We've been waiting literal years for a new Mario game and now that the movie's out, now was the perfect time. And the game we got is, well, WONDERFUL! Really this is a game you have to experience for yourself. Words don't do it justice but I guess I'll try.

Wonder's greatest strength is innovation. Unlike the "New" games which often re-used level concepts (although NSMB U felt a little different at least), every level in Wonder feels like a unique experience, whether by gameplay gimmick, Wonder effect or enemy type. I'm sure every single level is somebody's favourite, which is saying something.

The enemies are the real highlight. This game introduces a huge variety of new creatures (take notes, modern Paper Mario...) that not only look unique, but have clearly-defined, and FUN, game mechanics. Levels are typically built around one of these enemies.

The world also experiments with non-linearity, with multiple levels accessible at the same time, each graded on a difficulty scale from 1 to 5 stars. There are 4-star levels even in the first world so you're always on your toes, though I never came close to running out of lives. The game struck a good balance between satisfying challenge and not feeling frustrating, with... one exception I'll get to later.

While not an essentially part of a Mario game imo, the soundtrack is also excellent, with very few repeated tunes, making each level even MORE unique.

Speaking of unique, every level has a Wonder Flower effect. Some are worked into the main path while others are more hidden, and they're typically an exaggeration of or twist on the level's core gimmick. (The "ten" in the "ki-sho-ten-ketsu" structure) Outside of the Special World they're all optional, ensuring they don't bog down replays of the level if you missed a collectible.

My criticisms are mostly nitpicks, but there's a few. Firstly, despite letting you tackle a few levels out of order, the game only opens into true non-linearity for Worlds 4 through 6, while the Petal Isles could've easily served as a hub granting access to ALL worlds after the first.

Despite all the crazy Wonder effects, every boss besides the final one is Bowser Jr, and while each fight is completely unique, it would've been nice to see more characters. Not every world has a boss, either. The final fight with Bowser was a cool setpiece but am I the only one who found it disappointingly easy?

And speaking of difficulty, the Special World, while meant to be super-hard optional challenges, places one of their hardest levels FAR too early. "Climb to the Beat" is only World 2's Special level, and it's so brutal my first attempt (which capped off my very first play session of Wonder) made me take a week-long break from the game for the sake of my actual health. None of the later Special World stages caused this much pain, so I feel this one should've come later.

Overall, Wonder is an excellent return for 2D Mario, and I hope its new enemies set a precedent for future entries.

Bayonetta 3 is the textbook definition of too many cooks in the kitchen. It throws the kitchen sink at you, not realizing how badly it kills the pacing, storytelling and replay value.

So much of this game is bad. Yes, playing as Bayonetta against monsters is better than ever, but its also the Bayonetta game with the least of it. Viola and Jeanne stages are atrocious and ever frequent. It took me a year to slog through this 13 hour game because I dreaded having to play for 30-45 minutes playing a mission with a character that isnt fun. (Jeannes levels are way shorter, but they're the jankiest and ugliest to make up for it).

The less said about the story, the better. Seriously. Even if I ranted about how Platinum massacred Bayonetta as a character and sandblasted at least 80% of the original's camp comedic writing away for self-serious multiverse bullshit, it wouldn't help. The joy of Bayonetta 1 was that the ridiculously fun gameplay was matched in energy by over the top, funny cutscenes with lovable characters. Just...fuck Bayonetta 3 for doing this.

The aliasing in this game is genuinely hideous. Like, everything is shimmering and jagged and the lighting is weird and the textures are shining like a students first unreal project, its a mess. I know its not the end of the world, but I had to play on a CRT to hide how ugly this game is. (To my TVs credit, it worked wonders and made it look decent).

Most importantly of all, Bayonetta 3 keeps thinking the player hates playing Bayonetta. Every chapter has some stupid puzzle mechanic or new gimmicky demon to learn to use for 10 minutes, or a shitty boring shmup section, or bad platforming, or clunky kaiju fights that actually remove happiness from the universe statistically; Bayonetta 3 is an unfocused mess of gameplay ideas that got thrown in as a first draft. Much like this meandering review.

To wrap up my rant, the game is still a begrudging 2 stars because playing Bayonetta is still good fun. Its not as constant as I'd like, but around 40% of the total experience is good. I wouldnt buy it for 60 dollars when DMC5 launched at the same price and is also Bayonetta 3 except they nail it on every level and don't kill the franchise.

