Recently, it has occurred to me that the harshest thing that could be said about any sequel is that it makes you "appreciate the original more". What initially may seem like a positive comment is anything but. In actuality, such a statement is essentially saying "This game took an imperfect original and failed to improve upon it so spectacularly that I'm left wondering if the flaws of the first one are really so problematic after all".

Anyways, Pikmin 2

Chapter 1 - Earth: The Final Frontier

The original Pikmin game was fairly coy about the possibility of this game taking place in our very own backyard, perhaps after some sort of unnamed armaggedon. The sequel, on the other hand, hardly waits 20 minutes to smack you across the face with mustard lids and toy gundams. Such a setting would be fine, cute even, if it ever actually amounted to anything. At risk of getting ahead of myself, caves (which I'll get into more later) are given a vague "Earth stuff" wallpaper, but it's not like they're actual locations, just a mish mash of junk. They more closely resemble those AI-generated images that look like a hoarder's bedroom at first glance, but if you try to focus on any details your brain will start dry heaving and saying hail marys. Above ground is given token dandelions, though I hardly remember the forest having so many electrified gates and toxin-spewing vents. Maybe that's more common in Japan.

Chapter 2 - Hocotate Pawn

So, what is it that possesses the blue-collar hero Olimar to return to the site of his 30-day nightmare? Well, MONEY, of course! The plot is novel, as Olimar and his junior Louie are sent back to Earth in order to scrounge up enough money to save their (presumably non-union) jobs. Hazard pay is, I imagine, off the table. That being said, "novel" feels like such a disappointing step back from Pikmin 1. For any of its faults, the first game shined in mood. Olimar was in a genuine life-or-death struggle, completely alone on an alien planet. There was a constant danger and he clearly knew it. Now, it's Olimar and his jackass friend playing junior Bargain Hunt. There is nothing pressing about the situation except the occasional nagging email from their boss. The development of his situation was funny, especially by the time he was becoming king of the woodland creatures, but it once again undercuts any sense of isolation.

Chapter 3 - All the Time in the World

The time limit in Pikmin 1 was at once the bane of my existence, and its most essential feature. I was constantly fearful of inefficiency and working too slow, but it was a healthy kind of anxiety. Like a low heat stove, there was a constant simmering tension that merely asks you to avoid pissing around. Now, there is absolutely no urgency. Despite the plot explicitly concerning repaying late debt, the boss will presumably indefinitely hide out from the knee-breaking loan sharks until you're good and ready to proceed, Olimar and Louie free to spend all the time in the world prancing through flowers and singing hymns. Bizarrely, the game mysteriously retains the day-night cycle. Since there is no day limit, it's just an excuse for a recap of stats from the last arbitrary period of time and a chance for the boss to guilt trip you with the cigarette butts and half-eaten cheesecake he had to scrounge out of the trash for dinner. Previously, the end of a day was a further tick on the doomsday clock, that much less time to save your life; now, it feels more like that screen where the Wii would tell you to take a break and go outside.

Chapter 4 - The Louie Factor

Another new feature is of course the presence of Olimar's "he's trying his best" sidekick, Louie. Aside from the aforementioned total destruction of the atmosphere this creates, it does allow for some interesting gameplay opportunities, as Pikmin can now be set to two tasks at the same time - occasionally, at least. Since there's absolutely no automation, the only tasks you can set a captain to supervise passively is things that take a long time for the Pikmin to do, like destroying walls. That's not nothing of course; it's nice to not have to stare deadeyed as your Pikmin dash their brains out against a stone wall for 7 hours in a prolonged metaphor for their entire existence. Still, it would be nice to even have some basic captain commands (ex. "Return to the Onion with your Pikmin", "Go here on the map by the safest possible route", "Collect pellets near you"). Having two captains also allows for you to divvy up your Pikmin easier - still not as neatly as would be ideal, but definitely an improvement. Louie in specific is an interesting character, coming across less like Olimar Jr. and more like some sort of savage animal who's simply too stupid to be scary. He doesn't think about anything but food (which seems to rub off on Olimar somewhat), culminating in Louie's journal, an entire compendium built around one joke. I can't imagine reading the entire thing when it is, again, one joke, but the fact they put that much effort into it honestly does make the joke a lot funnier. To add to Louie's charming weirdness is the unexplained implication that he tries to kill Olimar, something which absolutely did make me laugh.

