a sequel it’s always nice to see good things return, but what you are truly looking for are the new features that are being introduced. Pikmin 2 does a great job exposing you to new features in tandem with the original features of Pikmin. For example, you start with a small colony of Red Pikmin. You are then taught the basics of collecting flower pods and enemy carcasses to bolster your forces. This naturally translates into the new goal of this game. Instead of fixing your ship, you are looking for treasure. Having two captains to control allows you to cover more ground within the small time window that you have for each day. I do wish that there was a way to send an inactive captain to specific places. That being said, the ability to coordinate the two captains worked fine to serve the challenges presented. Many obstacles from the first Pikmin game return. Throughout the different environments that you get to explore you will encounter obstacles like the breakable walls and the extendable bridges. Walls that require bomb rocks, interestingly enough, do not make a return. New obstacles include poison emitters and electrical lines. While poison can be recovered from, electricity instantly kills all of your Pikmin except for Yellow ones. There are only a few treasures to be found on the surface, the abundance of treasure needs to be uncovered in the game’s largest feature: caves.
Caves in this game are the focal point of exploration. Pikmin 2 successfully takes the original experience of Pikmin and pivots it in a completely different direction by introducing this single feature. Once you gain access to a cave, the day timer freezes so you can explore at your own pace. Upon descent, you are greeted with a labyrinth of randomly generated floors. Your game saves in between each floor, so if you’re given a bad floor layout you can reset the game for a more desirable outcome. This comes in handy later in the game when there’s a chance for you and your Pikmin to appear immediately within range of enemies. These floors are littered with all kinds of treasures, enemies, and traps, so it is up to you to strategize your approach. Caves demand you to play more thoughtfully as you cannot repopulate your Pikmin whilst exploring them like you can on the surface. Some of the caves do have flowers that can give you a few extra Pikmin, but enemy carcasses are turned into money instead of additional forces. Aptly preparing for a cave excursion is essential and the game gives you enough knowledge of what to bring beforehand. Each cave gives you a preview of what elements will be present within. This gives you a chance to decide what type and how many Pikmin to bring.
To aid your search for treasure, you enlist the help of several different types of Pikmin. Six types, to be exact. You have your original roster of primary color-themed Pikmin; Red and Blue Pikmin retain their respective immunities to fire and water while Yellow Pikmin lose the ability to pick up bomb rocks in exchange for immunity to electricity. You can still throw Yellow Pikmin higher into the air than any other Pikmin. New Pikmin types include Purple Pikmin, White Pikmin, and Bulbmin. Purple Pikmin do twice as much damage as a Blue, Yellow, or White Pikmin and are also ten times heavier and can lift with the strength of ten Pikmin. White Pikmin can find treasure buried underground and dig it up, are immune to poison and are poisonous to hostile creatures. Bulbmin are parasitic Pikmin that have taken over Red Bulborbs. You obtain them by killing the leader of the group. They are immune to all environmental hazards but are slower and weaker than regular Pikmin. Although Bulbmin cannot journey with you out of a cave, they make for a nice disposable supplement for your forces. These unique attributes open up the game to more challenges by combining returning hazards with new ones. You can now encounter poison/electric gates and much heavier items to be carried back to your ship. The main thing to note here is that the new Pikmin types don’t have onions. To get them you have to sacrifice your main forces (or Bulbmin) to convert them into these new Pikmin types. This makes White and Purple Pikmin intrinsically more valuable. By adding three new Pikmin types, and limiting your access to them, the game can create a new atmosphere of interesting challenges and resource management.
Locating and collecting treasures is your primary goal in Pikmin 2. The entire reason you have returned is to collect treasure so you can pay off your boss’s loan that was taken to cover a lost shipment. The treasures you find in the original release are directly related to things we have in real life (i.e. a Duracell battery and a bottle cap that says Sprite on it). Some of these items are mundane garbage to us, others are fun or interesting. You get a whole range of treasures. One of the caves yields only confectionaries. The best part of this is that your ship names and describes each of these treasures. I often found myself getting a good chuckle from some of the names given to the treasures. Naming a queen chess piece “Priceless Statue” and the king chess piece “Useless Statue” was probably my favorite example of this. The unfortunate thing about the remaster is that all of the third-party brands were removed from the game and replaced with generic fictional brands. While the game is still enjoyable, I found this diminished my appreciation for the treasures. Things that had a generic label ended up being less interesting to me and so I was less likely to look at it in my treasure catalog in between days.