I know the reception isn't that bad, but with a dev hell stillbirth like this and the departure of Kamiya, Im not expecting a new game starring "the next generation". Fuck man, did Platinum not notice how hard Capcom had to sell the fans on Nero to make him popular? What made them think Bayo 3's ending was a good idea?

Final rant: Why is the enemy design dogshit? Remember the Joy fight? Now everything is just nickelodeon slime dinosaurs and mannequins.

I wish that this was a game about trauma. I mean, it sort of is. Every Nancy Drew is split between at least two identities that often feel like they’re meant to synergize into a thematic whole, but they so rarely find the balance. Most commonly this takes the form of a modern day mystery plot and its historical roots, and the issue comes from finding a way to make enough time for both, or making sure the weight of one side is appropriately felt in the other.

Nancy Drew: The Haunted Carousel seems initially like it might nail this element – with its historical intrigue about a guy who carved the horses for a carousel in the titular amusement park which are now considered extremely valuable for some reason (there is a historical heist involved, these games LOVE historical heists and listen man SO DO I so I will NOT be taking them to task for this), and his modern-day descendent, Joy, who is RATHER IRONICALLY a very sad woman who works at the park today. See, Joy’s whole life has revolved around the park; everybody in her family works or worked there going back generations, her mom died in a car crash that feels responsible for during a park-related incident when she was four years old that led to her repressing all of her early childhood memories as a coping mechanism, normal precocious kid shit.

Another very normal thing about Joy is that her dad, who used be like, an attraction designer for the park, eventually realized that helping his extremely young child essentially condition herself to forget her entire early development instead of dealing with her grief was an extremely fucked up thing to do (hindsight is 20/20) and talking to her about it, waited until he was on his deathbed and then invented a wacky little robot guy to give her riddles in hopes that solving them would prompt her to resurface park-related memories of her mother. Most of the game’s story ostensibly involves solving these riddles for Joy, and helping her push through her shit and come to terms with some real ugly feelings, in ways that I have gripes with but are clearly the emotional core of the game and also by far the most interesting stuff here. It’s just that this is where we come back to my tragic thesis for this review: this SHOULD be what this game is about, and although it’s certainly the EMOTIONAL center, and you do spend a lot of the middle portion of the game working towards the few key scenes where Joy gets to have these moments, the moments themselves are few and brief. The best, most interesting, most resonant content in the game, and the content that’s most directly tied to the Traditional Nancy Drew Historical Storyline, is FIRMLY the b-plot of the game, only given slightly more time and weight than “what’s the wacky new age engineer up to” and “hmm the security guard seems kind of cagey about his past.” I would have much rather seen Joy have to reckon with her father’s role in all of this than learn about fucking Ingrid’s secretly selling rollercoaster blueprints to a friend or whatever the fuck she was up to.

The tone of it all doesn’t help? These games do have a history of playfulness to them, but I mark mood-setting as maybe their greatest and most consistent strength normally, which is why it feels so weird to have this complaint. The scenes with Joy feel very grounded, very real. A woman finding catharsis by embracing grief is a powerful thing, especially when the circumstances of the whole situation lead to a lot of murkiness in the way she must feel retroactively about a lot of what came after and people she thought she knew growing up in a relatively closed and tight-knit environment. So to have these scenes always end with Joy and Nancy turning to see a funny little robot guy literally cough up a new clue and piddle out a little rhyming riddle to hunt down the next piece of this deeply sad trauma puzzle feels deeply inappropriate. Like yeah man it IS super funny but this is the one moment in the game I don’t want to be laughing?

Although these are my only REAL complaints with this one they do feel big enough to sour what is otherwise a perfectly fun Nancy Drew Cyber Adventure. The amusement park (which is not even slightly haunted and nobody acts like it is so the title of this game is a fuckin TEASE AND A HALF) is a cute setting that lends itself really well to puzzles and I think they make the most of it. Plenty of fucking around with rides, going behind the scenes, working in the offices, playing minigames based on attractions around the park; everything you would want to see out of this kind of setting is here.

The characters are all pretty good too, if a little underwritten. This game is a little shorter than the last few have been, and leans more heavily on puzzles than narrative, but it also has the most characters to speak with of any of the games so far and I think the surplus of content crammed into a barely two hour runtime really shows. I do like everyone. Joy is obviously the one with the most meat on her bones, but I also really enjoy the very sensitive jersey accented beefcake security guard Harlan and the person who turns out to be the villain, who is not a particularly deep or interesting character but who is lifted up by a much higher-than-usual-quality performance for these games by their voice actor.

