There's a lot to take in with this game, and to be frank I don't think I like all of it.

Surely, the best place to start is what I hated most about the game, and I think the most egregious thing in this game is how things are upgraded. In previous installments, upgrades for your crew were unlocked by obtaining specific treasures hidden in the world, and offered buffs that were rarely that game breaking or overpowered (barring a certain five-man napsack). In Pikmin 4, the upgrading system is streamlined to a fault, letting you choose your upgrades by using naturally obtained currencies that you rarely have to go out of the way for. The upgrades are also pretty overpowered, ranging from simple health or walking speed upgrades, to making your dog a force of absolute destruction, one that puts Purple Pikmin in Pikmin 2 to shame. Everything about the upgrades in this game just make it feel like "a modern gaming take on a Pikmin game" and I don't like that.

How many Pikmin you're allowed to have in your current platoon is also tied to its own upgrade system in the form of obtaining Flarlic. I get capping the number of Pikmin you're allowed to have is supposed to be a means to prevent the game from being way too easy early on, but frankly the game is too easy across the board. If you want a game with a challenge on par with 1 or 3 (without reaching levels of bullshit like 2), you'd have to avoid upgrading your dog and deliberately limit your Pikmin capacity. I wouldn't mind them having just done away with the Flarlic system in exchange for making the game acutally difficult.

Speaking of making the game actually difficult, letting you rewind time by minutes at a time seems way too generous, but I guess that's just a matter of accessibility; if you want to have an actual challenge with the game, don't use the rewind feature so much, but if you want to experience a Pikmin game for the first time, go ahead. Besides that, the game just doesn't have a whole lot of stakes when you can just use your dog to destroy anything. It's pretty clear they wanted to do Pikmin 2 but more fair, with the dungeons returning and the lack of a day limit, but they overcorrected for that game's flaws. Instead of being bullshit with random traps and obnoxious fights in randomized dungeons, this game has pretty avoidable traps and not-very-thought-provoking fights. Dungeons having actual level design is a HUGE plus, though.

In general, the game comes off as baby's first Pikmin game, even more so than Pikmin 3. Nintendo wants Pikmin to succeed, and they probably wanted to start reeling new players in by being more accessible, but in a lot of places they went way overboard.

The dog itself also just kinda feels like a step down over similar systems in the previous games. Pikmin 2 gave you an extra captain that you could control in tandem with the other, and allowed you to split up your squadron pretty quickly. Pikmin 3 gave you a third captain and the ability to quickly pause time to direct what you want each captain to do. Pikmin 4 gives you a dog you have to dismount in order to split up from them, and then in order to send them off to do their own thing you have to go into a quick menu to split off from your Pikmin (you have to do this process twice if you want to have the dog take all of the Pikmin, because doing it once only splits the captain away from all but one Pikmin type), and then you have to change to the dog in order to command them where you want their AI to go. Really, the dog just kinda makes this game worse in a lot of ways. The fact that you have two captains that aren't made equal could be good on paper, allowing you to play to each one's strengths or weaknesses to have them do specific things, but in reality what you get is a character with like 15 different powers and then your actual captain who does the generic stuff.

The vibes of this game are pretty immaculate, it stands out against every other game in the series in that regard, for better and for worse. It's a very pretty game, the environments look great, and the game very deliberately makes a point of showing how small you really are in the grand scheme of things, seeing as how the game takes place in someone's backyard. On the other hand, everything feels a little bit too cutesy for its own good. The original Pikmin has a very gloomy, eerie feeling throughout, every environment in that game feels truly desolate and intimidating, a very deliberately alien setting. This game doesn't feel "alien" all that much, it just feels like you're an ant coming to raid someone's picnic. Not really a negative thing, just depends on what kind of atmosphere you're in the market for.

The enemy design on this game is still on point, typical of a Pikmin game, but as for your crew...it's very obvious they were put through the same character creator as you, with a few bonus features. No one feels like a very stand out design in the slightest. Then you have a self insert player character, which really does not suit this series well. In the first 3 games, all the captains had pretty interesting personality quirks demonstrated through their log notes, and in 2's case the emails you'd get from characters related to Olimar and Louie. In this game, you get a self insert who doesn't say anything, and a crew whose personalities and dialogues are even less interesting than those of any of 3's captains. It's like being stuck with 6 different variations of Alph who never shut up. But I like my little skrunkly I made, so it's okay.

Of course, being a Pikmin title, this game's shining qualities come from how satisfying it feels to pull off multitasking quickly and efficiently. Whatever the story mode has you doing is satisfying enough, but the real meat of the game comes in when you do the dandori challenges, where there's an actual sense of difficulty, and thus actual sense of achievement when you manage to get a high score. Really, that's probably how you can most enjoy this game, imposing challenges on yourself. Avoiding certain upgrades, going for completion under a certain number of days, there's a lot you can probably do, but playing the game as what feels like intended just doesn't let you express a lot of skill.

Also uhhh night stages? Yeah they're fun I guess I'd probably have more fun with them if I avoided upgrading Oatchi, but I do like the feel of what's basically Pikmin tower defense.

I probably sound like I tore the shit out of this game but I really did enjoy it, it was a very satisfying time that I didn't want to pull out from, had a handful of QoL improvements over previous installments, and despite the things I personally didn't like about it constantly sitting on my mind, I think the good I got out of this game far outweighs it. It still has those iconic Pikmin moments where you're taking in the world around you, getting treasures, when you're suddenly jumped by a group of giant enemies out of nowwhere. I don't think I can call this game a disappointment, even though it was a game that took 10 years to come out despite feeling like it was only in development for 3. I will probably truly appreciate it upon trying to challenge myself on another playthrough. I'll probably end up updating this review if I bother playing it in a more difficult fashion or when I finish the postgame.

