In this game you and your coworkers are sent to a distant planet full of dangerous native creatures by the shitty company you work for so you gather mundane objects for the sake of selling them back way over their actual value. So what I'm saying is that Pikmin 2 and Lethal Company are the same game.

I really liked this game. I knew going into this that I was probably gonna like it because I played this a lot as a kid but I didn't think I'd like it this much. Coming off Pikmin 4 felt like a really different beast; if that game was using the Pikmin system as an engine to make puzzles, this game uses the pikmin system to make a dungeon crawler. And it's tight.

Unlike Pikmin 1 (and the later 3), Pikmin 2 ditches the the timelimit and trims down the amount of time you spend in the overworld looking for items (though you still do that) for Caves, large multi floor dungeons with some random elements (Floor patterns, what treasures are on each floor, and type of enemies are consistent, but enemy spawn locations, treasure locations, starting position and exit locations have various different patterns).

I love the dungeons; the game knows that because there's no global timelimit like 1, it is allowed to be a little mean and punish you harsh if you fuck around because you'll always be able to resupply and go back in. Fucked up traps like bombs just falling from the sky (shoutouts to opening an egg that was full of mites that freak out all my pikmin and then dropping a bomb ontop of me), dense enemy spawn locations, enemies that very easily mulch pikmin if you move wrong (i lost a lot of pikmin to shit like calling pikmin back at the wrong time to wollywogs/moving the squad wrongly agaisnt cannon larvas), and because enemy spawns can be really dense you can't just completely own every enemy by walking behind them and throw Purple Pikmin until they die. And obviously you can't recover your pikmin outside of specific floors, so having a Pikmin Disaster fucking SUCKSSSSSSSS. It's great

Of course this is a gamecube game so it was made in the era of nintendo taking Genre, But Make It Rated E, so it's not THAT punishing. As mentioned before you have no global timelimit so if things go tits up you can always just bail, recoop your pikmin, and go back in. The game also lets you save between floors, so if you want to runback your Pikmin Disaster you can just hit reset and try again. And even if you do have to go back into the dungeon most floors are pretty easy to beeline straight to the exit to so it's quick to get back to whatever floor you missed an item on. It's fucking pikmin this isn't your masochist mod.

Things I have issues with are mostly control related. Limited camera controls can make trying to precisely aiming pikmin difficult which is frustrating for enemies with mid air attack points like the snargets and ect (this might be better on the versions of Pikmin 2 with motion controls, but then you lose all the branding, and I'm not giving up on being able to collect duracell batteries and skippy peanut butter), non flower pikmin (especially purples) being so slow that you can just lose them forces you to move slower than you need to be and is annoying, some floors just fuckin suck (S/O to Hole of heroes 6/dream den 10 layout. And by shoutout I mean go to hell. also specifically the Heroes 6 one because there are some treasure layouts that are actually impossible to get), and I think like 2-3 bosses are kinda dogshit. But it's really minor gripes in the long term.

This game was awesome. Such a fun skew for a weird console RTS/Dungeon Crawler hybrid. Not even the other pikmin game hit the same feeling, as the other dungeon focused pikmin game (4) is far more focused on puzzles than combat and "resource management" (not letting your pikmin get massacred).

The only time product placement actually enhanced an experience. This game is a time management, real time strategy, dungeon crawler. I can't think of another game like it even the other Pikmin games. Its kind of mean and fucked up, but you can save constantly so its not unforgiving. Combat is supersizing deep once get a hang of it. It's not a numbers game, if you are just swarming monsters know there is a more effective way. Thowing pikmin, learning counter timing, and knowing when to call pikmin back before monster thrash. The elephant in the room is purple pikmin. People over state thier power, yes they are good at combat cus that's their roll. Every pikmin has a roll and you can't beat the game with nothing but purples. (And I'm not just saying that cus they are rare.) They are a power piece that needs to be managed like everything else and to those who say they invalidate reds, no the fact that they nerfed fire did that.

Pikmin 2 is a bit divisive among Pikmin games. The first Pikmin was a beautifully elegant experience about time and workload management. Pikmin 2 ditches the time management aspect of the game for dungeons and significantly more challenge. Pikmin in Pikmin 2 feel infinitely more disposable, which is good because a lot of your Pikmin are going to get mowed down, incinerated, eaten, drowned, electrocuted, and even good-ol'-fashioned shot by guns.

Pikmin 2 almost feels like a roguelike with procedurally-generated dungeons. It's packed to the brim with loot and hazards to micro-manage your Pikmin through. With infinite time to complete the game and a portion of the challenge that came with that in Pikmin 1 being eliminated, Pikmin 2 is just hard. Monster types are brutal with lots of them, and with more Pikmin, you have significantly more bandwidth to kill enemies with them--either by crushing them with Purples or just straight-up sacrificing White Pikmin for the glorious cause. The slew of monster types keeps the gameplay interesting and occasionally terrifying. And the coolest feature is the Piklopedia, a journal of sorts for every enemy and every piece of loot you grab in the game.