Also I’m starting a new segment that I expect will recur at the end of many of these reviews moving forward called Nancy Drew Cop Watch, to catalogue all the times Nancy needlessly acts like a huge asshole cop for no reason when she could just leave the fuck alone and be cool instead.

Today she finds out that Harlan the security guard used to be incarcerated when she accidentally contacts someone who turns out to be a parole officer, and immediately runs to his boss to tattle on him, framing it as “disturbing information.” When his boss is like “yeah I know I hired him anyway he’s cool he told me up front and I trust him” Nancy STILL tries to finger him for some extremely petty harmless shit he did to get him in trouble, JUST because she doesn’t trust him for being in jail when he was younger! He gets mad and won’t talk to her for a while, and then later, HE apologizes to HER for getting mad about this!

Additionally she finds out that Ingrid the engineer is doing an actual criminal act of stealing the park’s roller coaster blueprints and giving them to her friend to copy so they can make their own roller coaster out of them but Nancy doesn’t care about this, presumably because Ingrid is not already a felon, who knows, she contains multitudes.

So anyway I am impressed that this series continues to press up against the edges of the kinds of subject matter they want to try to tackle, and that despite not doing it in the MOST graceful ways, the stories they try to tell so far have been pretty respectful and not really embarrassing. It’s a better track record than any AAA game series I can think of, and I look forward to them continuing to broaden their horizons.

PREVIOUSLY: GHOST DOGS OF MOON LAKE
NEXT TIME: DANGER ON DECEPTION ISLAND

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES

Recently, it has occurred to me that the harshest thing that could be said about any sequel is that it makes you "appreciate the original more". What initially may seem like a positive comment is anything but. In actuality, such a statement is essentially saying "This game took an imperfect original and failed to improve upon it so spectacularly that I'm left wondering if the flaws of the first one are really so problematic after all".

Anyways, Pikmin 2

Chapter 1 - Earth: The Final Frontier

The original Pikmin game was fairly coy about the possibility of this game taking place in our very own backyard, perhaps after some sort of unnamed armaggedon. The sequel, on the other hand, hardly waits 20 minutes to smack you across the face with mustard lids and toy gundams. Such a setting would be fine, cute even, if it ever actually amounted to anything. At risk of getting ahead of myself, caves (which I'll get into more later) are given a vague "Earth stuff" wallpaper, but it's not like they're actual locations, just a mish mash of junk. They more closely resemble those AI-generated images that look like a hoarder's bedroom at first glance, but if you try to focus on any details your brain will start dry heaving and saying hail marys. Above ground is given token dandelions, though I hardly remember the forest having so many electrified gates and toxin-spewing vents. Maybe that's more common in Japan.

Chapter 2 - Hocotate Pawn

So, what is it that possesses the blue-collar hero Olimar to return to the site of his 30-day nightmare? Well, MONEY, of course! The plot is novel, as Olimar and his junior Louie are sent back to Earth in order to scrounge up enough money to save their (presumably non-union) jobs. Hazard pay is, I imagine, off the table. That being said, "novel" feels like such a disappointing step back from Pikmin 1. For any of its faults, the first game shined in mood. Olimar was in a genuine life-or-death struggle, completely alone on an alien planet. There was a constant danger and he clearly knew it. Now, it's Olimar and his jackass friend playing junior Bargain Hunt. There is nothing pressing about the situation except the occasional nagging email from their boss. The development of his situation was funny, especially by the time he was becoming king of the woodland creatures, but it once again undercuts any sense of isolation.

Chapter 3 - All the Time in the World

The time limit in Pikmin 1 was at once the bane of my existence, and its most essential feature. I was constantly fearful of inefficiency and working too slow, but it was a healthy kind of anxiety. Like a low heat stove, there was a constant simmering tension that merely asks you to avoid pissing around. Now, there is absolutely no urgency. Despite the plot explicitly concerning repaying late debt, the boss will presumably indefinitely hide out from the knee-breaking loan sharks until you're good and ready to proceed, Olimar and Louie free to spend all the time in the world prancing through flowers and singing hymns. Bizarrely, the game mysteriously retains the day-night cycle. Since there is no day limit, it's just an excuse for a recap of stats from the last arbitrary period of time and a chance for the boss to guilt trip you with the cigarette butts and half-eaten cheesecake he had to scrounge out of the trash for dinner. Previously, the end of a day was a further tick on the doomsday clock, that much less time to save your life; now, it feels more like that screen where the Wii would tell you to take a break and go outside.