The setting isn’t entirely dissimilar to the first Pikmin game. Although your adventure takes you to new locations, you are still visiting the same planet so that makes sense. While the first Pikmin had more explicit theming, this charm isn’t realized so well in Pikmin 2. You have four locations like before, but only two of them feel truly defined. The Valley of Repose is an oblong-shaped snowscape. Lacking much detail, you’re left pursuing the few obstacles that are laid down before you in this introductory area. Awakening Wood is a more lush environment. You find the Blue Pikmin onion here despite them being locked behind an electrified gate. This area is more square and features only a few challenges. The Perplexing Pool was the most interesting environment for me. It features a central land mass that’s surrounded by water. You find the Yellow Pikmin onion here. This area had the most interesting challenges that demanded the use of multiple types of Pikmin. Finally, the Wistful Wild is accessed only once you’ve cleared the debt owed by your boss. This area felt more plain. You see very little opposition between you and the caves. The lack of bosses on the surface undermines any sort of challenge that you may face since all of the creatures are decently manageable. I found these places to be much less memorable than its predecessor. It feels like the environmental innovation was spent more on developing the caves. This would have been fine if the caves were less procedurally generated. Because of this, only a few caves are truly memorable.
What’s more interesting than the environments, are the creatures that inhabit them. Some returning creatures are Bulborbs/Bulbears, Burrowing Snagrets, Blowhogs, and many others. Pikmin 2 almost triples the amount of creatures that you will encounter throughout your journey. Notable additions are the various types of Dweevils, Wollywogs, and some new variations of the aforementioned returning creatures. Each of these creatures have unique behaviors and ways of impeding your progress in the game. Anode Dweevils steal treasures and wear them as protection. Swooping Snitchbugs make a return and are often paired with the new Bumbling Snitchbug. Bumbling Snitchbugs grab and throw your captains around which can get pretty annoying when you’re trying to retrieve your pikmin from the ground. Seeing many different enemies is a marked improvement upon the cast that you got to enjoy in the first game. Many of these enemies have great designs and are fun to read about in the game’s new feature, the Piklopedia. This catalogs every enemy you encounter and gives you information on each of them. Given entries based on the perspective of both Olimar and Louie, also provides a fun spin on the information gathered for each creature. This can be helpful if you are struggling to figure out a good way to tackle a particular creature.
You also encounter several bosses as each cave has at least one. They are usually found at the end of the cave and some are encountered multiple times. The Empress Bulblax is the first boss you will encounter and is easy. When you face her again you are given a much stricter challenge as she’s constantly reproducing Bulborb Larvae that can eat your Pikmin before dying. I’d say her encounter in the late game is more forgiving than in the mid-game but that’s because her mid-game encounter is poorly designed. Sloped hallways would be okay if your Pikmin were able to consistently climb them without fear of the Bulborb Larvae. The Emperor Bulblax makes a return and is seen a few times as well. Not much has changed except you can’t use Yellow Pikmin to throw bomb rocks into their mouths like before. You’re left to try other strategies with them. My favorite boss was the Water Wraith. The Water Wraith is encountered in the Submerged Castle, which is only accessible with Blue Pikmin. The cave has all types of hazards along with a unique gimmick. The boss drops in on you if you take too long on any given floor. This applies pressure for you to hurry to the end where you’ll be given the proper tools to defeat it. This was the first cave that challenged my ability to manage my time and resources properly. With proper strategization (and a few choice resets of certain floors) I was able to avoid the Water Wraith altogether for a few floors. The boss itself isn’t that tough once you gain access to its weakness, but the challenge it imposes on you is what makes it so effective. The only other boss that elicited a strong response was the Man-at-Legs. This was a Beady Long Legs equipped with a machine gun. Although terrifying at first, once you have a chance to think rationally the boss isn’t too difficult to handle.
Fully delving into what Pikmin 2 has to offer gave me a lot of thrills. Despite the environments being less fleshed out, I still enjoyed searching for the treasures both on the surface and underground in the caves. The inclusion of three new Pikmin types was a welcome feature and well implemented. I ultimately found Pikmin 2 to be a more engaging game for me. I still appreciate the original Pikmin and its simplicity but Pikmin 2 has so much more to offer. I did find that towards the end of Pikmin 2, I started to feel a bit of fatigue with the longer caves. One cave is effectively a boss rush and another cave just has tons of grueling floors to tackle. Then once you finally reach the bottom, you have an extremely tough final boss to face. The Titan Dweevil is perhaps the most challenging aspect of Pikmin 2. This boss forces you to play to the strengths of your Pikmin. It was a much more challenging boss than the Emperor Bulblax in 1, and it was more thematically interesting as a final boss. The seamless introduction of new features balances well between innovation and stagnation. The accomplishment of collecting all 201 treasures felt satisfying. By the time I had completed all that I wished to accomplish, I was ready to put the game down and play something else. Pikmin 2 gave me just enough content to feel satisfied, if not a little bit more.
