As a follow-up to Pikmin 1, Pikmin 2 makes an incredibly strong statement. And that statement is "we know that we're spreading ourselves thin between score attack-style survivalist gameplay and slow-burn exploration and worldbuilding, so we've destroyed the worldbuilding and put it in a little book and now the game is all about not dying in caves". It's a change that honestly the Pikmin series probably needed to take in one direction or the other, and the game commits to its more arcade-style gameplay fairly well! Without having to worry about navigating a more complex terrain in favor of labyrinths, control of the Pikmin generally feels a lot more consistent, combat challenges can be placed in a player's way methodically and deliberately, and overall the spikes in difficulty and memorable moments are a lot more controlled than in Pikmin 1. Unfortunately, the very limited exploration offered from seeing Pikmin 1 environments change does end up feeling very rote and obligatory by comparison, which makes a lot of the game's opening stretch seem pretty performatory; Pikmin 2 can't be mean enough in its opening to really grit its teeth due to needing to reteach Pikmin 1's mechanics and introduce its new ones. Additionally, returning bosses like the Burrowing Snagret, Beady Long Legs and Emperor Bulblax are shadows of their former selves due to appearing at the end of dungeons where a player can't be assured to have a full squad like Pikmin 1, creating this really unfortunate deflating feeling after clearing the first game. I'd cleared the debt and was ready to write the game off as a technically superior, but ultimately short-sighted version of Pikmin 1.

Then the Water Wraith happened.

I cannot tell you how wonderful of a turning point the Water Wraith is. Every cave up to that point (discounting backtracking to the first area's harder dungeons) could be handled with just a simple measure of patience, with taking things slowly, step by step, and throwing the right colored Pikmin at the thing they're good at stopping. Water Wraith takes every bit of that away from you, demands you scramble, puts you in the position to make mistakes, has no weaknesses for a majority of its dungeon. This is Pikmin 2 at its best: throwing you into cruel situations where one lapse in attention or assuming that your little guys will be fine will end up with a squad crushed, exploded, or eaten by a jumpscare of a bomb rock or bulbear. Where the first game had you try to figure out how to solve each creature individually, Pikmin 2 is glad to mingle its enemies together, forcing you into incredibly uncomfortable situations to try and keep your most precious fellas alive, cursing the name of the Dirigibug or anything that happens to shoot lightning as they attempt to one-shot your lil' boy army. Bosses take a significant step up, with Man-At-Legs being an especially fantastic upgrade of needing to figure out spacial awareness, positioning, and just how fast your Pikmin can duck into cover to avoid machine gun fire. The midgame of Pikmin 2 is absolutely exhilerating in attempting to expect its cruelty and react.

... and unfortunately the endgame is where Pikmin 2's flaws become most apparent. The caves that you delve into are somewhat randomly generated, with layouts tending to be similar, but a lot of enemy placements and exit placements in those rooms being random. This leads to a lot of scenarios that aren't so much difficult, but unfun, especially if something REAL dangerous like a groink or bulbear spawns directly outside your starting area and leaves you little time to react. I do think the game is significantly more fun not resetting or leaving caves, just trying to do your best with the limited resources you have (I actually managed to beat Submerged Castle on the back of seven total Pikmin remaining, and it was an absolute blast maneuvering that!), but I'll admit it's not the optimal way to play the game compared to resetting. Sitting there watching your 'min get blown over and over again because the blowy man is behind a wall you need to break while a snitchbug takes swipes every so often is hardly a fun time, and these kinds of scenarios are abundant the further you get into Pikmin 2. Add in things like bomb hitboxes extending through walls with no real indication, cutscenes for items interrupting gameplay, and treasures sometimes glitching out if at a bad angle, and Pikmin 2 ends up an experience as unintentionally frustrating as it is intentionally.

Overall, Pikmin 2 is my favored Pikmin game of the Gamecube duology. It's a wildly inconsistent game, but its peaks are utterly fantastic, its writing some of the best on the system even though it's tucked away in its own little section, and the moments it creates as you barely make it through a tough challenge or scenario are legendary. I will never forget sending my army of Pikmin to gank the Empress Bulblax while the President of Hotocate Freight personally punched out an army of her spawn with his bare hands until they could all mob her face and guarantee a win, or slowly tricking Dweevils into getting a stack up disc out of the water because I lost all my Blue Pikmin. It is not the ideal sequel to its original game, and has to sacrifice a lot to make its own fun, but what it does uniquely it does superbly, and there's a stretch of about eight hours of game in here that's utterly incredible. The other surrounding eight hour chunks on either side are still pretty good, too, just with their very obvious drawbacks!