Chapter 4 - The Louie Factor

Another new feature is of course the presence of Olimar's "he's trying his best" sidekick, Louie. Aside from the aforementioned total destruction of the atmosphere this creates, it does allow for some interesting gameplay opportunities, as Pikmin can now be set to two tasks at the same time - occasionally, at least. Since there's absolutely no automation, the only tasks you can set a captain to supervise passively is things that take a long time for the Pikmin to do, like destroying walls. That's not nothing of course; it's nice to not have to stare deadeyed as your Pikmin dash their brains out against a stone wall for 7 hours in a prolonged metaphor for their entire existence. Still, it would be nice to even have some basic captain commands (ex. "Return to the Onion with your Pikmin", "Go here on the map by the safest possible route", "Collect pellets near you"). Having two captains also allows for you to divvy up your Pikmin easier - still not as neatly as would be ideal, but definitely an improvement. Louie in specific is an interesting character, coming across less like Olimar Jr. and more like some sort of savage animal who's simply too stupid to be scary. He doesn't think about anything but food (which seems to rub off on Olimar somewhat), culminating in Louie's journal, an entire compendium built around one joke. I can't imagine reading the entire thing when it is, again, one joke, but the fact they put that much effort into it honestly does make the joke a lot funnier. To add to Louie's charming weirdness is the unexplained implication that he tries to kill Olimar, something which absolutely did make me laugh.

Chapter 5 - It's a Duracell World

Populating Olimar's new recurring vacation destination is a number of treasures for you to collect. These are Pikmin 2's equivalent to the ship parts in the previous game. There is absolutely a funny novelty to the idea of junk scavenged out of a dirty hole being considered treasure, as Olimar proudly displays rotten pickle chips and broken Hot Wheels next to Hocotate's Mona Lisa. The issue with this feature is a simple one: Pikmin 1 featured a total of 30 treasures to collect. Pikmin 2, a marginally longer game, features over 200. Despite this overwhelming amount of junk, each of which is worth a handful of pennies and a Subway coupon, the game still requires you to one-by-one carry them back to your ship for a little celebratory cutscene. Then, all my Pikmin gather around for a jovial applause and the Evangelion "Congratulations" scene because I brought back a feather worth literally 10 coins (reminder that the total debt is 10,000). It's impossible not to find it incredibly tedious after a while. There are only so many times you can laugh at the novelty of seeing a screw or a kiwi or one of the four(?!) Duracell batteries they make you collect. The most damning thing I can say is that, after defeating the final boss, I felt absolutely no impulse to collect the remaining treasures, in a game where such an exercise is ostensibly the entire point.

Chapter 6 - Meet the New Pikmin, Same as the Old Pikmin or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Purples

Like that story of James Cameron writing "Alien$" on a whiteboard, the inclusion of more Pikmin is an obvious step forward. Here, we have technically two new members of the Pikmin posse, though it's functionally three. The ability for yellow Pikmin to carry bombs has been removed, a mechanic that will not be missed. Instead, they focus on electricity, opening electric gates and giving electric enemies that fluoride stare when they try to zap 'em. The first fully new addition is the white Pikmin, whose primary function is to open poison gates and fight poison enemies - noticing a pattern here? It's like the whole games been recalibrated around making sure you have different keys for different doors. It could be argued that bombs were that too, but a) it's more explicit now and b) in these games, two keys feels very different from three. Hell, is it four? I don't remember fire gates in Pikmin 1, but that might just be the dementia. Beyond the poison immunity, white Pikmin also damage anything that eats them, something which will be very useful when Pikmin introduces the Divine Wind Pikmin and suiciding your units becomes a viable strategy. Thirdly, they can dig up buried treasures, a contextual "locked door" that seems to only exist to give you the double bird if you thought that "no poison" in a cave meant it was safe to not take whites, you oafish simpleton. Finally, they can carry items faster, an ability that's totally useless, since I don't really see any good reason to carry more than a few white Pikmin; you're not rolling out the White Ranger Recovery Squad to speed haul those Duracells, especially when there's, again, absolutely no urgency in this game. Further exacerbating that is the fact that whites and the secret third Pikmin are both fairly rare and not easy to replace. Ah, yes, that secret third thing: the purple Pikmin. Perhaps akin to Dr. Oppenheimer, I was initially naive to the awesome power I was meddling with. Rest assured, once their true potential dawned on me, I did indeed become death, destroyer of worlds. There's no reason not to roll up with a backing crew of these big boys. After getting cold cocked by a purple Pikmin air barrage, 80 - 90% of enemies fold like wet paper. These chunky fellas not only do gonzo damage, they can also stun enemies. That's not just those they hit, but also nearby enemies, their wife, pet dog, and those who happen to have run an errand in the same postal code. In addition, they seem to have basic homing abilities, so even my Olimar's crosseyed aim is enough to make bulborb pancakes one right after the other. It's not an exaggeration to say the vast majority of enemy encounters are totally trivial if you just bury them in purple Pikmin, including most bosses. Purple Pikmin being limited is not an issue because purple Pikmin simply won't die. If that wasn't enough, they can carry more than any other Pikmin, meaning you don't even need many for treasures.