When playing a sequel it’s always nice to see good things return, but what you are truly looking for are the new features that are being introduced. Pikmin 2 does a great job exposing you to new features in tandem with the original features of Pikmin. For example, you start with a small colony of Red Pikmin. You are then taught the basics of collecting flower pods and enemy carcasses to bolster your forces. This naturally translates into the new goal of this game. Instead of fixing your ship, you are looking for treasure. Having two captains to control allows you to cover more ground within the small time window that you have for each day. I do wish that there was a way to send an inactive captain to specific places. That being said, the ability to coordinate the two captains worked fine to serve the challenges presented. Many obstacles from the first Pikmin game return. Throughout the different environments that you get to explore you will encounter obstacles like the breakable walls and the extendable bridges. Walls that require bomb rocks, interestingly enough, do not make a return. New obstacles include poison emitters and electrical lines. While poison can be recovered from, electricity instantly kills all of your Pikmin except for Yellow ones. There are only a few treasures to be found on the surface, the abundance of treasure needs to be uncovered in the game’s largest feature: caves.
Caves in this game are the focal point of exploration. Pikmin 2 successfully takes the original experience of Pikmin and pivots it in a completely different direction by introducing this single feature. Once you gain access to a cave, the day timer freezes so you can explore at your own pace. Upon descent, you are greeted with a labyrinth of randomly generated floors. Your game saves in between each floor, so if you’re given a bad floor layout you can reset the game for a more desirable outcome. This comes in handy later in the game when there’s a chance for you and your Pikmin to appear immediately within range of enemies. These floors are littered with all kinds of treasures, enemies, and traps, so it is up to you to strategize your approach. Caves demand you to play more thoughtfully as you cannot repopulate your Pikmin whilst exploring them like you can on the surface. Some of the caves do have flowers that can give you a few extra Pikmin, but enemy carcasses are turned into money instead of additional forces. Aptly preparing for a cave excursion is essential and the game gives you enough knowledge of what to bring beforehand. Each cave gives you a preview of what elements will be present within. This gives you a chance to decide what type and how many Pikmin to bring.
To aid your search for treasure, you enlist the help of several different types of Pikmin. Six types, to be exact. You have your original roster of primary color-themed Pikmin; Red and Blue Pikmin retain their respective immunities to fire and water while Yellow Pikmin lose the ability to pick up bomb rocks in exchange for immunity to electricity. You can still throw Yellow Pikmin higher into the air than any other Pikmin. New Pikmin types include Purple Pikmin, White Pikmin, and Bulbmin. Purple Pikmin do twice as much damage as a Blue, Yellow, or White Pikmin and are also ten times heavier and can lift with the strength of ten Pikmin. White Pikmin can find treasure buried underground and dig it up, are immune to poison and are poisonous to hostile creatures. Bulbmin are parasitic Pikmin that have taken over Red Bulborbs. You obtain them by killing the leader of the group. They are immune to all environmental hazards but are slower and weaker than regular Pikmin. Although Bulbmin cannot journey with you out of a cave, they make for a nice disposable supplement for your forces. These unique attributes open up the game to more challenges by combining returning hazards with new ones. You can now encounter poison/electric gates and much heavier items to be carried back to your ship. The main thing to note here is that the new Pikmin types don’t have onions. To get them you have to sacrifice your main forces (or Bulbmin) to convert them into these new Pikmin types. This makes White and Purple Pikmin intrinsically more valuable. By adding three new Pikmin types, and limiting your access to them, the game can create a new atmosphere of interesting challenges and resource management.
Locating and collecting treasures is your primary goal in Pikmin 2. The entire reason you have returned is to collect treasure so you can pay off your boss’s loan that was taken to cover a lost shipment. The treasures you find in the original release are directly related to things we have in real life (i.e. a Duracell battery and a bottle cap that says Sprite on it). Some of these items are mundane garbage to us, others are fun or interesting. You get a whole range of treasures. One of the caves yields only confectionaries. The best part of this is that your ship names and describes each of these treasures. I often found myself getting a good chuckle from some of the names given to the treasures. Naming a queen chess piece “Priceless Statue” and the king chess piece “Useless Statue” was probably my favorite example of this. The unfortunate thing about the remaster is that all of the third-party brands were removed from the game and replaced with generic fictional brands. While the game is still enjoyable, I found this diminished my appreciation for the treasures. Things that had a generic label ended up being less interesting to me and so I was less likely to look at it in my treasure catalog in between days.