Olimar should not dump his wife for a cool marble, though. That's weird, Olimar.

Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is a sequel to the first Metroid Prime, developed on its engine in the span of a bit less than two years, though it apparently had to be rushed in a few areas to make that deadline (This caused it to release right after Halo 2 and right before Half-Life 2 which... ouch). Following up on the first game's success, the studio took inspiration from Metroid Fusion, wanting to make a more challenging and narratively-focused experience. The overall plot is still simple, though: Samus Aran follows an emergency message sent by a Federation ship to a planet named Aether, where she discovers the remainders of a war between the peaceful Luminoth and the Ing, a horde of aliens born from another dimension, Dark Aether. That's not to say that intended focus on storytelling doesn't come across, though. The first few hours of the game see you trying to piece together what happened to this Federation group, and the Luminoth's lore is discovered piece by piece through scanning the environment. This may be a wild guess but I feel Half-Life was an inspiration here, and it worked quite well. The Scan Visor (my beloved) returns in full force, firing on all cylinders to flesh out every part of the world, from the wildlife, to the Aether/Dark Aether war, to the fates of humans and space pirates who set foot on it.

Speaking of the worldbuilding, it's a pretty good improvement. The Luminoth are sort of akin to the Chozo, but them not being a franchise stable makes them feel a lot more fresh, and their struggle against the Ing is well fleshed out and detailed, with some interesting turns. That said, the Ing themselves are kind of boring. By this point in the franchise we already had Phazon and the X as all-devouring unknowable horror villains for the franchise, and a third one really feels a bit redundant. They also are just not that interesting compared to the more Lovecraftian Phazon and the more TheThingian X. The return of Space Pirates feels so token that it's kind of out of place, also. I love those goobers but they just don't really matter here. Same for the Metroid. Something that does matter is the art design- Aether is beautifully alien and every corner of it is a delight to look at, and much more interesting than Prime's lush but kind of standard elemental biomes. It does come at the cost, however, of a more generally drab color palette which fits the style super well but does make rooms feel just a bit more samey. As intriguing as the areas are, the fact that they're all yellowy makes entering a new one much less awe-inspiring than it was in MP1. The soundtrack, while still good, is also nowhere near the perfection of the previous game's. At least, Samus' two new suits both look fucking awesome.

Every time I begin to play a new Metroid(vania), there's one big question in my mind: What kind of world design are we dealing with? Metroidvanias come in all shapes and sizes. Some hold your hand pretty firmly (Zero Mission, Ori and the Blind Forest), some cleverly dump you right where you're going to be going next (Dread) and some just rely on you to figure things out (Super Metroid, Hollow Knight). In this case... none of those, sort of? Echoes is divided in three big areas (with a fourth, transitional one in-between), rather than several smaller ones, and instead of asking you to travel between them regularly to get more upgrades, they essentially act as massive Zelda dungeons, containing all the items you need to beat them. In paper, this is actually quite smart. It keeps the spirit of slowly unfolding a massive puzzle box, while limiting the slog of backtracking. In execution this system works really well when in place, but it is broken twice through the game (once in the second area, once in the third), and that is half of MP2's biggest mistake, in my opinion. If a player is conditioned to think all they need is in the area they're in, they will hesitate to look outside of it, wasting a lot of their time. Once they do, this conditioning will be flipped, and they will mistakenly begin to believe that they need to search the entire world for the next piece of the puzzle, despite the fact that all the ones they need are all in the same place. It happened to me, and I wasted some hours in complete confusion.