Pikmin 1 felt like an honest arcade experience, where a lot of it became about minmaxing your work days maneuvering through levels and harvesting loot to fix your ship; it wasn't a particularly long game for it, but it was replayable. Pikmin 2 feels more like a complete game. It's a harder game with arguably a major hook fans of the first game liked gone, but it's still a beautifully designed game.

ive seen a lot of distaste for pikmin 2 recently, and now it seems like its the most polarizing game in the series. you either love pikmin 2 for its challenge, mini-roguelike caves, and new additions to the series, or you hate it for its difficulty, which can sometimes edge on downright cruel or unfair. for me, personally, i love pikmin 2 to death, and its probably my favorite of the 4 pikmin games currently out. pikmin 2 will kick your ass, spit in your eyes, curbstomp you, and then give you a bundle of roses the next day and apologize for its actions.

as previously mentioned, the caves are randomly generated each time you go through them. the layouts are different each time, but it keeps things like treasures and enemies consistent. it makes for a game with loads of replay value, with so much to do to keep you coming back.

i personally play the wii version whenever i do my replays, which includes new play control pointer controls, which is the best way to play. that being said, the gamecube controls arent as bad as youd expect for a game like this, its very much designed to accommodate those original controls.

if you played pikmin 1 and wanted a bit more of a challenge, give pikmin 2 a shot, its sure to give you exactly that

This fuckass game hates you in every single way.
Drops enemies all the times that'll kill you.
Hazards gallore.
Water wraith.
And its the funniest thing ever on how you have to survive it.
Pikmin at its core is really good, and hard to mess up, so making kind of an official kaizo game was a fun idea, even if it left 12 Y/O me scarred for life with difficulty in games lmao.

I was never interested in this game when it first came out. An RTS game with a time limit and resource management is completely uninteresting and almost too stressful for me. But I decided to give it a chance anyway and was shocked by how competent and interesting it was.

You control Olimar and Louie as you try to gather treasure so a heavy debt can be paid off. You do this by controlling an army of creatures known as Pikmin to search, gather, and destroy any treasure, obstacle, or enemy in their way. The controls for this can be a bit annoying, but it was surprisingly easier to get used to than I thought. Having the Pikmin do what I wanted them to was always rewarding.

Each area of the world has different treasures to collect, different caves to explore, and new puzzles to solve. many of these puzzles required controlling both Olimar and Louie with their respective Pikmin to do different tasks. When you can pull it off it is satisfying, but having to keep track of both can sometimes make my head spin.

The caves were a cool aspect of this game, as you had these puzzle rooms that needed certain Pikmin to complete each task or defeat each enemy. In these caves, you can also find the exclusive White and Purple Pikmin as opposed to the usual Red, Yellow, and Blue Pikmin. The downside is that you rarely know what kind of hazards you are going to face down there, not to mention that the layouts always change when entering, so you have to go in blind and potentially waste time figuring things out.

Graphically, this game looks great. It has started to show its age a bit, but it doesn't look bad in any regard. This game has a lot of content for players and is by no means easy, but it is an enjoyable time for any skill level. If you have the chance to play this, give it a chance, as you might find a hidden gem.

Pikmin 2 is one of my favorite games of all time, and in my opinion the best expression of the Pikmin experience. Time/inventory management is a gameplay mechanic I cannot get enough of, and this game is incredibly addicting trying to explore areas, defeat enemies, and collect treasures in the daily time limit. The addition of a 2nd captain to play as makes it so you are never waiting around for something to finish and always have some task you can go work on. The cave system can be a bit grindy but lets the game take a more combat focused approach, which is a lot of fun after how Pikmin 1 didn't have too many dangerous bosses. Not just gameplay wise, Pikmin 2 oozes charm in its writing. Olimar writes notes about every enemy you fight and treasure you collect, and it's very amusing seeing how alien creatures would react to and try to extrapolate meaning from everyday items completely normal to us. Not to mention the endgame reward of Louie teaching you how to cook the enemies.

Pikmin 2 is the complete opposite of Pikmin, it's design so antithetical to the core premise of the original game that it could've been marketed as a spinoff. Instead of a tightly-designed strategy game, Pikmin 2 is mainly a combat-focused dungeon crawler with an upgrade system. The controls are basically the same, and you still grow and manage a squad of pikmin, but there's no day limit and very few puzzles.

This all seems like a misstep that betrays everything good about the first Pikmin, and that's true. However, Pikmin 2 fills that void with new interesting and compelling design choices of its own.

