Alot of people say there's no reason to return to the old animal crossings when the newest one is out since that's the one with the quality of life improvements and modern conveniences and while that is true in that aspect these older ones especially the original, this one & city folk clearly just have way more depth to every character, all the villagers have way more to them in the older ones they feel human they all have individual likes and dislikes they're all unique vs. the new ones were they are essentially just cute - not cute husks with eight different personality types spread across 300+ villagers with no little unique likes and dislikes for all of them just eight flavours of stock villager and that's it that you collect as decoration for your village / island.

It feels like in attempt for more mass appeal animal crossing had to eliminate most of it's soul to do so in new leaf onwards which is a damn shame the new games are clearly more free to customize everything to your will and it is fun more and convenient to design than the older ones but feel alot more hollow and lacking in personality than them at the same time, it's been really interesting for me to play this game now since it's my first time playing and I started with new leaf and I say alot of this confidencence and clearly no "older games were better cause I grew up with them!" bias.

Always been quite conflicted on pikmin 2 there's alot I like, for example: like well the pikmin formula we all know and love is back with great new (and needed) quality of life improvements, the soundtracks' really good like before and visually killer for the time, it's quite a charming game between things like: the story, tons and tons of genuine real world items and brands which sells the fact the pikmin planet is a deserted earth and emphasises the scale of olimar, louie and co. being a really cool attention to detail, the new piklopedia which is a really cool feature and perfect for a game like this, the new bingo battle multiplayer and returning mission mode are both awesome, but the biggest new game changing addition are the caves which are great... in theory it's a bold new thing for a sequel to try and stand-out with and even promises to make the original game's issue of short length rectified!

But for all the seemingly cool things pikmin 2 does it comes with some caveats: for one the world isn't completely new (yeah it's the same planet hur hur) but the environments you explore are kinda new but also quite heavily retreaded, very familiar and sometimes literally ripped parts from pikmin 1's levels which is quite lame for a sequel to be honest and screams corners cut and in general it's not quite as well designed as 1 in my opinion, still good but the stitching of new and old is maybe the cause of this? not to sure but the biggin here is the caves which are a semi-randomly generated series of a varying small to large amount of floors consisting of enemies, treasure to collect and treasure you sit around and wait to be collected then repeat till the end with a boss and for the most part that's all there is to them not a big fan overall if you couldn't tell alot of them are visually bland, samey and just kinda dull to sit through things like the fun pikmin mechanics and again cool treasures kinda sorta save it and also there are some genuinely really rad (rare) but rad caves like the submerged castle where the gameplay turns kinda, sorta a little survival horror which is a really cool shake up but again those are rare gems in the muck.

all and all yeah pikmin 2 good just kinda held back in some ways, going the extra mile but also going backwards and yeah lol... also the game's not that hard, harder than 1 & 3 but get good

I genuinely really, really like this game and it might just be my favourite jak game: the racing mechanics are so damn fun with managing drifting, having two different items for attack in front and behind you, getting and using boost energy effectively, watching your health meter so much to keep track of leading to every race feeling constantly stimulating, the adventure modes entertaining and somehow for a racing game has a better thought out story than jak 3, the soundtrack's banging and fits the game perfectly, there's tons to unlock and play around with.

Yeah I was floored by how much I enjoyed this game it's definitely not perfect the game can feel a little janky in places like your vehicle deciding "oh slightly nudge something? better fuck completely out", the story mode's too easy and the ps4 version's not very good going from having a decent frame rate to single digits plus really fuzzy cutscenes, but yeah good game.