genuinely unsure of how to start this review. i have a lot to say about this game. none of it is positive. if this is a game that you like, a game that brings you joy, i do not wish to rob you of that. however, this game has, without hyperbole, taken the spot of worst game of all time for me. if you knee-jerk think that's an outlandish claim, that's fine. but i am not saying this lightly or for effect. this game is genuinely the worst thing i've ever played.
let's start with the gameplay. how can this game be so bad if it's pikmin 1, a game i enjoyed greatly, but with more content? the answer is that the content is either recycled from pikmin 1 or just outright bad. the overworlds feel like all the overworlds from pikmin 1 but just less interesting. valley of repose is just the impact site from pikmin 1 but with snow and a bridge. perplexing pool is almost the exact same map as distant spring. there's nothing interesting going on here, and their design feels like an afterthought. awakening wood is just the forest of hope, but less interesting because you already know what the forest of hope has in store. there's no time limit either, so all your actions have no urgency to them. several times while doing overworld things, i had the thought "okay whatever i don't have to be time efficient because i can take as long as i want". pikmin 1's time limit was by no means strict, but it existed. it added some level of depth to the gameplay. the only thing that's added to these levels are caves.
let's now talk about caves. i think caves, in theory, are a very cool idea with a lot of promise. i also think that this game made the absolute worst possible execution of them. they're randomly generated so there's no care put into the design of each floor of a cave to ensure that enemy layouts make sense or that you are given an adequate experience. incredibly often i would run into issues with caves where either an enemy would spawn somewhere they shouldn't and, as a result, either completely fall off the map or just outright be impossible to attack because they clipped through the walls of the level.
i cannot overstate how poorly designed these levels are when they're randomly generated. barriers will exist to block off coves with nothing. depending on your luck, 4-5 enemies can spawn in the same aggro range or you can get them all spaced out like they're social distancing. let's not forget that sometimes, oh joy, obstacles just fall on you with little warning. be careful, this boulder's going to fall on you and you have only seconds to react. what's that? you didn't expect a giant enemy to fall on you out of nowhere and kill a large portion of your pikmin? that's a shame! there's simply no consistency, no care, no design philosophy that exists in these levels. they are garbage, and the fact that they are mandatory for a complete playthrough is insane. caves are, at best, tedious, and at worst, trial-and-error spontaneous frustration generators.
so, in execution, when i tackled caves, i ran into the difficulty of keeping pikmin alive. pikmin AI in this is inexplicably worse than it ever was in pikmin 1. i can fully attribute this to the fact that pikmin 1 is less demanding and therefore gave me less opportunities to see the AI completely fail, but that changes nothing for the end result. pikmin just do not listen to you. they will attack enemies even when you tell them not to. you can whistle them, but sometimes they just won't come for absolutely no good reason. but no! it's your fault when they die, the game insists. they're cute, and you can't let cute things die, right? that sad sound that they make when a developer's asshole trap that they set in the cave that you could have literally never predicted kills them is because of you, the player. right?
i'm not exaggerating when i say that i think there's something evil and insidious about this game in that it constantly reminds you of how cute and fragile and harmless the pikmin are, then repeatedly kills them in ways you could literally never prepare for and always places the blame at your feet. it reminds me of the flash game "Can Your Pet", which i do not recommend checking out if you feel any level of compassion to animals. how is it my fault when, with no warning, my pikmin die because of their own stupidity or unwillingness to listen to me or from a trap that i could never have anticipated or from an enemy spawning that i could not have predicted or from them being flung out of bounds from poor level design or... the list goes on.
the worst thing this game does is that it convinces me that pikmin, much like the panda, deserve to go extinct. the beauty of pikmin 1 is that you were only using the pikmin to survive. the ending implies that the pikmin grew as a species and became both capable and willing to fight for their survival without olimar. olimar and the pikmin helped each other out of their own demise. it's beautiful and understated. pikmin 2 undoes that completely by making them still as subservient and stupid as ever.
