I found the Rogue-style caves to be exhausting, not necessarily in a bad way but the survival aspects made the treks feel arduous.

White and purple Pikmin are cool inclusions although the fact that they live in the ship and can only be gotten from flowers feels... sloppy?

I found a lot of the puzzles in the game to feel a bit busy worky.

I love the premise of "just find treasure we broke". The two captain system feels a bit under-utilized and the puzzles it is required for are kind of annoying?

I enjoyed this a lot while playing it but reflecting back I'm finding it to be messier than Pikmin 1 and some of the ideas feel a bit undercooked. I also thing it suffers a bit from "more is more" by the time we got our 10,000 coins (we is my obsessed four-year-old) we were pretty exhausted with the game. We enjoyed our time but didn't have much appetite left for "post-game" including any more taxing spelunking adventures.

Core Pikmin gameplay is still wonderful here but this doesn't feel like an all-timer like the first one. I'd rather that replayable 5 hour experience to this big fat 20 hour one. Still pretty happy to play through this one if nothing else just for my chunky purple buddies.

Played the PS3 version on PS5 streaming.

Couple things here:

A. PS5 streaming is maybe good now? All the games I've been trying fun pretty well. I also have a weirdly good time imagining whatever PS3 I'm remotely connecting to turning on and spinning up my game like a jukebox.

B. God this game is cool. Just concept-wise. We are gonna have a black and white modern classical music only perspective based puzzle game. And put it on that shiny PlayStation 3. Just... good stuff.

3. It's sort of cool the state this game is in now that the network is off. There are like 400 user levels that have been archived for posterity (congrats to anyone on there... I'd be bragging about that on my resume and dating site profiles) and the UI is just sort of abstract on purpose. I love this damn thing. There's a few hundred puzzles just hanging out there waiting for ya.