Good enough collection, my first opportunity playing Mario Sunshine and I'm enjoying that game quite a bit. However, this collection is as bare-bones as you can get. Having the three games and their soundtracks is not enough when this was supposed to be a celebration of Mario's anniversary. There's so much more that could have been included. At the very least, scans of all the manuals, concept art, just something fun to keep me entertained while not playing a game. I'm really passionate about keeping the legacy of older games going, and this feels like Nintendo doesn't share that. I hate corporate Nintendo, bring back the passion.

I think if you've never played a Pikmin game before, this game is genuinely an 11/10. I can't name a single issue I have with the game that doesn't have to do with the previous entries. So if you're looking for something new to try or want to get in the series, absolutely phenomenal place to start and imo was worth the 10 year wait.

Coming from previous titles (the "titles" in question being only Pikmin 3 so far but I've seen enough of the first two games to speak about them), I'm a huge fan of the progression in the game. The upgrades were such a nice addition and added a whole lot more to work towards during the game. The game is absolutely easier than the older ones, but starting out with a lot less Pikmin actually made it a lot less obvious imo. The night expeditions were super fun and were a lot more stressful than the daytimes were which I liked a lot. Oatchi is my beloved and I will protect him forever. Fuck you Moss you homophobic shithead.

However despite my praises, I've got a decent bit of complaints which again, are mostly related to it as a Pikmin game, so I'll quickfire them here.
- I don't like the excessive amount of characters in this game, having dozens of castaways makes the game feel a lot less lonely which is what I really liked in the other games, and also made the main cast much less significant
- Along with that, almost every piece of dialogue in the game felt like filler and I really just wanted them to shut the fuck up sometimes which I NEVER felt with Pikmin 3
- The character creator was very unneeded, would have LARGELY prefered an actual character
- The UI changes are pretty unforgivable, why on earth would they replace the beautiful bubbly themes of the others for the boring and flat sci-fi look?
- It was kinda cool having all the different Pikmin types come back but honestly it just made most of them feel useless; there was really no use for Rock or White Pikmin when other types were available, which is even further shown by the 3-type limit
- Essentially every difficult battle was trivial because the best strategy was just to rush with Oatchi, very little reason to have any actual strategy
- Waterwraith wasn't fear-inducing enough

Go play Pikmin 4