Did you know? It's well documented that first lady Hillary Clinton was an avid player of the Game Boy during her husband's presidency. However, what isn't as well documented is how she loved the handheld system so much that she bought two of them to give to George Bush and Dick Cheney before their inauguration as a symbol of goodwill among the two parties. Bush and Cheney reportedly loved Metroid II in particular so much that the game's plot about the Galactic Federation making up some bullshit about dangerous weapons and sending Samus to SR388 was what inspired the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

A good sequel at first glance, but once you delve deeper into the game the huge list of bullshit shows and ruin your experience.

This is what I think about Pikmin 2, an innovative sequel that brings a lot to the table but at the same time ruins what made the original great. My opinion of the game drastically changed once I got to the post-game of the basic ending, once you get there you get a whole new map to explore and welcome to bullshit city, this part of the game made me realize how flawed the Pikmin's AI is, it shows how dumb they are and once you get into a dungeon of that last stage.

The early game till the end of the base plot of the game is a ton of fun, it brings a lot of cool ideas such as two new Pikmin types with one of them being somewhat useless, the purple Pikmin, and the white Pikmin which is a bit too useful for treasure hunting and his race being only available in caves is really annoying in all honesty.
They gave us a new captain to control making this game also a COOP game! But the main reason they gave us a second playable character is to multitask so one can take a group of Pikmin and the other takes another group to avoid wasting time, but here's the issue with this, it's useless since there's no urgency to do anything fast unlike Pikmin 1! Guess Louie would've been more useful in the first game.
One big change that can seem unnoticeable is how most enemies have a lot less health than Pikmin's 1 enemies making them feel less like a damage sponge and making encounters less long, but it came as a tradeoff, they are also way more brutal and there's a lot of one-hit kill enemies or just ones that eat Pikmin really, really fast like a bunch of big Bulborbs in the caves.

So would that game be an upgrade to the original or just a downgrade? It's a very difficult question, both games do work as standalone releases and none of them just feels like it'll replace the next but the "superior" game would be Pikmin 2 as it's not 2 hours long like Pikmin 1 and there's no time limit, no bombs for yellow Pikmin making these atrocious stone walls in Pikmin 1 gone forever (thankfully) and the overworld maps just feel more balanced and better to explore, for the most part... Do they actually expect me to go there with my yellow Pikmin to break that electric fence past the wooden bridge? Don't they know how hard it is to move Pikmin on a small surface surrounded by instant death threats around them?

So what about the post-game? I'd love to tell tales about them but the last stage is just bad! Well, the overworld isn't but anything in the underground sections just sucks dude, even when they were easy in the early part of the game you kinda just slog through them but you never really have fun, they all look and play the same, the main factor is either "Will it be too easy or just filled with bullshit".
I love the idea of earning a unique item that gives Olimar new abilities after beating the boss of the cave but like I said it just feels the same, it goes on for too long and I wish they were each only like 5 or 6 floors long.
But in the case of the last world, it just shows how badly designed they are, bullshit one-hit traps everywhere like bombs with the 1 IQ all Pikmin share they all urge themselves to go hit something that you didn't order them to or just flock themselves to something at the wrong time like bombs right when they explode and in an instant you just lose like 50 Pikmin out of bad luck and level design.

So if anyone wondered "Is Pikmin 2 difficult?" for the most part it isn't, it's just filled with bullshit at the end.
But at the end of the day, it's still a fun game and beating the game doesn't require finishing all dogshit caves.

Pikmin 2 is one of the worst sequels I’ve played that has received some degree of critical acclaim. For those not versed into the Pikmin series Pikmin 2 for Nintendo Gamecube is a sequel to the hit launch title that set out to address many of the contemporary criticisms of the first game by dramatically overhauling many aspects of the franchise’s overlying systems and presentation. In my view these changes to narrative tone, progression structure, and game feel don’t really coalesce into an overall completely satisfying package.

The story is centered on Captain Olimar and his assistant Louie returning to the Pikmin planet in order to find treasures that can help him pay back his employer’s corporate debt. I usually say with Nintendo reviews the plot is simple but works as a vehicle for the gameplay and to an extent that is the case here but I can’t help but feel as though more could’ve been done. The first game had this unique sense of isolation to it that gave it a fantastic atmosphere and the day system synergized with the ship crash plot to give the game a tense mood. Not saying the more comedic tone of Pikmin 2 wasn’t a valid direction to take the series. Hell, if anything I think the game’s light jab at capitalism with the treasure hoard being IRL product placement in this (implied) apocalyptic planet and President character being this incompetent shortsighted oaf that doesn’t understand the concept of predatory loans is neat. I just wish the game had tied this theme of destructive consumerist capitalism into the gameplay loop more but hey its a mass appeal kids game they were probably never gonna go that far. To me the biggest fault in Pikmin 2’s story isn’t necessarily this shift in tone or even an inability to fully capitalize on its anti-capitalist themes but rather how it fails to use its gameplay in a synergistic way with its narrative. To get into this I will need to address overall game structure and how things have changed since the first game.

