This is one of the all-time greats, but god, I have. So many questions. About their design choices.

First of all, I just want to say, god, I miss all the product placement in the Switch version. I think that's a big reason why this isn't getting a 5 from me. It just added so much flavor and flair to the world and the game to see what ancient artifact you plucked out to sell on Planet Hocotate that is something we use in our daily lives.

As for the rest. It's a great game! Great music, and it expands on the original game in a lot of great ways. The caves are such a great idea, adding so much more depth (HEH) to the world and giving you so many more places to explore. It allows more bosses without overly cluttering the world, and allows tight level design in each area while giving a pretty neat roguelite, procedurally generated dungeon crawler.

However, there are some elements of the caves that... don't feel great. In later caves there will be hazards that fall from the sky. Some when you're alone, some when you have Pikmin, and some when you move treasures. Sometimes this will manifest in 3 bomb rocks or 3 Volatile Dweevils trapping you in a corner of a small room and blowing you to hell. Or boulders will just drop all over you and absolutely ruin your day. It's offset by the fact that caves save at the beginning of each floor, but it still doesn't feel fun. Were it not for progress saving, a lot of these later caves would be absolutely miserable. It's a really neat idea and great core gameplay loop that is just sort of marred by this messiness.

Not to mention that there are some cave floors where the best option is to go up to enemies and punch them to death with your captains isn't fun. It doesn't feel like satisfying. I understand I can use Pikmin and it'll take far less time, but the risk-reward isn't there. Why risk a bunch of my little guys and need to spend a day or two building up my numbers again when I can spend 10 minutes slowly punching stuff to death after I get the combat upgrade?

Combining that with the massive nerf to swarming and the sheer strength of Purples, to the fact that they're the best to use in all but a few situations, and it's a very messy game. A messy game I LOVE, but a messy game in terms of balance of gameplay.

At least the Pikmin AI is SO much better and I don't have to worry about them just all flying off a bridge, thank god. That was one of the roughest parts of 1.

It's also a very lovely game, the areas are all remixes of the areas from 1, save for the first one, and the way they recontextualize these old locations in a new way, with new landing sites, new terrain, and new enemies, through the passage of time since returning to Hocotate and coming back is fantastic, and I think was the best choice they could've made! The way they're all themed to seasons rules.

Also, the way the music changes instruments depending on the captain you're currently controlling? What a brilliant and fun idea that gives some variety as you swap between captains to get stuff done during the day.

Although purples are overpowered, I do like what they and white Pikmin add to the game overall! With the basics of fire, water, and electricity (finally added in this game, lol), extra carrying strength and really fast speed + digging are cool extras!

It's just a wonderful game with wonderful creatures, a wonderful gameplay loop, and some fantastic additions. Even for its problems, it's still an incredible Pikmin game, and even though I was too bad to beat it as a kid, I'm happy I finally was able to go the distance.

A farming sim DLC of one of my favorite games in recent history? Sign me up!

I was so excited, and, sadly... this didn't really live up to my hopes. It's a neat concept: John and Sam, in an alternate universe, come to an old, rundown town called Octopia, and work together to build it up to what it can truly be. Fan favorites like William and the Daniels, Alva and Isabel, and more show up and make the town a lively place. There's a big focus on gathering ingredients and recipe to make delicious meals, which you can share with your neighbors and visitors.

To be fair, I did enjoy both the mining minigame and the fishing minigame, and I really enjoyed some of the little scenes with William and the Daniels, Alva and Isabel, and Mung and his sons. There's a lot of really sweet, charming writing here given that this is an alternate world where everything is nice and peaceful, and I really enjoyed getting to see these characters again.

There's a lot of neat trappings here, but overall it just kind of... falls short.

There's a part early on where you have to make curry, but curry involves chicken. Where do you get chicken? Well, you have to buy a chicken coop. Only then do you unlock the ability to buy chicken at the shop in town. I only ended up doing this around day 40 or so because I had looked it up and I had a surplus of salt (money) to do so. Early game, money is tight, and I didn't want to buy a chicken coop because I imagined I'd also have to buy a chicken (not true, you can just adopt one on your farm) and feed, all while managing growing crops and fishing with a low money supply. I think some light signposting towards that would make things a lot easier to help move along, especially since making curry IS the opening to unlocking more construction, characters, and visits. It might just be me, but it feels like a strange oversight.

The other rough part is that the story and visitors are ploddingly slow. I was surprised there was real story at all (and what there was, I mostly liked!), but it crawls along at a snail's pace, where even after completing all my construction and all the major quests for the people in town, I still had so many days before it just kind of, unceremoniously reached the end of the story? It felt really strange to me. It just hit out of nowhere and then it was done.

Every so often, visitors, well, visit Octopia. You can see who's visiting when you press start and when you check the map to see who might be where, but at a certain point they visit... very slowly. I had a character who wanted a certain dish, but I didn't have the ingredients, couldn't get them and make the dish in time that day, and they didn't show up again for 15-20 days. That just. Doesn't feel great. Now that I'm in the post game, I'm just feeding animals, watering crops, and gathering crops and sleeping immediately to try and get to the next visitors, who are coming every 3-5 days. I'm very close to 100%ing the DLC, but I just think I'm going to stop because it feels like a waste and lack of respect for my time. I'm not saying I need them all one after the other day after day after day, but they definitely needed to show up more often to make Octopia not only feel thriving as a town and tourist destination, but to make me WANT to keep coming back for more as Octopia the DLC.

Also, I don't know what the patch did, but on Switch, the game runs kind of abysmally now. Every 20-25 seconds, the game will just hitch and freeze for a second or so, which really sucks not just because it makes fishing kind of a crapshoot, but also, it's just, terrible performance in every way. Eastward ran pretty flawlessly for me when I played it on Switch last year, so it suddenly performing very poorly is strange. I had a bug where, while catching a fish, the game ticked over to 20:00 (at which point you go back home for dinner and to go to bed), but I also remained in the fishing minigame, with the sounds and everything. I would automatically get pushed out of the eating/cooking menu, and since I couldn't see the fish, I couldn't catch it, so I had to hard quit out of the game and THEN reset the switch because my switch started lagging. As a result I lost a day's worth of progress (which might not sound like a lot, but given a lot of crop gathering, the mining minigame, crop buying and planting... it sucked to lose all of that, and it almost made me just want to quit. Were it not for it automatically saving each night, I definitely would've.

I also had numerous crashes at random times, while fishing, at the farm, it just felt very weird and it makes me wonder, given it's been over a month since the DLC released, if they even realized the issues that suddenly popped up on the Switch.

I really, REALLY wanted to like Octopia. Maybe I'm being a little lenient with my rating, but I do love Eastward a lot, and there are parts of this DLC I like, but it just... doesn't feel well designed in parts, in my opinion, and the technical issues really drag it down. For the price, I would recommend checking it out (It's $4.99, I think?) and seeing if you vibe with it more, and I definitely got my money's worth of it, but I think I'm gonna stop just shy of 100%ing it and move on.