what right to life does a species have if it cannot maintain itself without outside interference? in 2, pikmin still can't procreate without one of the captains' assistance, they still will engage with hazards that will kill them, even if they've already witnessed their own kind die to said hazard, they'll suicidally charge an enemy... after a certain point, i realized that the only reason you're supposed to want to keep them alive is because they're cute. they're adorable, they sing when they walk with you, but also they are incapable of self-preservation. at a certain point, i can't feel any empathy for the pikmin when they die when, even with the outside help of a far more intelligent species, they still manage to kill themselves time and time again. the beauty of pikmin 1 is undone. i legitimately like pikmin 1 less now. pikmin 2's widespread badness actively undoes positive memories i had of its predecessor.
i guess the last point i'll touch on is that the story is just awful, and, again, evil. instead of fighting for survival, olimar and louie go to the pikmin planet for money. they disrupt an entire ecosystem for money. capitalism poisons everything, even our innocent video game narratives about cute babylike plant creatures. i am not sympathetic at all to olimar when he causes several hundreds of creatures to die for no reason than "let's collect a pencil sharpener for money". i think it's evil of him to do that. i'm not reading too much into this, am i? you can literally kill a bulbmin parent and steal its children for labor and eventually abandon them or change them into your own slave labor. at least in pikmin 1, you can make the argument that all of it was for survival. here, i root for the predators. kill the pikmin, they don't deserve life if they cannot preserve it. defeat olimar, he's a poacher but framed heroically. survive against the game. i root for the antagonists of this game, but not to the game's intention.
nothing about this works for me. the gameplay of this game brought me to new levels of anger and hate that i did not think possible of me. the story has an awful moral ("poaching is okay and epic if it's for money and also you should prioritize the lives of cute organisms that cannot self-sustain instead of ones that serve a function to their ecosystem"), and it actively ruins a game that i found endearing and heartwarming in pikmin 1. i said this at the beginning, but i'll repeat myself again: i do not wish to take the importance or joy that this game imparts on others. i wrote this to explain myself and clearly detail why this game now takes the spot of worst game i have ever played.
edit as of 6/25/2023: good news, pikmin 2 stans. this is now only my second least favorite game ever. sonic heroes has dethroned it. hurray.
let's start with the gameplay. how can this game be so bad if it's pikmin 1, a game i enjoyed greatly, but with more content? the answer is that the content is either recycled from pikmin 1 or just outright bad. the overworlds feel like all the overworlds from pikmin 1 but just less interesting. valley of repose is just the impact site from pikmin 1 but with snow and a bridge. perplexing pool is almost the exact same map as distant spring. there's nothing interesting going on here, and their design feels like an afterthought. awakening wood is just the forest of hope, but less interesting because you already know what the forest of hope has in store. there's no time limit either, so all your actions have no urgency to them. several times while doing overworld things, i had the thought "okay whatever i don't have to be time efficient because i can take as long as i want". pikmin 1's time limit was by no means strict, but it existed. it added some level of depth to the gameplay. the only thing that's added to these levels are caves.
let's now talk about caves. i think caves, in theory, are a very cool idea with a lot of promise. i also think that this game made the absolute worst possible execution of them. they're randomly generated so there's no care put into the design of each floor of a cave to ensure that enemy layouts make sense or that you are given an adequate experience. incredibly often i would run into issues with caves where either an enemy would spawn somewhere they shouldn't and, as a result, either completely fall off the map or just outright be impossible to attack because they clipped through the walls of the level.
i cannot overstate how poorly designed these levels are when they're randomly generated. barriers will exist to block off coves with nothing. depending on your luck, 4-5 enemies can spawn in the same aggro range or you can get them all spaced out like they're social distancing. let's not forget that sometimes, oh joy, obstacles just fall on you with little warning. be careful, this boulder's going to fall on you and you have only seconds to react. what's that? you didn't expect a giant enemy to fall on you out of nowhere and kill a large portion of your pikmin? that's a shame! there's simply no consistency, no care, no design philosophy that exists in these levels. they are garbage, and the fact that they are mandatory for a complete playthrough is insane. caves are, at best, tedious, and at worst, trial-and-error spontaneous frustration generators.
so, in execution, when i tackled caves, i ran into the difficulty of keeping pikmin alive. pikmin AI in this is inexplicably worse than it ever was in pikmin 1. i can fully attribute this to the fact that pikmin 1 is less demanding and therefore gave me less opportunities to see the AI completely fail, but that changes nothing for the end result. pikmin just do not listen to you. they will attack enemies even when you tell them not to. you can whistle them, but sometimes they just won't come for absolutely no good reason. but no! it's your fault when they die, the game insists. they're cute, and you can't let cute things die, right? that sad sound that they make when a developer's asshole trap that they set in the cave that you could have literally never predicted kills them is because of you, the player. right?
