Going into Pikmin 2, I was feeling hopeful and excited. I enjoyed the first title quite a lot, and by what I've heard everyone say, it seemed like this one was just going to be that but better. So naturally, I couldn't wait to play my way through it! However, when I finally finished the game, I found myself liking it significantly less than its predecessor, to the point that I honestly can't see any reason to replay this one over the original.

But before I tear into this game, I'll praise it for the stuff it gets right.

The controls and general interface feel way more refined and optimized, they took a lot of what was done well in the first game and enhanced it this time around.
I was particularly a huge fan of the Piklopedia, which allowed me to look at all my treasures and monsters I fought. That helped give the game a real sense of completion as I played through it and got to fill out all those blank spaces.

I also really liked the new pikmin, the purple and white ones. The first three still work together really well, but the new pikmin add a whole new level of strategy to everything (that strategy usually just being "throw purples at it until it dies!" but you know).

And I finally have to compliment the adjustment to the Pikmin AI. While they're still not perfect, I didn't have to worry about them falling off a fairly large bridge and drowning anymore. I still had moments of frustration here and there, but for the most part, I felt like I could rely on my Pikmin to do what I wanted (most of the time).

Okay, with that out of the way, now let's get to the stuff I don't like...

There are two massive changes to Pikmin 2 that change the general formula quite a lot from the original game: the removal of the thirty day time limit, and the introduction of caves. Both of which, I have incredibly mixed feelings on.

I never really know how to feel about time limits in games because my initial reaction to them is always immediate stress. Having to make decisions while having a permanent fixed amount of time just reminds me too much of real life and makes me feel anxious when starting a game. But then, when I actually play through the game, that stress fades into enjoyment. There's a reason Persona 5 Royal is my favorite game after all.

This was how I felt with the time limit in the original Pikmin. It stressed me out at first, but once I got the hang of it, I learned to love it. And in Pikmin 2, I ended up missing it. A lot.

In the original game, you had thirty ship parts in total to collect, and a thirty day time limit composed of twelve minute days. Because of this, levels had to be designed so that even players who weren't particularly skilled at the game could still get at least one ship part per day. So one ship part within twelve minutes. This is what made getting multiple ship parts in one day such a thrill. I don't think I ever got more than two in a single day, but just being able to do that once was a rush. Its one of the reasons I ended up liking that game so much.

Sadly though, I never really got that same rush while playing Pikmin 2. Part of it is just because there are two-hundred and one ship parts, but I think the main reason for it is because of the big shift in level design. Without that time limit, there's no reason to design the levels with guaranteed player progress in mind. There's no real downside to a player not getting any treasure in a day, other than a personal sense of disappointment, so there's no reason to make sure players will get one piece of treasure in a day. That leads to much larger and sprawling levels that, by the end of the game, become a chore to traverse. It never got too terrible, but it also never really felt as good as traversing the levels in the first game.

But of course, that only applies to the surface levels, the caves are where the meat of the game takes place. And boy, I have so many problems with them.

First and foremost, I just don't really like the caves as a concept all that much. Going through the floor to find a few pieces of treasure takes out a lot of the adventure that I came to love from the original game. I think the idea can work, exploring caves is one of the big video game setting and tropes after all. But the way its done here just doesn't click with me the way I hoped it would. It made the adventure feel far more linear and far less interesting.

But honestly, that isn't even my main problems with the caves. No, what really made the caves so annoying to me was the frankly just absurd difficulty and the baffling RNG.

Pikmin 2 is hard. There is no doubt about that. But the way it is hard is what drives me crazy. The game ramps up the difficulty by repeatedly either placing enemies on an incredibly small piece of terrain, or, putting an absolutely absurd number of enemies all in one room. It just gets to a point where it really stops being fun. Having to deal with an annoying frog that jumps around, while all your pikmin are being blown down by a flying fish, and a flying jerk picks you up and flies you away while all your pikmin die is nothing but frustrating. In late game, my two main strategies were to either pump my pikmin with red juice so they would deal more damage, or, and I kid you not, just leave my pikmin at the starting area and run out with just Olimar and literally punch everything to death. It was genuinely easier to just punch so many enemies to death instead of throwing my pikmin at them just because of how invincible Olimar becomes by late game. I wish I found this strategy out sooner, I could have made so many caves a breeze.

But then of course, there's that aforementioned RNG. Now, I don't know if the cave layouts have pure RNG or if the game only has a select number of layouts that each floor can be (If I had to guess, it would probably be the latter). But either way, the cave layout RNG is just hilariously strange. There are some layouts that are just outright, no question about it, easier than others. For instance, there was one floor where the single treasure of that floor spawned right next to the spawn point. The reason that this annoys me so much is because it makes the already frustrating difficulty of the caves feel even more unfair. But on top of that, it also gives the player an unfair way of cheezing through the caves.

Since the game saves after every floor of a cave, you can just up and reset a floor if you're having difficulty with it, and chances are, you'll probably end up having an easier time because of it. There were so many floors where I just reset the game to get an easier floor layout, and I don't feel any regret for doing that at all. I especially did this when I had to run through caves a second time. Why try the floor seriously when I can just reset until the game decides to but the next hole somewhere I can easily reach?

It's just a system that I think could use a lot of improvement. I know these come back in Pikmin 4, hopefully they're way better implemented there.

Okay well, now that I'm done pointing out all my problems I have with this game, I can say that I... honestly don't hate it. It does a lot of individual things that I do hate, but as an overall experience, I think it's still pretty fun for the most part. It's still great to run around with your pikmin, picking stuff up and growing your little army. And I really enjoyed the additions of purple and white pikmin, they changed the game enough to feel warranted. And I loved the improvements to the UI, AI, and general control.

But man, those caves and the level design just really bring the game down for me. To the point that I can't really say there's any reason to play this one over the first. At all.

Oh well... onto the next game!