Pikmin 2 has four main additions to the franchise formula including Purple & White Pikmin, upgrades in the form of the both consumable spicy/bitter berry sprays & permanent upgrades for your space suit, and an additional captain for multitasking. All these tools are promising on paper but never really come together into a cohesive package of interesting choices for one simple reason: caves.

Caves are basically combat oriented dungeons where Olimar will earn much of the treasure to pay off his debt. This cave system does not gel with any other choice the developers make even on a baseline level. The way the combat in Pikmin 1 was set up (and that is largely carried over here) is you throw or swarm the Pikmin horde in a vague direction towards your opponent and avoid attacks aimed at your captain and Pikmin using a combination of movement and whistling. This has a level of impreciseness to it that meant your Pikmin lost in combat were effectively a resource tax you had to play around in the time limit system to ensure you gathered the 30 ship parts in 30 days. Since time doesn’t run naturally in the caverns and the time limit doesn’t really exist on a macro-scale (in other words there is no alt ending system) sans as a form of leaderboard tracking you effectively end up with very basic combat with little gameplay tension. Losing a Pikmin is less “ NOOOO NOT MY REDS!” and “more ugh time to grind more Pikmin”. Unless you run low on troops this game can devolve into the very tedious pattern of killing a ton of enemies and playing 52 pickups with the treasures left behind. Needless to say this creates a ton of dead air. The developers must have realized this at some point in development as this game has assorted layers of mass Pikmin grave creators like roaming enemies, falling bombs, and various flavors of instant kill attacks to create tension via low Pikmin counts close to boss areas. Some of it a player can counter play (as an example: boulders are usually telegraphed with sound effects and a discolored ground texture even before the drop shadow reveals itself thus giving you plenty of time to whistle Pikmin out of the way) but a lot comes off as artificial difficulty on a first playthrough. A lot of falling bomb rocks only seem to trigger upon trying to pick up a treasure for example. Pretty much the only two of these hazards that felt interesting on a decision making level were the boulder which incentivized playing with a smaller squad to scout out a location before tracking down the loot and the waterwraith, an Aliens: Isolation or Metroid Fusion style instant kill enemy chase sequence tied to a timer which forces you to grab the treasure quickly. These are the few moments in the game that really have any sense of tension. In short, most of these hazards feel less like engaging gameplay challenges and more like a resource threshold you have to clear by grinding Pikmin.

Speaking of grinding Pikmin, doing that for two of the species in this game is a complete pain in the ass that shows the reason a lot of these stylistic choices don’t go together. New to Pikmin 2 are white and purple Pikmin. White Pikmin can dig stuff out of the ground, carry things around quicker, and sacrifice themselves to most enemies for a massive amount of inflicted poison damage while Purple Pikmin are the muscle of the squad that can stun enemies in combat by being thrown and act as strength equivalents to 10 normal Pikmin in the context of the carrying weight mechanic. I do actually like the game play choices they ask of the player in terms of party composition (you have a 100 slots, how many do you want allocated to these just as perishable excess utility Pikmin vs tried and true puzzle solving Pikmin species?). The problem comes from the rarity of these two new species. Since Whites and Purples can only be grown via underground transferring of other species troops via Candypop buds. You end up with a large time sink for dungeon preparation. Want more white Pikmin as prep for those annoying Pileated Snagret boss battles or a poison barrier in the Awakening Wood? Better be ready to take a trip to the Subterranean Complex’s third sub-level with any extra red Pikmin you have several times over. Want 100 Purples for that time sink 1000 carrying weight dumbbell in Wistful Wild? Dear god your poor soul shouldn’t have decided to go for all treasures.

Oh and did I mention that Yellow (due to electric gates, negating some instant kill attacks and the strength of being more able to easily hit various bosses significant more easily with vertical mobility) & Purple Pikmin (stun locking enemies with throw) are overwhelmingly more useful then Red, White, and Blue Pikmin (all of which serve as very basic keys to certain treasures) further exacerbating this design choice to limit Purple growth to caves as it sorta naturally draws a casual players’s eye to this bad pacing for dungeon preparation. Sure players might optimize the fun out of everything (a common retort I see to poorly balanced gameplay systems online) and balance isn’t everything but I feel like it's safe to say that a spammable combat unit you get during the first dungeon trivializing combat is pretty different from say saving great scientists in Civ 5 to exploit that game’s research payout algorithm. Both are pretty gamey and take away player expression but one is much more likely to be noticeable and thus employed by a casual player playing the game for the first time. Maybe if Pikmin 2 didn’t employ cheap design tricks with its falling bomb rock and enemy spam that heavily incentivized unfun, optimal strategies like purple grinding I wouldn’t be making this review but I guess what I am trying to say is that it isn’t just a case of Pikmin 2 being unbalanced it's that the unbalanced aspects are actively brought to the four front via its sloppy dungeon design which in turn is informed by a lack of temporal consequences to Pikmin grinding due to the lack of a day system.