The central gimmick of Echoes' level design is the ability to travel to Dark Aether's version of the world. These areas are incredibly hostile, damaging you overtime and siccing very powerful enemies on you on the regular. It's used fairly well, getting some good mileage out of the levels while blocking off parts of them that would be unnecessary to this dark version. However this system compounds the issue I've mentioned already, because throughout the world there are several portals to Dark Aether that will be opened to the player as they gain more power-ups. Logically one would expect them to contain either a progression item or at worst some nice side thing, but in truth they contain invisible keys necessary to access the final boss. Metroid Prime's fetch quest was my least favorite aspect of it, but you could at least collect its Artifacts at any point, as long as they were accessible to you. In this game, they're invisible (Revealed only by a mid/late game item), and you have no reason to ever guess they're there before the fetch quest officially starts. What this means is that if you ever get the idea to backtrack, whether because you think finding the next plot item will require it or just because you want to check out a place you just gained access to, these apparent dead ends are likely going to be wasting a lot of your time. It's kind of baffling, honestly, making the keys not invisible would completely remedy this issue. Still, when the time for the fetch quest came around, I did at least have fun this time. The problem of incredibly annoying and tanky enemies jumping you during backtracking remains, but you do get a lot of traversal items in the late game and they let you breeze through early areas fairly swiftly. Another thing I want to praise is how almost every optional item has some very cool puzzle tied to it, rather than just being given to you.

The general discourse around Echoes is that it's much harder than its predecessor. I admittedly can't fully testify to that- I'm playing using PrimeHack, which gives the game modern PC controls. It's very fun and feels amazing, but I would assume it breaks the difficulty design just a bit (though so would the Wii's control scheme, I think). So take this all with a grain of salt, but I didn't find Echoes much harder than MP1, most of the time. Dark Aether's damage over time is punishing at the beginning but eventually becomes more of an annoyance, and almost all of my game overs were to a certain few infamous bosses. The first, the Boost Guardian, I actually thought was a really fun challenge, very frantic and tense, with no way to avoid damage over time and needing to quickly pile damage onto him after making him vulnerable. The second, the Spider Guardian, is truly awful. Essentially just a really hard Pac-Man boss, it takes a lot of time to get to and a lot of time to beat, and forces you to deal with Morph Ball physics at their absolute worst. There's a lot of Morph Ball fights in this game, actually, three bosses are fought entirely with it and about as many feature it prominently. I don't mind, it's kinda cool, just a shame that the worst one is so challenging. Some other bosses are also quite great, and while a lot of the mini-boss fights end up feeling like filler, others are actually very elaborate and on par with "main" bosses, which is always a pleasure to see (here's my tier list of the bosses btw). Well, when they don't kill you. MP2 is very stingy with save rooms.

As you can see, I had a lot to say about this game. There were very high highs and low lows in my playthrough, but I'm happy to say I did really enjoy it by the end. Definitely going to check out Metroid Prime 3 sooner than later, I've heard a few things about it that I'm quite interested to verify, both good and bad.

whoever stopped atlus from adding a new marketable anime girl that tears the plot in half to this remake is this generations stanislav patrov. in a world where vandalism like catherine full body and final fantasy 7 refund exist, i am so happy to experience this games magic brought out to the potential it had but didn't meet at the time of its release. re-experiencing this game but with the modernisations it needed has been such a joyful ride. in spite of this clearly not being a big budget project, this is a gold standard for rpg remakes and i could not be any happier with this release.

Never have I seen so many paywalls in a videogame depsite having spent over 100 bucks on it. Big mistake, you can't go anywhere without being slammed in the face by a paywall asking you to spend another $15 for a sad gold brick. The incessant restrictions suck out all of the fun and all there it left is a rather mediocre level design made all shiny by the sheer franchise power which, you can't deny, is impressive. But so, so scummy. I'd be interested in a gold edition of the game where you don't have to spend hundreds to have 5 minutes of fun. As it stands, any other lego game is a better option.

It seems the people at Nintendo heard the negative feedback about the second game, because Pikmin 3 is much more like the first game. Caves are gone, the focus on exploration is back, with the objective being collecting fruits, not unlike the ship parts from Pikmin 1, with those fruits being used to produce juice, the substitute for the day limit of the first game, seeing as the captains need juice to survive or else it’s a game over. That’ll hardly be an issue though, because this game is considerably easier than the previous two.

That was the thing that stood out the most to me on my first run, because I was coming right after two games where I had to carefully plan each step or else my precious little guys would end up being mauled by creatures or electrified to death (among many other horrid fates). But in Pikmin 3, the hazards aren’t nearly as deadly and the enemies come nowhere near close to the level of threat of those games, not even the bosses.

However, the game being easier didn’t take away from my enjoyment at all. Having almost a 10 year gap from the previous game, the gameplay got refined to a new level. The areas are much more expansive and delightful to explore, full of setpieces that show how gorgeous the scenery is; the Pikmin AI is more responsive and the combat is more intuitive, thanks to the new lock-in and charge mechanics; and despite the boss battles being much easier, they’re true spectacles, due to how massive some of them are (although some of them can feel a bit too scripted).