Chapter 7 - The Earth Defense Force

Enemy variety is one area of improvement here, though the actual quality of the specific enemies is something of a mixed bag. Some, like the Careening Dirigibug or the Decorated Cannon Beetle can add a fun challenge, though become extraordinarily frustrating in the wrong situation. Others, like all the little Dweevils or the Jellyfloats, are not threatening at all, just annoying to deal with. The new bulborb variants are frightening suckers; the halloween-colored guys will pull an "omae wa mou shindeiru" on eight of your Pikmin before you can even react. As far as bosses go, they were unique and fun, though most were made fairly trivial by the purple Pikmin. The final boss, similarly to in the first game, is deeply frustrating to figure out, but once you do, he's a fun challenge. I probably prefer this boss to the first one, as your responses feel more varied, not just repeating the same hit and run until he throws in the towel. Finally, I can't not mention the Waterwraith, my new best friend, who turns into a Looney Tunes character after he loses his rolling pin. Replace his theme with Benny Hill for the same effect.

Chapter 8 - Addressing the Deep, Dark Hole in the Room

Finally, we get to caves, the foggy, wet hole at the center of this game. This is the part where I would normally say "it's a good idea in concept, but the execution leaves something to be desired". The issue, however, is that it's not a good idea in concept. In fact, I struggle to grasp how a team of developers decided the best evolution of a somewhat open world game about exploring and finding items scattered around a nature environment was a series of cramped, linear tunnels devoid of any discovery. Since these are such a major part of the experience and I have so many different things to touch on, this chapter will be broken into subchapters.

Chapter 8.1 - Pikmin's Baby Park

I really can't stress enough how much I hate caves. Let's start with the biggest, most glaring issue - the aforementioned linearity. Most floors are not strictly linear, to be fair, but that just means you're not TECHNICALLY forced to wade down the lane of the swimming pool because you're allowed to explore the hot tub to your heart's content. Every floor is a tiny area, mostly devoid of any puzzles, fun level design, or sense of discovery. They pretty much all boil down to a mix of fighting a bunch of guys (far from the most fun part of Pikmin) and clearing one of the many doors that you hopefully have brought the full rainbow to deal with like you're Captain Planet. Caves are, at first, fine, and by the end of the game, they're a merciless trudge. I feel like Alex DeLarge, having my eyeballs held open and being forced to watch increasingly elongated sequences of the same tunnels with the same enemies (mostly) and the same four kinds of doors until I break. The worst offender is Glutton's Kitchen, in which you "explore" an entire cave's worth of large, blank rooms where a crowd of bulborbs are holding a singles mixer to meet some nice breadbugs. These empty rooms populated by a bunch of basic enemies feel like the Pikmin equivalent of Mario Kart's Baby Park. Thankfully, it's mercifully short. Speaking of length, what starts at a compassionate 6 floors by the end of the game becomes upwards of an eyewatering 15. If you'll recall back to Chapter 1, I also alluded to how the artistic direction of the level design seemed to be "public park or public restroom after a tornado". Maybe I would enjoy it more if these were real environments, but they're not. I just remember bathroom tile texture over haphazard "baths" and randomly placed props, or something meant to resemble a sandbox or play pen if it was, as they say on Chopped, "deconstructed". I concede gameplay should come first, but environmental cohesion should probably be some sort of a factor, no?

