What I can never fault Ring Racers for is its ambition. Its environments are lovely, well realized, and expand on familiar Sonic zones and trappings in a way that accentuates every single track. It's a mechanically rich game with a bunch of different systems to compensate for every idea it has. It loads you with objectives and a glut of content that is mind boggling to begin to tackle. In all senses, it is a love letter to the legacy of Sonic and the fan game community that has sprung up around him, and takes every opportunity to remind you of its fan game status that it absolutely relishes. As a celebration and collection, Ring Racers is absolutely sublime.

Getting there tends to be the trickier issue. Much has been said about the game's intro, and while I find the dialogue and overall presentation of the tutorial very charming, I do find it a very misguided intro to the game. The mechanics taught in the tutorial are often used very sparingly across the actual races, and even those used often like drifting are used in different, shorter-form contexts than the tutorial would imply. It practically posits Ring Racers as an entirely different game and experience compared to what it actually is, and it goes on doing that for quite a while!

The actual races themselves vary in quality drastically depending on the track layout. Ring Racers can be absolutely vicious with its track designs, with hazards feeling devastating as they can easily combo into other hazards or items that toss you around like a pinball. This can be DEVASTATING on slopes, which require Sonic's vaunted momentum to get up and are aided by the ring system, letting you increase your speed a little bit per ring used. This should present some level of risk/reward; do you use your rings on straightaways to burst ahead, or save them for slopes as a means of recovery to maintain position? Unfortunately, rings are plentiful to a fault, and computer opponents (ESPECIALLY your rival character) are want to use them whenever possible to ludicrous speed increases, so rings become less strategic unless you're specifically saving them for chaos emerald bonuses in Grand Prix standings and more "I hope this part of the track also has rings". And when it doesn't... well you have the spin dash to get you out of the worst of things, but it feels pretty rough.

Drifting is also highly committal compared to rings, meaning that all alternate forms of speed are just kinda secondary to the immediate allure of the rings, which do not have enough risk to them to make the immediate reward not always a pull. This is compounded by items, which use the same button as using rings and, thus, often get in the way of progress more often than they help, especially considering how avoidable most offensive items tend to be as they struggle to interact with the steep sloped terrain of Ring Racers! I feel that individual race courses struggle to decide if they want to play nice with Ring Racers' systems or want to struggle against them, and very few of them are properly in line with the expectations set by the tutorial. It makes for a very uneven experience where a single bad spill on the last lap is both really debilitating and could not be entirely your fault, with means of consistent recovery not entirely present as opponents can keep padding their lead with rings and the comeback items are either unweildy to use, especially in a bad headspace, or inaccurate.

There are moments where Ring Racers does put everything together. Zones like Emerald Coast, Withering Chateau, Opulence, Regal Ruin, and Joypolis show DRRR at its best, with a consistent sense of flow, opportunities to best use shortcuts, and a great feel for combining the drift and ring mechanics. But for every one of them, there's a Marble Garden just asking for the player to try and break it in two before it breaks them. It lacks the kindness of kart racers like Mario, fails to commit to its individual mechanics like F-Zero, and does not string its systems together in nearly as seamless away as Crash, Diddy Kong, or even other Sonic racing titles manage. Ring Racers is its own, unforgiving beast that I can't say I had a bad time with, but it feels a bit overtuned for all it wants to strive for; a love letter that needed an editor, but how do you say "turn down the passion?" I like and respect it, I'll come back to keep pecking away at its wide breadth of content. But man I STILL haven't unlocked Whisper and don't even have a clue on how to get her, and I sincerely hope she's in the character class I like otherwise I'm gonna be real sad.

