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

What a complete joke of a game from start to finish. I had so so SO much hope for this game considering they had to kill TWO games for it and this was one of the biggest disappointments ever.

I'll start with the good things because it's going to be very short and sweet. The gameplay definitely felt better than ever. It was apparently pretty messy on launch in Japan but for the global launch they seem to have gotten everything together very well. The amount of customization you can do for the live shows blow the original game out of the water so it was really fun being able to relive the gameplay from the original game in its ideal form. The new cards are absolutely gorgeous and oh my GOD the Daily Life shorts are pure dopamine. There's also a decent chunk of goodies in the app while you're not doing shows (I definitely spent a LOT of time going through all the song descriptions, whoever wrote those was probably the most passionate person on the entire team). The rehearsal feature was SUPER nice, as was being able to restart songs without having to waste LP, despite that it encouraged me to retry spam quite a bit lol.

Aaaaand unfortunately, that's where the positives end. SIF2 is unacceptably buggy and unfinished for how long it's been out in Japan and how long they had to work on it beforehand. Buttons that don't work, text that is left completely untranslated, even entire features that just straight up did not work (including ones that already worked in the Japanese version!). While events were running, the game would legitimately just completely break at every strike of the hour, leaving the game inoperable for around 15 minutes each HOUR. Not only that, they repeatedly DENIED it through bug reports and emails to support. It really just shows that the team did not care whatsoever about the game and just wanted to make as much money as possible before shutdown.

Aside from what I described in the intro, this game is just objectively inferior to the original, which released over a DECADE ago. The game has ZERO story content aside from the short introduction with each group and the 5-part Daily Life shorts. Any form of side-story was also removed and replaced by the messaging feature, where you can engage in short text messages with different members. Cool in concept but in practice was very obviously just a way to do less work. The gacha is much more expensive, there's less to do in the app, I could go on and on.

Events are a complete disaster as well. Results take a full two days to come out when it took less than an hour in the original. Complete lack of anti-cheat leaving event leaderboards FULL of obvious cheaters, which don't even get removed after the two days of results processing. One event shortly after release would give rewards that expire immediately upon collecting them. The complete lack of playerbase made the events feel so hollow and empty. I could consistently get top 1k on the events just by playing for a couple mins every day so there was no incentive whatsoever to actually put effort and time into getting into the higher tiers like the original had (which, to be fair, I wouldn't want to regardless on this piece of garbage).

I am so utterly disappointed and Bushiroad should be embarrassed they ever shipped this abomination of a game. This was most likely our last chance for official μ's content, so it's depressing to see it go out with such a whimper. The Love Live franchise is one of the most important things ever to me and to see it treated with such disrespect is just plain upsetting to see. Here's hoping we can somehow get a SIF3 managed by literally anybody but Bushiroad but if not, guess we're stuck with what, Link Like? The Yohane games? After School Activity? I don't know.

You're a disgrace, Bushiroad.