Chapter 8.2 - Poison Vents to Nowhere

Much of these caves are procedurally generated, and by god can you tell. It's honestly atrocious. Spawning immediately next to a giant bulborb ready to make pik-kebabs and hazardous traps set up carefully to guard the cave's vast stock of dead ends are just a couple of the many wonders Pikmin 2 will generate regularly, the second one seeming to happen on essentially every floor. What is even the point of putting me through all these rooms if 90% of the dangers will spawn so haphazardly they're entirely irrelevant? The most important button map you need to remember to get through Pikmin 2 is your reset button. Don't like a level? Just reset it, and it'll be entirely different. There was one level where an extremely narrow bridge over a pond spawned off to the side, but after I was forced to reset the level, it spawned obstructing my path every single time. Since I refuse to play the Pikmin Shuffle with 100 little idiots, I just kept resetting until it would get out of my way again. So, we have a system that makes every level feel samey and terribly structured, and said system is easily abused, to boot. To add on to that, apparently some of the cave music is procedurally generated, which explains why some parts sound like cats remixing a soundboard of Weird Al songs.

Chapter 8.3 - The Great Bulborb Spanking Line

The degree to which these caves begin to rely on "fight huge hordes of guys" as their one and only challenge feels like if a movie director decided they'd done enough plot and made the back half of the film a series of disconnected scenes of people bowling. One right after another these dwarf bulborbs line themselves up, and one after another they get the goomba experience from my purple Pikmin air squadron. For most of these enemies, it's not difficult, it's not fun. By the time Cavern of Chaos has 54 bulborbs on one floor, it's hard not to imagine Miyamoto like Peter Venkman running his psychic tests at the beginning of Ghostbusters: "The effect? I'll tell you what the effect is - it's pissing me off!" Except by that point, I don't know if I had the enthusiasm to be pissed off, just totally drained. Who enjoys fighting grunt after grunt after grunt like this?

Chapter 8.4 - Live, Die, Repeat: The Pikmin Killing Zone

The horrible little reality that only dawns with time is how vital that reset button really will be. In every cave, you can bring 100 pikmin max and you're unable to ever go back for more until the cave is completely cleared and all the curtains are washed. With that change, suddenly Pikmin become a precious commodity - the loss of just one can be devastating, in part because the game only gives vague hazard warnings before entering a cave, so you have no idea of the ratio of colors you should bring. Pikmin in combat being stupid, sometimes difficult to control, and sometimes the victim of random game bs wasn't really a huge issue before, but now? Every one is like a hot needle to the brain. I'll reiterate what I said in my review of Sea Salt: you can't give me wild, uncontrollable tools and reasonably expect me to act with a great deal of precision. I can't make a ship in a bottle with a sledgehammer, and I can't thread the needle of mecha-frog artillery strikes without a couple troopers getting blown to kingdom come. Even the basic grunts, as easy as they are, can sometimes get in a lucky shot. Between the level reset and enemy behavior, you just have to keep trying until you get lucky enough to lose next to no one, since you never have any idea what precisely you'll need on the next floor. The most egregious example of all four sections here is a floor that is an entirely straight line, crossing over itself just enough so that the higher points will block your camera on the lower points. Along this straight line is one decorated cannon beetle after another. There had to have been upwards of 20 total, all lined up, technically easy to crush with purples, but with enough of a random factor to screw it up intolerably outside of any control when one of them gamer rages and chucks the 20 blue Pikmin I need into the Great Beyond to meet Pikmin Christ. If I didn't have access to save states through my... Nintendo Gamecube I honestly might have quit the game right there. But that's the thing - in Pikmin 1, there's a button to reset the day when you make too many mistakes. In Pikmin 2, meanwhile, you just have to reset the console for every little slip-up. It feels wrong, like you're cheating, but they clearly expect you to do it. This does not seem really doable without it.

Chapter 9 - The End of Pikvangelion

This turned out larger than I expected, but Pikmin 2 elicited stronger emotions from me than many other games. Honestly, I really did gain a new appreciation for Pikmin 1 through playing it. That's why this game is more saddening than anything else. Not only to see it ruin so much of what made the first game not just good, but especially unique, but to see it being lauded for it. I can't begin to understand the critical response to this game, but its worst crime is making me dread playing the rest of these. Pikmin 4 is supposedly "Pikmin 2 2", which is about as effective at selling me on it as if you told me playing it would lock my fingers in a Saw trap I can only be released from by killing 10,000 breadbugs in the name of Hocotate Freight.