Chapter 5 - It's a Duracell World

Populating Olimar's new recurring vacation destination is a number of treasures for you to collect. These are Pikmin 2's equivalent to the ship parts in the previous game. There is absolutely a funny novelty to the idea of junk scavenged out of a dirty hole being considered treasure, as Olimar proudly displays rotten pickle chips and broken Hot Wheels next to Hocotate's Mona Lisa. The issue with this feature is a simple one: Pikmin 1 featured a total of 30 treasures to collect. Pikmin 2, a marginally longer game, features over 200. Despite this overwhelming amount of junk, each of which is worth a handful of pennies and a Subway coupon, the game still requires you to one-by-one carry them back to your ship for a little celebratory cutscene. Then, all my Pikmin gather around for a jovial applause and the Evangelion "Congratulations" scene because I brought back a feather worth literally 10 coins (reminder that the total debt is 10,000). It's impossible not to find it incredibly tedious after a while. There are only so many times you can laugh at the novelty of seeing a screw or a kiwi or one of the four(?!) Duracell batteries they make you collect. The most damning thing I can say is that, after defeating the final boss, I felt absolutely no impulse to collect the remaining treasures, in a game where such an exercise is ostensibly the entire point.

Chapter 6 - Meet the New Pikmin, Same as the Old Pikmin or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Purples

Like that story of James Cameron writing "Alien$" on a whiteboard, the inclusion of more Pikmin is an obvious step forward. Here, we have technically two new members of the Pikmin posse, though it's functionally three. The ability for yellow Pikmin to carry bombs has been removed, a mechanic that will not be missed. Instead, they focus on electricity, opening electric gates and giving electric enemies that fluoride stare when they try to zap 'em. The first fully new addition is the white Pikmin, whose primary function is to open poison gates and fight poison enemies - noticing a pattern here? It's like the whole games been recalibrated around making sure you have different keys for different doors. It could be argued that bombs were that too, but a) it's more explicit now and b) in these games, two keys feels very different from three. Hell, is it four? I don't remember fire gates in Pikmin 1, but that might just be the dementia. Beyond the poison immunity, white Pikmin also damage anything that eats them, something which will be very useful when Pikmin introduces the Divine Wind Pikmin and suiciding your units becomes a viable strategy. Thirdly, they can dig up buried treasures, a contextual "locked door" that seems to only exist to give you the double bird if you thought that "no poison" in a cave meant it was safe to not take whites, you oafish simpleton. Finally, they can carry items faster, an ability that's totally useless, since I don't really see any good reason to carry more than a few white Pikmin; you're not rolling out the White Ranger Recovery Squad to speed haul those Duracells, especially when there's, again, absolutely no urgency in this game. Further exacerbating that is the fact that whites and the secret third Pikmin are both fairly rare and not easy to replace. Ah, yes, that secret third thing: the purple Pikmin. Perhaps akin to Dr. Oppenheimer, I was initially naive to the awesome power I was meddling with. Rest assured, once their true potential dawned on me, I did indeed become death, destroyer of worlds. There's no reason not to roll up with a backing crew of these big boys. After getting cold cocked by a purple Pikmin air barrage, 80 - 90% of enemies fold like wet paper. These chunky fellas not only do gonzo damage, they can also stun enemies. That's not just those they hit, but also nearby enemies, their wife, pet dog, and those who happen to have run an errand in the same postal code. In addition, they seem to have basic homing abilities, so even my Olimar's crosseyed aim is enough to make bulborb pancakes one right after the other. It's not an exaggeration to say the vast majority of enemy encounters are totally trivial if you just bury them in purple Pikmin, including most bosses. Purple Pikmin being limited is not an issue because purple Pikmin simply won't die. If that wasn't enough, they can carry more than any other Pikmin, meaning you don't even need many for treasures.