I could go into more detail on other new aspects of Pikmin 2 that reinforce this point with the bitter spray and captain punching upgrades but I’d just be repeating both myself and other folks in the online discourse surrounding this title. Instead I wanna turn my attention to another aspect of the game I think hasn’t gotten as much attention as a gap between the designer's likely intent and the final product: the shoddily implemented multi-tasking system.

In Pikmin 2’s pseudo-midpoint (paying off the debt) you get a mock credits sequence in which Olimar accidentally leaves Louie to fend for himself on the Pikmin planet. In theory this should be a needle scratch moment after the player has gotten attached to Louie as this helpful partner that helped you grow your corporate bank account via the multi-task function. In practice this ends up being a bit of a wet fart of plot point that sorta makes the true ending feel less like a Lethal Weapon like capstone on Olimar and Louie’s unlikely friendship kinda and more just abrupt due to how little you need to use the multi-task function in game. Over the course of my all treasures playthrough of Pikmin 2 I can only think of seven places I was heavily incentivized to use the multitasking feature:

1) The Valley Of Reposes multitasking tutorial.
2)The three berry grinding locations in Awakening Wood, Perplexing Pool, and Wistful Wild.
3) A stone elevator in the yellow onion spawn in
4)The Perplexing Pool’s “Massage Girdle” treasure.
5) A boss known as the Ranging Bloyster that requires constant switching to stun lock him into vulnerability.

Since Louie can theoretically just be chilling at your base or cave floor entrance 90% the game with little repercussions (and generally I’d say sticking to one captain or treating the captains as a universal party is the path of least resistance most of the time) you as a player never really develop an affinity for the second in command thus you end up with a kinda ineffective climax with the only interesting stuff being the implication that Louie might’ve been controlling the final boss to cover up his role in the company going into debt. The game doesn't really do much with this so I don't really have much to add to that other than it sorta being emblematic of Pikmin 2 as a whole of a bunch of good ideas that never really come together in the end.

Pikmin 2 isn’t all bad. There is some nice quality of life changes with Pikmin party management, some of the writing in the treasure horde is generally pretty funny, the arcadey challenge mode is a huge step up from the first game but it just didn’t take into account how much of the franchises appeal and structure of its core mechanics resided in its use of time scarcity to create tension.

i might be biased in this review because i had the whole story spoiled for me because i actually had dropped this game twice(over the course of a year), watched the movies and figured that would be my p3 experience. there was always something in my head telling me to play it, so i finally cracked and decided to beat it and not drop it. going in knowing everything made me enjoy it less, probably. and that kinda sucks. but it is what it is.

8/10

i dont like the gameplay. tactics is fine when it works, and is a pretty cool concept. makes you feel like youre actually leading a group, lol. however it doesnt work a lot of the time. even then, my biggest critique on the gameplay is how rng based it is. it is very clearly the first incarnation of the one more system, and thats a theme youll see a lot with this game. growing pains. they struck gold with the hybrid rpg-social sim but there are visible growing pains from the transition of what p1 and 2 were to what it the series became that wouldnt be ironed out to perfection till 4 and 5. some examples are better gameplay and party member social links for the dudes, and not forcing a harem. despite all this, persona 3 still feels the most organic of the nusona trilogy to me. the characters dont just congregate around the mc, they each have their own aspirations and connections to other party members. their second awakening isnt tied to the protag. the characters can't go to tartarus some days because they have other stuff to do. all this makes it feel like a very organic experience, wheras in 4 and 5 it can feel like the world revolves around you. hmmm what else...
the soundtrack is banging as expected. i think i prefer the movie osts more tho. cant go wrong with light in starless sky

i enjoyed my time with persona 3. i think its the weakest in the nusona trilogy, but im a sucker for the persona games and thus i still enjoyed it a fuck ton. even cried at the ending despite knowing what would happen

pro tip: tartarus grinding is slow and boring,battle animations take forever que up some mid romcoms/slice of life anime and video essays on squeenix games to at least have something to listen/watch while going through tartarus. turbo mode is very helpful, lol