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.

Reviewed on Jun 15, 2023


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