Chapter 7 - The Earth Defense Force

Enemy variety is one area of improvement here, though the actual quality of the specific enemies is something of a mixed bag. Some, like the Careening Dirigibug or the Decorated Cannon Beetle can add a fun challenge, though become extraordinarily frustrating in the wrong situation. Others, like all the little Dweevils or the Jellyfloats, are not threatening at all, just annoying to deal with. The new bulborb variants are frightening suckers; the halloween-colored guys will pull an "omae wa mou shindeiru" on eight of your Pikmin before you can even react. As far as bosses go, they were unique and fun, though most were made fairly trivial by the purple Pikmin. The final boss, similarly to in the first game, is deeply frustrating to figure out, but once you do, he's a fun challenge. I probably prefer this boss to the first one, as your responses feel more varied, not just repeating the same hit and run until he throws in the towel. Finally, I can't not mention the Waterwraith, my new best friend, who turns into a Looney Tunes character after he loses his rolling pin. Replace his theme with Benny Hill for the same effect.

Chapter 8 - Addressing the Deep, Dark Hole in the Room

Finally, we get to caves, the foggy, wet hole at the center of this game. This is the part where I would normally say "it's a good idea in concept, but the execution leaves something to be desired". The issue, however, is that it's not a good idea in concept. In fact, I struggle to grasp how a team of developers decided the best evolution of a somewhat open world game about exploring and finding items scattered around a nature environment was a series of cramped, linear tunnels devoid of any discovery. Since these are such a major part of the experience and I have so many different things to touch on, this chapter will be broken into subchapters.

Chapter 8.1 - Pikmin's Baby Park

I really can't stress enough how much I hate caves. Let's start with the biggest, most glaring issue - the aforementioned linearity. Most floors are not strictly linear, to be fair, but that just means you're not TECHNICALLY forced to wade down the lane of the swimming pool because you're allowed to explore the hot tub to your heart's content. Every floor is a tiny area, mostly devoid of any puzzles, fun level design, or sense of discovery. They pretty much all boil down to a mix of fighting a bunch of guys (far from the most fun part of Pikmin) and clearing one of the many doors that you hopefully have brought the full rainbow to deal with like you're Captain Planet. Caves are, at first, fine, and by the end of the game, they're a merciless trudge. I feel like Alex DeLarge, having my eyeballs held open and being forced to watch increasingly elongated sequences of the same tunnels with the same enemies (mostly) and the same four kinds of doors until I break. The worst offender is Glutton's Kitchen, in which you "explore" an entire cave's worth of large, blank rooms where a crowd of bulborbs are holding a singles mixer to meet some nice breadbugs. These empty rooms populated by a bunch of basic enemies feel like the Pikmin equivalent of Mario Kart's Baby Park. Thankfully, it's mercifully short. Speaking of length, what starts at a compassionate 6 floors by the end of the game becomes upwards of an eyewatering 15. If you'll recall back to Chapter 1, I also alluded to how the artistic direction of the level design seemed to be "public park or public restroom after a tornado". Maybe I would enjoy it more if these were real environments, but they're not. I just remember bathroom tile texture over haphazard "baths" and randomly placed props, or something meant to resemble a sandbox or play pen if it was, as they say on Chopped, "deconstructed". I concede gameplay should come first, but environmental cohesion should probably be some sort of a factor, no?