At the current moment I think Pikmin 3 is the best game in the series in terms of gameplay, and Pikmin 1 is the best for atmosphere and worldbuilding. I don't think I'll budge on the latter opinion, but this game does have potential to be my favorite in terms of gameplay.

tutorial sucks btw, very bad very long

For better or for worse, it's Toontown Online just like you remember it. Recently, I came back to this game after a massive update that added the long awaited Sellbot Task Force and Field Offices, and while those were fun for a while, I think the glaring issues with the game at its core are astoundingly obvious, and it wasn't long before I put myself on hiatus for this game yet again.

If you've played the original Toontown, you'll know that the game operated on a monthly subscription fee in order to access almost the entire late game. To make the most out of this, Disney, ever so ready to maximize profits, made it so that there were absurd requirements in completing everything. Completely maxing out an activity that required a membership (in other words, just about all of them) could take several months, if not years; gardening alone could take up to several months to max out if you wanted to 100% the game, the rarest fish in the game had less than a .01% catch rate, and getting a suit to level 50 would take ages with how the game awards progression points. It was incredibly obvious that Disney wanted you to keep buying memberships so you could get everything completed on just a single toon.

Unfortunately, as TTR is made to be as close of a replica as possible to the original game, many of these glaring issues didn't see much fixing. The only things I can note that changed progression wise were a few select missions and the requirements to max out certain activities, which are entirely optional if you want to just play the main game. The issue with slow suit progression is still there, meaning you'll have to go through several hours of grinding just to start attempting another boss again. Even though the pay-to-play factor was eliminated, TTR's insistence on being accurate ultimately holds it back in several areas. It's still an incredibly grindy game, and I wouldn't recommend going through it without a friend or without something to watch or listen to in the background.

That said, in an age of gaming where preservation is becoming more and more crucial, I can appreciate the dedication to preserving a project as impactful as Toontown Online was, and going beyond with updates that logically would've happened should TTO have lived this long. TTR is nearing its 10 year anniversary, and thus TTO is nearing its 20th, and I'm glad that this community is still kicking strong all these years later, which is one of the most crucial parts of the game: its community. Without its community, TTR and any other fan projects like it wouldn't exist, and the game would be absolutely dreadful to play. The dedication people have for what looks like a silly game is absolutely astounding. It's a testament to just how far people will go in the name of preserving beloved games, no matter how many will play, how little there is to profit off of, or how the game's quality actually holds up. It's a passion project in every sense of the term. Even if it stopped attracting new players entirely, the sheer amount of people still looking to play the game they loved 20 years ago can easily keep it relevant.

The gameplay isn't anything incredibly special, though its simplicity isn't at all a bad thing; it's a game that everyone can pick up and learn easily, which makes it a fun time to play with friends. It's also not every day you see an MMO with turn-based combat, most people are out here playing something like FF14 or PSO2, which are both action RPGS. I'd personally love to see more MMOs take a shot at the genre, there's a ton of unexplored potential.

Frankly, I'm a bit afraid of TTR's future in the long-term; there's an overwhelming (and for new players, intimidating) amount of grinding to do, with seemingly no plans to have them adjusted later on, meaning the game will likely meet the same fate of TTO of players leaving at a more steady pace due to just getting bored. Though story extensions like the Sellbot Task Force are built to remedy this, I feel like it's a matter of "too little, too late." Updates come at a snail's pace, and adding more things that need grinding won't exactly keep player retention for long. There are core flaws with how TTO was built, and the insistence on being strictly accurate means those flaws likely won't be addressed. Though, I do still come back to the game every several months to check in, and I feel like the nostalgic memories it brings me, paired with the simplistic gameplay it offers, ultimately keeps me from putting it down permanently. If you're looking for an experience just like TTO, TTR is just about the best option out there with a still thriving playerbase. No matter where the players go, the game will likely always be here since this is a non-profit game. As long as there's at least some people willing to play, the game won't be going anywhere, nor will its community.



(If you're looking for a fresh, less grindy experience though, Corporate Clash will probably be more your speed)

A platformer game whose concept lends itself greatly to the gameplay, and whose visual style is like no other game; every single stage is oozing with a personality of its own, and the stories behind each character are simple and quickly shown, yet incredibly compelling. To say the game is oozing with personality would be an understatement.

Not a whole lot of negatives bogged this game down, though I really feel like the cobweb collector should've been available at the start of the game, since you can still get it fairly early on, it's just needless padding to backtrack into earlier levels at that point though; another huge complaint is that the final boss, and final level for that matter, are huge cakewalks if you've been doing everything up until that point, since having maxed health and maxed powerups just makes nothing feel threatening at that point. Also I'm not sure if this can be classified as a complaint or a good thing, but a lot of the time figments really had a tendency to blend into the environment to the point of being impossible to spot out naturally; probably good from a narrative standpoint, having the figments of your imagination blend seamlessly with your subconscious environment, but a little bit annoying to deal with sometimes.

Beyond that, I can definitely say I had a fun time 100%ing the game and messing with the game's fun, albeit sometimes a little buggy, platforming mechanics, and after having finally played this game, I can definitely see why so many people were anticipating its sequel for so long.