i'm not exaggerating when i say that i think there's something evil and insidious about this game in that it constantly reminds you of how cute and fragile and harmless the pikmin are, then repeatedly kills them in ways you could literally never prepare for and always places the blame at your feet. it reminds me of the flash game "Can Your Pet", which i do not recommend checking out if you feel any level of compassion to animals. how is it my fault when, with no warning, my pikmin die because of their own stupidity or unwillingness to listen to me or from a trap that i could never have anticipated or from an enemy spawning that i could not have predicted or from them being flung out of bounds from poor level design or... the list goes on.
the worst thing this game does is that it convinces me that pikmin, much like the panda, deserve to go extinct. the beauty of pikmin 1 is that you were only using the pikmin to survive. the ending implies that the pikmin grew as a species and became both capable and willing to fight for their survival without olimar. olimar and the pikmin helped each other out of their own demise. it's beautiful and understated. pikmin 2 undoes that completely by making them still as subservient and stupid as ever.
what right to life does a species have if it cannot maintain itself without outside interference? in 2, pikmin still can't procreate without one of the captains' assistance, they still will engage with hazards that will kill them, even if they've already witnessed their own kind die to said hazard, they'll suicidally charge an enemy... after a certain point, i realized that the only reason you're supposed to want to keep them alive is because they're cute. they're adorable, they sing when they walk with you, but also they are incapable of self-preservation. at a certain point, i can't feel any empathy for the pikmin when they die when, even with the outside help of a far more intelligent species, they still manage to kill themselves time and time again. the beauty of pikmin 1 is undone. i legitimately like pikmin 1 less now. pikmin 2's widespread badness actively undoes positive memories i had of its predecessor.
i guess the last point i'll touch on is that the story is just awful, and, again, evil. instead of fighting for survival, olimar and louie go to the pikmin planet for money. they disrupt an entire ecosystem for money. capitalism poisons everything, even our innocent video game narratives about cute babylike plant creatures. i am not sympathetic at all to olimar when he causes several hundreds of creatures to die for no reason than "let's collect a pencil sharpener for money". i think it's evil of him to do that. i'm not reading too much into this, am i? you can literally kill a bulbmin parent and steal its children for labor and eventually abandon them or change them into your own slave labor. at least in pikmin 1, you can make the argument that all of it was for survival. here, i root for the predators. kill the pikmin, they don't deserve life if they cannot preserve it. defeat olimar, he's a poacher but framed heroically. survive against the game. i root for the antagonists of this game, but not to the game's intention.
nothing about this works for me. the gameplay of this game brought me to new levels of anger and hate that i did not think possible of me. the story has an awful moral ("poaching is okay and epic if it's for money and also you should prioritize the lives of cute organisms that cannot self-sustain instead of ones that serve a function to their ecosystem"), and it actively ruins a game that i found endearing and heartwarming in pikmin 1. i said this at the beginning, but i'll repeat myself again: i do not wish to take the importance or joy that this game imparts on others. i wrote this to explain myself and clearly detail why this game now takes the spot of worst game i have ever played.
edit as of 6/25/2023: good news, pikmin 2 stans. this is now only my second least favorite game ever. sonic heroes has dethroned it. hurray.
14 Comments
cope harder lmoa
who are you i'm from ancient grece
You highlight a lot of aspects about Pikmin 2 that very much hampers my enjoyment of the game (pseudorandom caves, complete tonal shift, no day limit, no time restriction in caves - as well as captains being too competent in terms of gameplay), but one thing I can't agree with is on Pikmin 2's morality.
Let's recap. The reason Hocotate Freight enters as much peril as they are in at the beginning of the game is because the president resorted to borrowing money from a loanshark; Olimar is forced to return to the planet that he fought for his life on for the sake of repaying that debt that he was never even responsible for; the Hocotate ship gives inflated, clearly exaggerated sales pitches of literally useless junk like bottle caps to give them monetary and commercial value; even Olimar is tired of both the company and his family's demand for money and consumerism; and Louie and his gluttony is only framed as antagonistic in opposition to the greed that Hocotate Freight exhibits.