As a follow-up to Pikmin 1, Pikmin 2 makes an incredibly strong statement. And that statement is "we know that we're spreading ourselves thin between score attack-style survivalist gameplay and slow-burn exploration and worldbuilding, so we've destroyed the worldbuilding and put it in a little book and now the game is all about not dying in caves". It's a change that honestly the Pikmin series probably needed to take in one direction or the other, and the game commits to its more arcade-style gameplay fairly well! Without having to worry about navigating a more complex terrain in favor of labyrinths, control of the Pikmin generally feels a lot more consistent, combat challenges can be placed in a player's way methodically and deliberately, and overall the spikes in difficulty and memorable moments are a lot more controlled than in Pikmin 1. Unfortunately, the very limited exploration offered from seeing Pikmin 1 environments change does end up feeling very rote and obligatory by comparison, which makes a lot of the game's opening stretch seem pretty performatory; Pikmin 2 can't be mean enough in its opening to really grit its teeth due to needing to reteach Pikmin 1's mechanics and introduce its new ones. Additionally, returning bosses like the Burrowing Snagret, Beady Long Legs and Emperor Bulblax are shadows of their former selves due to appearing at the end of dungeons where a player can't be assured to have a full squad like Pikmin 1, creating this really unfortunate deflating feeling after clearing the first game. I'd cleared the debt and was ready to write the game off as a technically superior, but ultimately short-sighted version of Pikmin 1.

Then the Water Wraith happened.

I cannot tell you how wonderful of a turning point the Water Wraith is. Every cave up to that point (discounting backtracking to the first area's harder dungeons) could be handled with just a simple measure of patience, with taking things slowly, step by step, and throwing the right colored Pikmin at the thing they're good at stopping. Water Wraith takes every bit of that away from you, demands you scramble, puts you in the position to make mistakes, has no weaknesses for a majority of its dungeon. This is Pikmin 2 at its best: throwing you into cruel situations where one lapse in attention or assuming that your little guys will be fine will end up with a squad crushed, exploded, or eaten by a jumpscare of a bomb rock or bulbear. Where the first game had you try to figure out how to solve each creature individually, Pikmin 2 is glad to mingle its enemies together, forcing you into incredibly uncomfortable situations to try and keep your most precious fellas alive, cursing the name of the Dirigibug or anything that happens to shoot lightning as they attempt to one-shot your lil' boy army. Bosses take a significant step up, with Man-At-Legs being an especially fantastic upgrade of needing to figure out spacial awareness, positioning, and just how fast your Pikmin can duck into cover to avoid machine gun fire. The midgame of Pikmin 2 is absolutely exhilerating in attempting to expect its cruelty and react.

... and unfortunately the endgame is where Pikmin 2's flaws become most apparent. The caves that you delve into are somewhat randomly generated, with layouts tending to be similar, but a lot of enemy placements and exit placements in those rooms being random. This leads to a lot of scenarios that aren't so much difficult, but unfun, especially if something REAL dangerous like a groink or bulbear spawns directly outside your starting area and leaves you little time to react. I do think the game is significantly more fun not resetting or leaving caves, just trying to do your best with the limited resources you have (I actually managed to beat Submerged Castle on the back of seven total Pikmin remaining, and it was an absolute blast maneuvering that!), but I'll admit it's not the optimal way to play the game compared to resetting. Sitting there watching your 'min get blown over and over again because the blowy man is behind a wall you need to break while a snitchbug takes swipes every so often is hardly a fun time, and these kinds of scenarios are abundant the further you get into Pikmin 2. Add in things like bomb hitboxes extending through walls with no real indication, cutscenes for items interrupting gameplay, and treasures sometimes glitching out if at a bad angle, and Pikmin 2 ends up an experience as unintentionally frustrating as it is intentionally.

Overall, Pikmin 2 is my favored Pikmin game of the Gamecube duology. It's a wildly inconsistent game, but its peaks are utterly fantastic, its writing some of the best on the system even though it's tucked away in its own little section, and the moments it creates as you barely make it through a tough challenge or scenario are legendary. I will never forget sending my army of Pikmin to gank the Empress Bulblax while the President of Hotocate Freight personally punched out an army of her spawn with his bare hands until they could all mob her face and guarantee a win, or slowly tricking Dweevils into getting a stack up disc out of the water because I lost all my Blue Pikmin. It is not the ideal sequel to its original game, and has to sacrifice a lot to make its own fun, but what it does uniquely it does superbly, and there's a stretch of about eight hours of game in here that's utterly incredible. The other surrounding eight hour chunks on either side are still pretty good, too, just with their very obvious drawbacks!

Olimar should not dump his wife for a cool marble, though. That's weird, Olimar.