But just like the previous two games can be defined by a single aspect, with the first game’s being the atmosphere and Pikmin 2’s being the combat, Pikmin 3’s defining aspect is the multitasking. You can alternate between three captains and use the new “Go Here” feature to send each of them to a different place in the map to do different tasks simultaneously, that way you can optimize your efficiency in getting the collectibles back to the ship.

Mastering multitasking is CRUCIAL in this game’s side mode called Mission Mode, in which the objective is to collect all treasures or defeat all enemies within a time limit. This mode is where I spent more than half of my 75 hours playtime with this game, trying to get platinum medals on all 30 missions, whose timer is ABSURDLY strict for some of them - it forces you to be the master of planning and divide tasks between all three captains while making sure they’re taking the most optimal routes in each map. The Mission Mode is simply the best thing about this game.

Pikmin 3 is also more replayable than the second game due to it being shorter and nowhere near as stressful, but I’d say I like both of them equally. When I want to have some action, I might replay Pikmin 2, but when I want to chill and have a good time, I might replay Pikmin 3.

crossed my fingers that this one would cross the best aspects of pikmin 1 and 2 into a single game, and I'm pleased to say they effectively nailed it. this series benefitted greatly from a decade off to reflect and redesign, smoothing out some of the ragged edges of the series in the process.

the first game played the most like a proper RTS: resource and time management where choosing preferred solutions yielded good results even when not optimal. the second game did away with the frustration inherent to the debut's strict time limit but in the process featured puzzles and problems with rigid, simple solutions. the third game attempts to triangulate a happy medium by adding in a heavy exploration element that could only be accomplished with more powerful hardware and expanded level sizes.

each area feels less bounded and instead generally features multiple winding routes with objectives that can often be handled in parallel. the second game rarely made effective use of the two leaders, while this game often encourages using all three at once to accomplish tasks simultaneously to optimize time. running around from place to place with a single squad would simply take too long, and the game pushes the player to maximize efficiency by fixing their days remaining on the planet to their juice supply, which requires consistently bringing new fruit back to the ship alongside moving the story forward. most people will not struggle to keep their juice supply up, rendering the pressure somewhat irrelevant, but the drive to collect fruit helps flesh out the experience.

the speciality pikmin from the second game have now been replaced with rock pikmin and winged pikmin. rock pikmin break combat much in the same way the purple pikmin did, except they now can smash through glass barriers. winged pikmin are completely new, and can both hover over water as well as open and lift certain objects other pikmin cannot. neither requires the dreadful dungeon grinding in the second game to obtain and instead can be farmed by regular means. they still fall into a lot of the same lock-and-key puzzles of the first game, but thanks to the greater amount of multitasking, this becomes less of a chore to deal with.

most of my issues with the game come down to nitpicks with the changes made with the jump to wii u. the touchscreen controls are great but strained my hand a bit during boss battles where a lot of tapping was required, and the loss of the whole right side of the controller is a bit of a sore spot for me. thankfully pikmin type switching is very easy to do now, and most of the other functionality can pretty much be handled with the new apps selection on said touchscreen. I also feel like the pikmin are somewhat less self-sufficient than they previously were, with my most deaths of any game in the series from leaving pikmin unattended near minor enemies such as the little bugs that burrow from beneath the ground. nothing too game-breaking, but still unpleasant for sure.

the final area really surprised me with its novel concept that really focuses on keeping track of multiple things at once. it initially frustrated me (especially early on when there weren't as many routes to take during the chases) but later on I really settled into the rhythm of routinely swapping between all my leaders to make sure they were on task. the ability to send a leader and their pikmin to a predefined location is exceedingly useful in this game, and would've really made the difference in the second one to improve the multitasking functionality in that game. it also helps that this game allows you to tackle bosses on multiple days with no penalty, which radically decreases the frustration of having a wipe on a first encounter with an unfamiliar boss.

certainly the most enjoyable time I've had with any of the three games in the trilogy. I feel like I may have missed out on part of the experience by not collecting all the fruit, but it was a good enough time as it stands. after all, I can always come back another to attempt a proper 100% run, which certainly seems less rote here than it did in the second game.