Sure, maybe this might not be explicitly enough stated for you, and even I dislike this direction that they took - especially since Hey! Pikmin did take Pikmin 2 at face value in terms of enabling Olimar's scavenging (even if handwaved by insisting that he needed them for Sparklium to repair his ship).
But there is a reason I think Olimar, with his growing lust for treasure overtaking his inquisitive spirit, was retired as series protagonist in Pikmin 3, with him and Louie being shown in a less sympathetic light compared to the Koppai trio, who are themselves not saints either, but are at least pursuing their mission in the name of saving a species and an entire planet's ecosystem - as much as it may be up for debate as to whether that Greater Good warrants throwing another species into the face of danger.
Had the trio not been on the planet to save him, Olimar would have withered away, his mission and journeys all in vain, stranded with no way back home, forced into eternal slumber for his sin of greed enacting karma on him.
To reiterate, I don't like Pikmin 2 - I think every single aspect of it aside from its speedrunning potential is inferior to the original game for diluting its elegance in simplicity, and for taking the series in a more cynical tone than the original. I even have difficulty coming to terms with Pikmin 3, although what I've played of it is some of the best of the series, because of the narrative problems it inherits from 2 to some extent, as well as not living up to the tone of the original despite its immaculate presentation.
And perhaps Pikmin is not satire, or at least, not open-faced satire - but it absolutely does not venerate the morals that you think it does.
Let's recap. The reason Hocotate Freight enters as much peril as they are in at the beginning of the game is because the president resorted to borrowing money from a loanshark; Olimar is forced to return to the planet that he fought for his life on for the sake of repaying that debt that he was never even responsible for; the Hocotate ship gives inflated, clearly exaggerated sales pitches of literally useless junk like bottle caps to give them monetary and commercial value; even Olimar is tired of both the company and his family's demand for money and consumerism; and Louie and his gluttony is only framed as antagonistic in opposition to the greed that Hocotate Freight exhibits.
Sure, maybe this might not be explicitly enough stated for you, and even I dislike this direction that they took - especially since Hey! Pikmin did take Pikmin 2 at face value in terms of enabling Olimar's scavenging (even if handwaved by insisting that he needed them for Sparklium to repair his ship).
But there is a reason I think Olimar, with his growing lust for treasure overtaking his inquisitive spirit, was retired as series protagonist in Pikmin 3, with him and Louie being shown in a less sympathetic light compared to the Koppai trio, who are themselves not saints either, but are at least pursuing their mission in the name of saving a species and an entire planet's ecosystem - as much as it may be up for debate as to whether that Greater Good warrants throwing another species into the face of danger.
Had the trio not been on the planet to save him, Olimar would have withered away, his mission and journeys all in vain, stranded with no way back home, forced into eternal slumber for his sin of greed enacting karma on him.
To reiterate, I don't like Pikmin 2 - I think every single aspect of it aside from its speedrunning potential is inferior to the original game for diluting its elegance in simplicity, and for taking the series in a more cynical tone than the original. I even have difficulty coming to terms with Pikmin 3, although what I've played of it is some of the best of the series, because of the narrative problems it inherits from 2 to some extent, as well as not living up to the tone of the original despite its immaculate presentation.
And perhaps Pikmin is not satire, or at least, not open-faced satire - but it absolutely does not venerate the morals that you think it does.
For months I have wished to not comment on my opinions of what you perceived from the game, yet I have refrained from commenting on my hatred for your comments that are legitimately incorrect, or ignorantly missing the point. I will try my best to stop thinking about what you said, and I simply cannot even grow the third eye needed to comprehend your strange thoughts.
ok
I have never played Pikmin 2.
I just want to comment that lazed's reply is hilarious
I just want to comment that lazed's reply is hilarious
how are you real
i love having the power to make people mad just by typing things on the internet
remember: don't be weird, don't be mean, you're on my computer screen. it's my world, it's my life, i'm a pikmin 2, please be nice.
did you make a burner account just to say that
aint mad never played the game im just impressed tbh
unreal
i can't say i even come close to understanding where the poaching thing came from but everything else you said was the realest shit i've ever heard
vlntnegrl
3 years ago