The caves in Pikmin 2 are long, arduous, procedurally-generated gauntlets filled with enemies and hazards. Once you reach the first non-tutorial cave, the Citadel of Spiders, Pikmin 2 really starts to shine with interesting floor layouts and enemy combinations that take advantage of them. For example, blowhogs in sublevels with no ledges mean you have to position yourself carefully to avoid your pikmin being chucked off. Rarely do other Pikmin games pit you against multiple types of enemies at once.

Unlike the first game, Pikmin 2 is more about reading and adapting to situations on the fly. The procedural generation allows for some hectic combat setups, and the further you go the more interesting the different rooms get. There are traps that can fall from the ceiling, but these give you ample time to react accordingly. Even though combat is fundamentally simple, the enemy variety and free aiming/swarming (unlike 4) give you a lot of variety and options.

One of the biggest issues with the game is actually the overworld design. Even though three of them are reused from Pikmin, they are much more simple to navigate and really only serve as oversized level-select menus for the real meat of the game, the caves. In Pikmin, your base would often be around the center of the map, with multiple paths immediately accessible, which gave you more options in how to approach each day. Pikmin 2's maps start you in a corner and force you to progress linearly until you acquire the globe halves and all five pikmin types. On top of that, the overworld treasure placement is very uninteresting, sometimes repeating placements from the first game. The overworlds in Pikmin 2 just feel unnecessary.

I like the caves as they are, but I don't think they're quite punishing enough. The autosaving and lack of pressure (aside from the Submerged Castle) encourages cheap tactics. For the game to be at it's best, you have to be in a speedrun/multitasking mindset, because the game itself won't force you be good.

I would be remiss not to mention the over-tutorialization compared to the first game. These often pause the game in the middle of combat (and are unskippable in the Switch port!) and ruin the pace of the early game on repeat playthroughs. There should have been an option to turn them off, or have the text boxes appear in real time instead. The beginning 25-30% of the game is also much too easy; the dungeons don't really pick up until you have all 5 pikmin types.

As it is, Pikmin 2 feels unsure of what it wants to be. I think they should've instead committed fully into making the game a full-fledged dungeon crawler without all of the fluff. Something similar to the Challenge Mode, but with lengthier dungeons, more variety of hazards and themes, and up to 100 pikmin. The lack campaign co-op also seems like an oversight considering how excellent the Challenge and Battle modes are.

I really do like what the game was going for, and my love of Pikmin gameplay and dungeon crawling prevents me from seriously disliking the game - but I wish it had more focus. Fortunately, recent mods like Endless Abyss and Colossal Caverns explore this potential and also get my recommendation.

I would recommend playing the GC or Wii versions, depending on your control preference. The Switch port has worse controls than previous versions, missing easter eggs, and audio issues, including lack of surround sound.

Right after finishing the first game and loving it to pieces, I went straight to Pikmin 2. Before playing it I wasn’t aware of how divisive this game was in the Pikmin community, but now that I’ve beaten it 100% twice, I can definitely see why. It boils down to a single word: caves. Some people love how unpredictable they are due to them being randomly generated and the challenge they offer with its many enemies and bosses, and those are the very same reasons some people hate them, because let’s face it, it’s not that fun wasting your time bringing down a gate just for it to have literally nothing behind, or having bombs raining down on you from the ceiling out of nowhere.

While the main focus of the first game is exploration, the caves make Pikmin 2 be more focused on combat, because they make up for like 80% of this game’s content. The overworld exploration takes a back seat, so much that they didn’t even bother on creating new areas - other than the very first level, all areas in this game are reused from the previous game, but with some changes. So if you don’t like the caves, well too bad, this game ain’t for you. As for myself, I quite enjoyed my first run through the game. Exploring the caves the first time around made me increasingly anxious as I progressed through the game and noticed how unpredictable they were, uncertain of what devilish troll the game would throw upon me. I’d always be especially excited for the boss fights.

I’ll never forget my first clashes with the Empress Bulblax and her spam of evil larvae that can one hit kill Pikmin; the sheer surprise I had when this mechanical spider called Man-at-Legs started decimating my Pikmin squad with a freaking machine gun; and the nightmarish Waterwraith, crushing my Pikmin with its stone rollers in the most memorable cave in the game, the Submerged Castle, a cave with an unsettling atmosphere that forces you to use only Blue Pikmin despite it having hazards of every single element.

However, despite the randomized aspect being nice for repeated playthroughs, the overall magic of the first run is significantly reduced, especially because of how exhaustive some caves can be due to their long length and the overwhelming amount of bullshit. And speaking of length, Pikmin 2 is MUCH longer than the first one (AND third one!), so all that combined greatly diminishes the replay value of this game.

All that said, I still love this game. It may sound like I find this game vastly inferior to the first one due to all I said, but that’s far from being the case. I can understand why some people dislike it, but I don’t think it deserves all the hate it gets. I’m sure I’ll replay it again and again for the years to come, just not as much as the first game.