i came into this for the first time after 9 years thinking "man this's a solid 8/10!" i left it thinking "why did i ever think this was particularly great, let alone better than pikmin 1?"

this run was spurred in part by a conversation i had with someone else in the comments on this site, and in part because i really wanted to get to pikmin 3 but didn't wanna skip an entry. now i wish i had just skipped it and kept the happier memories from when i played it as a kid.

the first part of the game is pretty alright, just being a lesser pikmin 1 but still being solid because of what it's based on. the caves in the early to midgame are tolerable, too, since they're short and quick. it also helps give the game a little more direction, as the lack of stakes and the fairly weak premise give the player little motivation on their own.

i'll take a quick detour to go over caves. i think plenty of people have probably said this before, but the cave design often discourages multitasking and come across as lazy due to them being mostly created through rng. you're given two captains at once - perfect for multitasking! - but in any given cave there are often traps and enemies everywhere that mean you can't leave your captains anywhere but back at the ship whenever you want to "multitask". otherwise, you risk losing half of your platoon. it's just not a great time.

anyway, i'd say the game peaks in quality around the perplexing pool. the overworld is challenging but not ridiculous, and the caves are some of the better ones in the game.

however, it's when you finally relieve yourself of debt that the game takes a nosedive in quality and enjoyability. not only is the motivation for your collectathon dashed in a single cutscene, but you're now given an unnecessarily enemy-filled map with the worst caves in the game. if you don't already know which cave louie was in, you'll have to go through the absolute worst caves in the game for a process of elimination. long, boring, and full of unbalanced enemies or traps, these things were the bane of my run and cut my sessions short very quickly.

this would all be easily forgiven if the game allowed the collectathon to become optional after the first part of its runtime. however, to get the ending you need to get every single item from every single cave and overworld map. not only is this painstaking, but it also takes away from the open-ended nature the game seemed to take in its attempts to expand upon the first one. you can't just pick and choose high-value items to pay off your debt and then move onto the louie rescue. with pikmin 2 being significantly longer than 1, this becomes a lot more painful for casual players who wouldn't normally be completionists. no, 100% is an inevitability in pikmin 2, and it sucks.

i have a fair bit more to say about this game but i'm not in the mood to make another neo twewy tier review on it. the general story, atmosphere, stakes, and premise of this game are incredibly weak without even having to compare to pikmin 1, and as a sequel it does next to nothing to justify itself. its positives are almost entirely based on the fact that it's a mechanically improved version of pikmin 1 with reused maps.

i think this rating is pretty fair for the experience i had as well as for what i described in the above block. the game was pretty good for the first part and turned shitty in the second, had a solid base and was certainly functional. i didn't think it was good, but i don't think that it was bad or straight up unlikeable. i'd guess that people who think "more content = better" would get a lot out of this game, as would people who prefer saccharine nintendo comedy and wit to more hands-off atmospheric entries. it's definitely not a game for me. as a kid i trusted reputations deeply when judging things and thought more content was always good, which makes it pretty unsurprising why i had such a shitty time coming back to this game.

i'm hoping pikmin 3 is gonna be a better time than this one. i'd be sad to find out pikmin 1 could be the only one of the games i really like, as i thought once upon a time that this was a very me-core series. i'd really like to not have to deal with another animal crossing situation, but i guess we'll see.

“These people have the entire world as their audience, and yet they sit there writing up stuff that nobody can really understand.”

I've never cared much for VNs. Never had the attention span for them, never much cared for any of their aesthetic sensibilities, never liked their pretentious purple prose. To be frank, the only reason I ever ran this was so I could play Flower Sun and Rain, which seems infinitely more interesting to me. So, for the first full on VN I've finished (assuming you don't count the AA trilogy and Snatcher), what did I think?

Uh, it was okay.
In some ways my expectations were more than met, in some ways they were pretty thoroughly dashed. The aesthetics kinda wore off on me really quickly, I grew to not care much for the weird background thingies and the odd presentation, and I never really liked the music, which I've seen a bunch of people soy about, but for the most part I definitely enjoyed the experience. Suda's definitely great when it comes to writing engaging dialogue and interesting if fairly one note characters, and his takedown of the farce that is police and it's role to protect the status quo and the nature of information certainly are pointed and engaging, but I don't know how much he can do beyond that. Some of the exploration segments in this sure are fucking tedious, like the particularly bad sections in parade or the ending or every placebo chapter, the man can't make a good puzzle to save his life, and he sure is fond of his exposition dumps. They're some of the better exposition dumps I've seen, for what it's worth, but they definitely still are that. Also, he seems incapable of writing a character that doesn't fit into the "lovable asshole" archetype. Not a criticism, so much as an observation.

On the transmitter, the game starts out pretty fucking weak, it took me something like a few weeks to even muster up the attention to get through spectrum, but from that point on it's thoroughly engaging, parade in particular worked incredibly as a standalone piece, and kamuidrone and lifecut weren't far behind, but I had minor issues with both that held them back (A weak resolution and massive infodumps, respectively). Placebo remained consistently "good", Tokio certainly is a great protagonist but it's really monotinous looking through the same email screen, going to the same couple areas, checking Red over and over again. Ending was cool, though!

Anyway, yeah, Silver Case? More like Silver Okay-se. I don't regret reading it, it was cool. Tokio entering a chatroom and then immediately being threatened to be doxxed is the most accurate portrayal of internet chatrooms I've seen in any media. Here's to hoping FSR makes me do the soyface!