Chapter 8.2 - Poison Vents to Nowhere

Much of these caves are procedurally generated, and by god can you tell. It's honestly atrocious. Spawning immediately next to a giant bulborb ready to make pik-kebabs and hazardous traps set up carefully to guard the cave's vast stock of dead ends are just a couple of the many wonders Pikmin 2 will generate regularly, the second one seeming to happen on essentially every floor. What is even the point of putting me through all these rooms if 90% of the dangers will spawn so haphazardly they're entirely irrelevant? The most important button map you need to remember to get through Pikmin 2 is your reset button. Don't like a level? Just reset it, and it'll be entirely different. There was one level where an extremely narrow bridge over a pond spawned off to the side, but after I was forced to reset the level, it spawned obstructing my path every single time. Since I refuse to play the Pikmin Shuffle with 100 little idiots, I just kept resetting until it would get out of my way again. So, we have a system that makes every level feel samey and terribly structured, and said system is easily abused, to boot. To add on to that, apparently some of the cave music is procedurally generated, which explains why some parts sound like cats remixing a soundboard of Weird Al songs.

Chapter 8.3 - The Great Bulborb Spanking Line

The degree to which these caves begin to rely on "fight huge hordes of guys" as their one and only challenge feels like if a movie director decided they'd done enough plot and made the back half of the film a series of disconnected scenes of people bowling. One right after another these dwarf bulborbs line themselves up, and one after another they get the goomba experience from my purple Pikmin air squadron. For most of these enemies, it's not difficult, it's not fun. By the time Cavern of Chaos has 54 bulborbs on one floor, it's hard not to imagine Miyamoto like Peter Venkman running his psychic tests at the beginning of Ghostbusters: "The effect? I'll tell you what the effect is - it's pissing me off!" Except by that point, I don't know if I had the enthusiasm to be pissed off, just totally drained. Who enjoys fighting grunt after grunt after grunt like this?

Chapter 8.4 - Live, Die, Repeat: The Pikmin Killing Zone

The horrible little reality that only dawns with time is how vital that reset button really will be. In every cave, you can bring 100 pikmin max and you're unable to ever go back for more until the cave is completely cleared and all the curtains are washed. With that change, suddenly Pikmin become a precious commodity - the loss of just one can be devastating, in part because the game only gives vague hazard warnings before entering a cave, so you have no idea of the ratio of colors you should bring. Pikmin in combat being stupid, sometimes difficult to control, and sometimes the victim of random game bs wasn't really a huge issue before, but now? Every one is like a hot needle to the brain. I'll reiterate what I said in my review of Sea Salt: you can't give me wild, uncontrollable tools and reasonably expect me to act with a great deal of precision. I can't make a ship in a bottle with a sledgehammer, and I can't thread the needle of mecha-frog artillery strikes without a couple troopers getting blown to kingdom come. Even the basic grunts, as easy as they are, can sometimes get in a lucky shot. Between the level reset and enemy behavior, you just have to keep trying until you get lucky enough to lose next to no one, since you never have any idea what precisely you'll need on the next floor. The most egregious example of all four sections here is a floor that is an entirely straight line, crossing over itself just enough so that the higher points will block your camera on the lower points. Along this straight line is one decorated cannon beetle after another. There had to have been upwards of 20 total, all lined up, technically easy to crush with purples, but with enough of a random factor to screw it up intolerably outside of any control when one of them gamer rages and chucks the 20 blue Pikmin I need into the Great Beyond to meet Pikmin Christ. If I didn't have access to save states through my... Nintendo Gamecube I honestly might have quit the game right there. But that's the thing - in Pikmin 1, there's a button to reset the day when you make too many mistakes. In Pikmin 2, meanwhile, you just have to reset the console for every little slip-up. It feels wrong, like you're cheating, but they clearly expect you to do it. This does not seem really doable without it.

Chapter 9 - The End of Pikvangelion

This turned out larger than I expected, but Pikmin 2 elicited stronger emotions from me than many other games. Honestly, I really did gain a new appreciation for Pikmin 1 through playing it. That's why this game is more saddening than anything else. Not only to see it ruin so much of what made the first game not just good, but especially unique, but to see it being lauded for it. I can't begin to understand the critical response to this game, but its worst crime is making me dread playing the rest of these. Pikmin 4 is supposedly "Pikmin 2 2", which is about as effective at selling me on it as if you told me playing it would lock my fingers in a Saw trap I can only be released from by killing 10,000 breadbugs in the name of Hocotate Freight.