The setting isn’t entirely dissimilar to the first Pikmin game. Although your adventure takes you to new locations, you are still visiting the same planet so that makes sense. While the first Pikmin had more explicit theming, this charm isn’t realized so well in Pikmin 2. You have four locations like before, but only two of them feel truly defined. The Valley of Repose is an oblong-shaped snowscape. Lacking much detail, you’re left pursuing the few obstacles that are laid down before you in this introductory area. Awakening Wood is a more lush environment. You find the Blue Pikmin onion here despite them being locked behind an electrified gate. This area is more square and features only a few challenges. The Perplexing Pool was the most interesting environment for me. It features a central land mass that’s surrounded by water. You find the Yellow Pikmin onion here. This area had the most interesting challenges that demanded the use of multiple types of Pikmin. Finally, the Wistful Wild is accessed only once you’ve cleared the debt owed by your boss. This area felt more plain. You see very little opposition between you and the caves. The lack of bosses on the surface undermines any sort of challenge that you may face since all of the creatures are decently manageable. I found these places to be much less memorable than its predecessor. It feels like the environmental innovation was spent more on developing the caves. This would have been fine if the caves were less procedurally generated. Because of this, only a few caves are truly memorable.
What’s more interesting than the environments, are the creatures that inhabit them. Some returning creatures are Bulborbs/Bulbears, Burrowing Snagrets, Blowhogs, and many others. Pikmin 2 almost triples the amount of creatures that you will encounter throughout your journey. Notable additions are the various types of Dweevils, Wollywogs, and some new variations of the aforementioned returning creatures. Each of these creatures have unique behaviors and ways of impeding your progress in the game. Anode Dweevils steal treasures and wear them as protection. Swooping Snitchbugs make a return and are often paired with the new Bumbling Snitchbug. Bumbling Snitchbugs grab and throw your captains around which can get pretty annoying when you’re trying to retrieve your pikmin from the ground. Seeing many different enemies is a marked improvement upon the cast that you got to enjoy in the first game. Many of these enemies have great designs and are fun to read about in the game’s new feature, the Piklopedia. This catalogs every enemy you encounter and gives you information on each of them. Given entries based on the perspective of both Olimar and Louie, also provides a fun spin on the information gathered for each creature. This can be helpful if you are struggling to figure out a good way to tackle a particular creature.
You also encounter several bosses as each cave has at least one. They are usually found at the end of the cave and some are encountered multiple times. The Empress Bulblax is the first boss you will encounter and is easy. When you face her again you are given a much stricter challenge as she’s constantly reproducing Bulborb Larvae that can eat your Pikmin before dying. I’d say her encounter in the late game is more forgiving than in the mid-game but that’s because her mid-game encounter is poorly designed. Sloped hallways would be okay if your Pikmin were able to consistently climb them without fear of the Bulborb Larvae. The Emperor Bulblax makes a return and is seen a few times as well. Not much has changed except you can’t use Yellow Pikmin to throw bomb rocks into their mouths like before. You’re left to try other strategies with them. My favorite boss was the Water Wraith. The Water Wraith is encountered in the Submerged Castle, which is only accessible with Blue Pikmin. The cave has all types of hazards along with a unique gimmick. The boss drops in on you if you take too long on any given floor. This applies pressure for you to hurry to the end where you’ll be given the proper tools to defeat it. This was the first cave that challenged my ability to manage my time and resources properly. With proper strategization (and a few choice resets of certain floors) I was able to avoid the Water Wraith altogether for a few floors. The boss itself isn’t that tough once you gain access to its weakness, but the challenge it imposes on you is what makes it so effective. The only other boss that elicited a strong response was the Man-at-Legs. This was a Beady Long Legs equipped with a machine gun. Although terrifying at first, once you have a chance to think rationally the boss isn’t too difficult to handle.
Fully delving into what Pikmin 2 has to offer gave me a lot of thrills. Despite the environments being less fleshed out, I still enjoyed searching for the treasures both on the surface and underground in the caves. The inclusion of three new Pikmin types was a welcome feature and well implemented. I ultimately found Pikmin 2 to be a more engaging game for me. I still appreciate the original Pikmin and its simplicity but Pikmin 2 has so much more to offer. I did find that towards the end of Pikmin 2, I started to feel a bit of fatigue with the longer caves. One cave is effectively a boss rush and another cave just has tons of grueling floors to tackle. Then once you finally reach the bottom, you have an extremely tough final boss to face. The Titan Dweevil is perhaps the most challenging aspect of Pikmin 2. This boss forces you to play to the strengths of your Pikmin. It was a much more challenging boss than the Emperor Bulblax in 1, and it was more thematically interesting as a final boss. The seamless introduction of new features balances well between innovation and stagnation. The accomplishment of collecting all 201 treasures felt satisfying. By the time I had completed all that I wished to accomplish, I was ready to put the game down and play something else. Pikmin 2 gave me just enough content to feel satisfied, if not a little bit more.
NOWITSREYNTIME17
8 months ago