maybe I'm just sour at the moment, but what was the point of this? why did we need to replace the puzzle solving and multitasking of the original with rote lock-and-key style challenges? all I did for hours on end was color matching: blue is water, yellow is electricity, red is fire, white is poison, etc. etc. etc. slowly moving around and disarming traps and then picking off enemies one by one until I could clear a path from the treasure to the ship. totally draining for me past the 10 hour mark especially when it came to the caves.

the real issue here is that pikmin 2 sidesteps many issues with the original instead of attempting legitimate improvements. combat, for example, was originally clunky and imprecise, especially on gamecube (I'm assuming the wii version is better). pikmin 2's solution is to attempt to trivialize it both by supplying the player with purples and adding the ultra-spicy and ultra-bitter sprays. for the latter there's the added annoying process of grinding berries for the sprays, which generally means keeping a leader near the berries waiting around for the pikmin to deal with cobwebs/knock off worms/harvest the fruit; a constant distraction while your other leader is doing the more interesting work. the purples as well add unintended annoyances by being both sluggish and rare, meaning that they die often and you rarely have as many as you would like. these are well-deserved drawbacks, as purples can butcher nearly any standard enemy in the game with no fuss, but losing too many and needing to fall back on your regular troops makes the return to clumsy combat all the more bitter, and it's not like mindlessly massacring hallways of enemies in caves with purples is exactly stimulating either. the day system as well is sidestepped by having the caves exist outside time. these areas totally remove time management for the player and in the process throw a lot of pikmin's natural strategizing out the window in favor of the aforementioned methodical dispersal of all noteworthy obstacles on each floor. some of these elements still exist in the main areas to the game's credit, but given that the levels have been scaled back in complexity from the original and that the day limit has been excised, it feels overly simplified. there were ways to fix this: perhaps make certain key items or enemies only show up periodically for a set of days, pushing savvy players to carefully lay out their day-to-day schedule to catch each event as it comes. that's an approach that has problems of its own, but could still attempt to realize the time management aspects inherent to the original while addressing common complaints.

the aforementioned level design changes are really indicative of the whole package here. the original game's levels felt explorable and flexible in the sense that the tools the player chose to use could vary while also having clear bounds. for example, it's not feasible on a first playthrough to tear down every breakable or bombable wall, so choices must be made via prioritization of objectives; no right answers, and it forces the player to follow their gut instincts and live with potential mistakes. the need for this planning in pikmin 2 is entirely absent. treasures in the overworld tend to be in much more obvious places, and enemy layouts are such that you're expected to clear pathways proactively rather than encouraging risky treasure-carry-paths around sleeping or slow enemies as in the first. as for gates, they all boil down to "match the element to the type of pikmin and then let them rip," and any gate that exists absolutely must be taken down if you're interested in the all treasure ending. presumably the debt repayment is meant to allow some level of player choice in how they pursue objectives, but the 10k coin threshold is so low that there's no impetus to do anything other than wander around and grab whatever is close. the caves just exacerbate the above issues, as the cramped spaces restrict freedom of movement and they are littered with cookie-cutter traps that will send you running back and forth to the starting area with different colored groups of pikmin in your wake. I could go on and on... I got tired of the caves very quickly.

controversial opinion, I know, but this one really seemed mechanically dead to me compared to the first, which already had plenty of issues on its own. perhaps improvements to the pikmin AI or controls could've smoothed things out, but adjustments are so subtle in these areas it's hard for me to give out points. that's not to say there aren't parts I like of course: the world is much more fleshed out in terms of both the denizens of hocotate and olimar's personal journal entries. his mixture of empirically-minded curiosity and existential boredom makes him much richer than he has any right to be, and the letters from home accentuate this, especially with their corner-cutting boss and the just desserts he gets while destitute and on the run from debt collectors. there are also still puzzles here and there I did legitimately enjoy, such as the block-weighing ones that required careful allocation of pikmin to each platform in order to elevate olimar to a higher platform. it's on a strong core, but I think it really misses the mark in trying to improve on the weaknesses of the original. I couldn't even push myself to get all treasures, as I'm writing this after finishing dream den and have no intention of doing much clean-up past that. that final boss was excrutiatingly boring... they really need to put HP indicators on each of his weapons, and killing pikmin with the water cannon off-screen is such a low blow. the fight music was terribly repetitive as well... I could continue on this tangent but I think it's basically clear this game didn't align with me like I was hoping it would after the much more unapproachable first game.